Today we’re witnessing the necessity to align Business and Information Technology (IT) as well as a change in the role of IT from an enabler to an industrial sector in its own right.
The reasons for are manifold: legal aspects, regulations, business requirements, economic factors etc. Technological trends such as SOA, Software as a Service and Virtualisation are influencing the way in which IT services are rendered. Model-based approaches and IT-Governance are prominent candidates to bridge evolving business contexts and IT, in order to adapt the provisioning of IT for business needs. This challenge can be met by capitalizing on semantic technologies for IT-Governance.
Based on the assumption that businesses in different sectors of the economy will require IT for different reasons and in different ways, plugIT aspires to develop an IT-Socket that will realize the vision of businesses “plugging-in” to IT.
Three demonstration scenarios deal with:(1) “Certification” of IT infrastructure to stay compliant with regulations, (2) “Virtual Organisation” by evolving the current service orientation to a higher and more business driven abstractionas well as (3) “Governance” of IT infrastructure introducing business context into highly distributed and complex systems.
The “Certification Use Case” demonstrates how the alignment between the business area and the IT domain during the certification process for regulations such as SOX, EuroSOX, ITIL®, CoBIT®, ISO20000 or BASEL II can be established.
The “Virtual Organization Use Case” demonstrates how virtual organizations can be supported using business driven requirements and semantic described SLAs for intelligent interpretation.
The “Governances Use Case” demonstrates how intelligent agents are used to identify the IT infrastructure of data centres. Graphical models are regarded as mediators between system administrations and an intelligent discovery environment.