Understanding complex IT environments using information analytics and visualization

Abstract

Today's business environments are going through several major transformations. First, most business environments are increasingly dependent upon vast amount of information. However, in part because of sheer volume, effective use of information is becoming more and more difficult. Second, the IT environments that support businesses are evolving from a simple machine- and automation-centric operational model to a complex people- and interactive service-centric operational model. Where, it becomes critical to analyze and understand the relationships between people, their skills, technologies, and organizations and effectively leverage human and technological resources to drive service delivery excellence and innovation. Unfortunately, very few tools exist to leverage the available information and analyze such relationships. This paper describes a solution, called "Business Insights Workbench" (BIW), which couples a number of information analytics techniques with a unique set of visualizations to help uncover hidden relationships among the key factors of the business environment (e.g., people, their skills, technologies, and organizations). Such understanding can bring many benefits to IT organizations, e.g., effective staffing for projects, collaboration and knowledge sharing, and technology growth and innovation. We use an IT business consulting services (IT BCS) organization as an example to illustrate our approach. Copyright 2007 ACM.