Synthetic incident generation in the reenactment of IT support organization behavior

In IT service management, IT support organizations are the entities in charge of restoring normal service operation after a disruption. Building accurate models of IT support organizations is useful for several purposes, such as optimal workforce allocation and what-if scenario analysis. However, the complexity of real-life IT support organizations makes it extremely hard to model their organizational structure and their behavior with stochastic processes. A particularly interesting process to model in the reenactment of IT support organization is the incident arrival one. The paper presents three synthetic incident generator models, based on advanced statistical methods, that are capable of reenacting, with different levels of accuracy, the incident arrival process of real-life IT support organizations. The methods were developed from the experience that the authors developed in the experimental analysis of transaction logs from a real-life IT support organization, provided by the Outsourcing Services Division of HP.