1. Rafael Almeida, Inês Percheiro, César Pardo, Miguel Mira da Silva
An Ontology-based Model for ITIL Process Assessment using TIPA® for ITIL
Rafael Almeida, Inês Percheiro, César Pardo, Miguel Mira da Silva

2. Agenda Introduction Theoretical Background Proposal Demonstration
Evaluation
Conclusion

3. Introduction
EGIT can be deployed using a mixture of structure, process, and relational mechanisms that encourage behaviors consistent with the organization’s mission, strategy, values, norms, and culture
Researchers agree that ITIL is among the most valuable and popular frameworks currently being adopted and adapted by organizations
For ITIL, as a Process Reference Model (PRM), process management requires each process to be controlled to remain compliant with the objectives of both IT and business
PRMs are always related to a process assessment model (PAM) which holds all details to assess a specified process quality characteristic based on one or more PRM

4. Introduction
TIPA® for ITIL is a well-known PAM for ITIL process assessment
In the literature, it is possible to find different ontology-based models for the ITIL PRM but, as far as the authors are aware, no ontology was proposed to represent an ITIL related PAM
Therefore, there is a gap in the literature both regarding the development and deployment of semantic systems that support ITIL assessments
This research intends to shed some light in this area by proposing an ontological approach to describing TIPA for ITIL

5. Theoretical Background – ITIL and TIPA for ITIL
ITIL is a set of comprehensive publications providing detailed guidance on the management of IT processes, functions, roles, and responsibilities related to IT service management
TIPA is a standards-based approach to ITIL (v2, v3 and v3 2011) assessment that can address challenges in several important ways by providing a repeatable, consistent method for conducting process assessment
TIPA for ITIL uses the generic approach for process assessment published by the ISO in ISO/IEC – Process Assessment (now ISO/IEC 330xx series)

6. Theoretical Background - Ontologies
An ontology denotes a system of categories accounted for a particular vision of the world if it is perceived in a philosophical sense, and so, it defines a common vocabulary for researchers who need to share information in a domain
An ontology has the following main components:
Classes
Relations
Formal Axioms
Instances
Classes: Represent concepts organized in taxonomies.
 Relations: Association between concepts of the domain, defined as any subset of a product of n subsets. Ontologies frequently contain binary relations to express concept attributes where the first argument is the domain and the second is the range.
 Formal Axioms: Used to infer new knowledge, to model sentences that are always true and to represent knowledge that cannot be formally defined by other components and to verify the consistency of the

7. Theoretical Background – ITIL Ontologies
In the literature, several ontologies were proposed for describing ITIL.
An ontology-based model for ITIL has been proposed by Henrique et al. with the goal of describing Configuration Items (CI) (software modules, hardware components, or staff members) and the processes dependent on them
Valiente et al. proposed Onto-ITIL, an ontology based on the ITIL V3 Service Management Model that aims to achieve formalization of ITSM domain and can be used as a knowledge base for ITIL based process implementations
However, as far as the authors are aware, no ontology was proposed to represent an ITIL related PAM
Classes: Represent concepts organized in taxonomies.
 Relations: Association between concepts of the domain, defined as any subset of a product of n subsets. Ontologies frequently contain binary relations to express concept attributes where the first argument is the domain and the second is the range.
 Formal Axioms: Used to infer new knowledge, to model sentences that are always true and to represent knowledge that cannot be formally defined by other components and to verify the consistency of the

8. Theoretical Background – METHONTOLOGY
METHONTOLOGY is among the more comprehensive ontology engineering methodologies that enables the construction of ontologies at the knowledge level, i.e., the conceptual level, as opposed to the implementation level
During the ontology’s life cycle three different types of activities are performed in parallel carrying an intra-dependency relationship: the management activities, the development activities, and the support activities.
Classes: Represent concepts organized in taxonomies.
 Relations: Association between concepts of the domain, defined as any subset of a product of n subsets. Ontologies frequently contain binary relations to express concept attributes where the first argument is the domain and the second is the range.
 Formal Axioms: Used to infer new knowledge, to model sentences that are always true and to represent knowledge that cannot be formally defined by other components and to verify the consistency of the

