Business IT Nerd conducted practical research at a large financial organization to analyze the impact of service management on the Business Continuity based on a number of strategic IT projects. The outcome of this research included practical advise to secure Business Continuity.

Research topics

The research topics included the following:

  • The positioning of various Business Continuity aspects.
  • The concepts of IT service-management as described in the ITIL framework.
  • A comparison of Agile and ITIL and the practical implications of the mismatch of both with respect to application development and application maintenance.
  • The influence of IT service management on Business Continuity.
  • The current state of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery with respect to the IT related and organizational aspects.
  • Recent outages of services and the financial impact of this.
  • Improvement which can be made to sustain Business Continuity when services fail.

Theory and models

The following theories and models were used in the research:

  • IT service management aspects (e.g. capacity management, availability management, continuous improvements)
  • Agile concepts (Agile manifesto)
  • Comparison of BiSL, ASL, ITIL frameworks and their role in application development & service management
  • IT Governance aspects (Cobit framework)
  • Crisis escalation document (private)
  • A lot of research papers from various authors

As a result we were able to calculate the financial loss based on the outage of IT Services which threatened the Business Continuity. This has been done based on a number of strategic projects which are crucial for the software development processes for all Agile Scrum teams.

Conclusions

Based on the conclusions of the research we were able to give practical advise in how to align the concepts of good service management with the Agile / Scrum processes in order to minimize the outages of crucial IT services which secured the Business Continuity.

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