Abstract– Capturing and reusing the experience of operators in implementing IT changes is an important aspect of IT service management, as it may result in fewer incidents (upon change execution) and faster specification of change plans, to mention just a few potential advantages. Nevertheless, in practice, changes are usually described and documented in an ad hoc fashion, due to the lack of proper support to assist the design process. This hampers knowledge acquired when specifying, planning, and carrying out previous changes to be reused in subsequent requests. In order to address this issue, we propose the use of change templates as a mechanism to formalize, preserve, and reuse the experience accumulated within organizations in relation to IT changes. Our solution is analyzed through a prototypical implementation of a change management system and a case study based on a real-life scenario. I. INTRODUCTION The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) has become, in the recent past, one of the most important references for Information Technology (IT) infrastructure management [1]. ITIL is composed of a set of best practices and processes that spread from service strategy to service operation. Among these processes, change management plays an important role in the efficient and prompt handling of IT changes [2]. Change management, as described in the ITIL Service Support book [3], defines that changes required to be executed over the managed IT infrastructure should be specified in documents called Requests for Change (RFC). RFCs are then supposed to be processed, either manually or automatically, for the generation of change plans. A change plan consists of a workflow of actions that, when executed, will move the managed system from the current workable state into another workable state. In practice, RFCs and change plans are traditionally modeled in an ad hoc fashion [4], where natural language is often employed to express what, why, when, where, and how changes should be executed. The lack of a common standard widely accepted and adopted by IT practitioners to assist this process often leads, for example, to documents with either too much or not enough information than actually required and to erroneous interpretation of the produced change-related documents. More important than that í and the focus of our investigation í it hampers knowledge owned/acquired by the personnel responsible for specifying, planning, and carrying out changes to be reused in recurrent or similar requests. We highlight two reasons that justify the importance of reusing the experience of operators in the implementation of IT changes. First, as change plans are recurrently instantiated, they become more stable and, therefore, their use may result in fewer incidents (upon change execution). Second, the time consumed by the IT personnel in the specification and planning of changes tends to be reduced, given that they will seldom be generated “from scratch”. Since the inception of ITIL, there has been substantial research on IT change management issues. For example, important steps have been taken towards automated planning and scheduling of change plans [2], policy definition for event reaction in IT systems [5], and business-driven change schedule optimization [4]. However, despite the potential benefits of reusing knowledge behind IT changes, this topic has been barely addressed in previous investigations [2, 3, 6] (this will be further discussed in Section II). To bridge this gap, in this paper we propose the use of change templates as a mechanism to formalize, preserve, and reuse the experience accumulated within organizations in relation to IT changes. These templates may exist at different abstraction levels of a change management system. We characterize request templates as those used by the change requester to specify RFC documents. In contrast, plan templates comprise activities, which represent large-grained steps required to accomplish the RFC objectives. These activities may need to be iteratively refined into finer-grained ones in order to produce detailed, actionable change plans (also called actionable workflows throughout this paper). Our solution has been evaluated through a prototypical implementation of a change management system called CHANGELEDGE. In addition to allowing templates to be designed and (re)used in the specification of new change documents, the system is able to compute actionable change A Template-based Solution to Support Knowledge Reuse in IT Change Design Weverton Luis da Costa Cordeiro, Guilherme Sperb Machado, Fábio Fabian Daitx, Cristiano Bonato Both, Luciano Paschoal Gaspary, Lisandro Zambenedetti Granville Institute of Informatics Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil {weverton.cordeiro, gsmachado, ffdaitx, cbboth, paschoal, granville}@inf.ufrgs.br Akhil Sahai 1 , Claudio Bartolini 1 , David Trastour 2 , Katia Saikoski 3 1 HP Laboratories Palo Alto, USA 2 HP Laboratories Bristol, UK 3 HP Brazil R&D, Brazil {akhil.sahai, claudio.bartolini, david.trastour, katia.saikoski}@hp.com 978-1-4244-2066-7/08/$25.00 ©2008 IEEE 355