9. Theoretical Background – METHONTOLOGY
Classes: Represent concepts organized in taxonomies.
 Relations: Association between concepts of the domain, defined as any subset of a product of n subsets. Ontologies frequently contain binary relations to express concept attributes where the first argument is the domain and the second is the range.
 Formal Axioms: Used to infer new knowledge, to model sentences that are always true and to represent knowledge that cannot be formally defined by other components and to verify the consistency of the

10. Proposal
The first step of the conceptualization activity is to propose a model that aims to represent the structure of the ontology
ArchiMate provides a uniform representation for diagrams that describe Enterprise Architectures (EA)
Since the motivational layer is essential to model the PAMs, ArchiMate seemed to be a suitable language for this activity
The authors would like to clarify that a) the measurement framework used is ISO/IEC 33020; b) the PAM indicators for PA1.1 for capability level 1 are base practices and work products; and c) the ontology only focuses on the indicators of PA1.1 for capability level 1.

11. Proposal
ArchiMate provides a uniform representation for diagrams that describe Enterprise Architectures (EA)
Since the motivational layer is essential to model the PAMs, ArchiMate seemed to be a suitable language for this activity
The authors would like to clarify that a) the measurement framework used is ISO/IEC 33020; b) the PAM indicators for PA1.1 for capability level 1 are base practices and work products; and c) the ontology only focuses on the indicators of PA1.1 for capability level 1.

12. Proposal
ArchiMate provides a uniform representation for diagrams that describe Enterprise Architectures (EA)
Since the motivational layer is essential to model the PAMs, ArchiMate seemed to be a suitable language for this activity
The authors would like to clarify that a) the measurement framework used is ISO/IEC 33020; b) the PAM indicators for PA1.1 for capability level 1 are base practices and work products; and c) the ontology only focuses on the indicators of PA1.1 for capability level 1.

13. Demonstration
Firstly, we demonstrate how the ontology can support the process assessment carried out in a Portuguese hospital by instantiating the ontology with examples of the hospital EA.

14. Evaluation
The ontologies’ evaluation comprises two different kinds of judgments, a technical judgment, and a user judgment,
The competency questions are firstly identified informally in natural language as requirement specifications for the ontology to answer once it is expressed in a formal language. These questions are not merely queries; they must be stratified so that they can be composed or decomposed into other competency questions.
For the evaluation of the TIPA for ITIL Ontology the following competency questions were defined: a) If there is a problem with the Configuration Management System (CMS) what are the expected results that are not achieved? b) Which Base Practices influence the Expected Result INCM.ER4 – “The incident impact on the business is minimized”? and c) Which Process uses Known Error Databases (KEDB) and produces a Request for Change (RFC)?

15. Evaluation 10 interviews with practitioners
The ontology was consensually assessed as complete, consistent and concise for the scope of process assessment
“Having a TIPA for ITIL Ontology can be valuable to identify inconsistencies on ITIL”
“A useful resource to give a better vision and identification of the process architecture”
Classes: Represent concepts organized in taxonomies.
 Relations: Association between concepts of the domain, defined as any subset of a product of n subsets. Ontologies frequently contain binary relations to express concept attributes where the first argument is the domain and the second is the range.
 Formal Axioms: Used to infer new knowledge, to model sentences that are always true and to represent knowledge that cannot be formally defined by other components and to verify the consistency of the

16. Conclusion
The information obtained from this work will be used to tackle three streams
The first stream will focus on updating and extend the ontology
The second stream will focus on developing a tool to support the definition of organizations’ processes through our ontology.
Finally, the third stream will focus on the automation, since the assessment process is currently a manual task, in this sense, as future work, the next step in this project will involve the automation of the assessment stage. There is already some research on this area, but we want to focus on multi-frameworks environments

17. Rafael Almeida, Inês Percheiro, César Pardo, Miguel Mira da Silva
An Ontology-based Model for ITIL Process Assessment using TIPA® for ITIL
Rafael Almeida, Inês Percheiro, César Pardo, Miguel Mira da Silva