574An Integrated Framework for IT Infrastructure Management by Work Flow Management using Hierarchical Tree Structure

Poster Paper
Proc. of Int. Conf. on Advances in Communication, Network, and Computing 2013

An Integrated Framework for IT Infrastructure
Management by Work Flow Management using
Hierarchical Tree Structure
V. R. Elangovan and Dr. E. Ramaraj
1

Research Scholar Madurai Kamarajar University Madurai,
elangotesting@live.com
2
Professor Department of Computer Science Alagappa University,
eramaraj@hotmail.com
Abstract. Information Technology (IT) is one of the most emerging
fields in today’s Internet world. IT can be defined in various ways,
but is broadly considered to encompass the use of computers and
telecommunications equipment to store, retrieve, transmit and
manipulate data. Infrastructure is the base for everything. IT also
has an infrastructure, which can be managed and maintained
properly. For an organization’s Information Technology,
Infrastructure Management (IM) is the management of essential
operation components, such as policies, processes, equipment,
data, human resources and external contacts, for overall
effectiveness.
In this paper, we propose a methodology to manage the IT
Infrastructure in a better way. Our methodology uses the treestructure based architecture to manage the infrastructure with less
manual power. The process of how to manage the infrastructure is
discussed with efficient methodology and necessary steps with
algorithm, in this paper. Also, in this paper, the process of workflow
management on IT infrastructure management has been provided.
Fig.1 IT Management Services

Keywords: Information Technology, Infrastructure Management,
Manual Power, Tree-Structure.

Reduce duplication of effort.
Ensure adherence to standards
Enhance the flow of information throughout an
information system.
Promote adaptability necessary for a changeable
environment.
Ensure interoperability among organizational and external
entities.
Maintain effective change management policies and
practices.

I. INTRODUCTION
Information Technology (IT) is defined as “maintaining
and managing the computer-based information systems by
implementing the design in an application”. The importance
to the infrastructure management has been varying
continuously since the late 1980’s. One third of IT spend is
mainly for management and support of technology
infrastructure. Organizations focused on reducing IT
spending mainly for on-going management and support are
required to decouple the user and administrative functions.
Infrastructure Management Services offers services across
the entire network life cycle and we use best shoring
approach to deliver these services as shown in Fig. 1.

B. IT Infrastructure Management Process
In IT, the members in an organization develops the product
based on the requirements submitted to them. After the
product in development phase, then it moves on to
maintenance phase. The Maintenance phase consists of
support team with several team members. The support team
maintains the product by taking the complaints or queries
raised by the user or customer. Some of the common queries
are data missing, database access prohibition, database
updating and so on. These queries can be monitored by the
support team and proper solution has been provided to them.
The user request can be solved by taking following activities
to manage the IT Infrastructure. The user who wants to
request for service can send the Service Request (SR). The
service request can also be termed as Ticket. Upon receiving

A. Challenges Faced in Infrastructure Management Services
(IMS)
Large spend on IT Management and support without
clear insight on returns from the costs incurred.
Lack of flexibility in some parts of IT Infrastructure due
to legacy or new technologies.
Significant time and amount spent to acquire or retain
critical IT Staff.
Among other purposes, infrastructure management seeks to:
© 2013 ACEEE
DOI: 03.LSCS.2013.1. 574

96

Poster Paper
the ticket, the user is provided with Service Request Number.
All the tickets raised by the user, can be solved by the
Support Team. The tickets are saved in the queue of the
support team. The members of the support team process the
Service Request by fetching the request from the queue and
then they solve the problem and the solution is termed as
Resolution. The user can view the status of the request that
they raised. The status may be of New, Assigned to, WIP
(Work-In Progress), and Closed.
The summary of the ITIM services is discussed below:
User creates the ticket. (Status = New)
Support Team Leader opens the ticket and
assigned to the member who is better to solve the
ticket. (Status = Assigned to <member>)
The allocated member process the request.
(Status = WIP)
The support team leader specifies SLA, the time
limit to close the ticket. (Status = Closed)
In this ITIM services, there may be difficulty of finding
the best member to solve the ticket, when more number of
tickets available in the queue and also to search whether the
member has no allocated jobs and so on. These are all done
manually which may be time consuming and a tedious
process. In this paper, this can be automated and all the
things have been carried out automatically which will reduce
the manual work and also time consumption.

discuss how distributed object management and customized
transaction management can support further advances in the
commercial state of the art in this area.
In paper [5], Jie et al described the goal of an effective
course management system for assisting course managers
to make informed decisions about what materials should be
most appropriate to be presented to students (learners) and
what learning strategies or methods should be used for the
students. The system was supported by the design of a novel
framework for user-driven data analytics in the cloud.
Different modules of the framework will be illustrated in detail
in the context of course management.
In paper [6], Mahmoud presented an integrated
component-based framework that would enable the
implementation of knowledge-intensive GIS-based
infrastructure management systems. The framework defines
four-tier architecture: the GIS interface tier, the applications
tier, the infrastructure management components tier, and the
data/knowledge repository tierThe data/knowledge
repository tier maintains a store for infrastructure data and a
knowledge base where infrastructure management knowledge
can be captured, represented, shared, and reused. Several
issues related to information modeling and integration was
discussed. A prototype that supports management of sanitary
and storm water sewer systems was also presented.
In paper [7], Pablo presented an integrated framework to
address performance prediction and maintenance optimization
for transportation infrastructure facilities. The framework was
based on formulating the underlying resource allocation
problem as discrete- time, stochastic optimal control problem
with linear dynamics and a quadratic criterion. To illustrate
the advantages of the proposed approach, they conduct a
numerical study where they examine the case of multiple
technologies being used simultaneously to collect condition
data.
In paper [8] [9], Keahey stated about the projects like
Globus Nimbus [8] (http://workspace.globus.org/) and
Eucalyptus [9] (http: //www.eucalyptus.com/), which they
term cloud toolkits, can be used to transform existing
infrastructure into an IaaS cloud with cloud-like interfaces.
Eucalyptus was compatible with Amazon’s EC2 interface and
was designed to support additional client-side interfaces.
Globus Nimbus exposes EC2 and WSRF interfaces and offers
self-configuring virtual cluster support. In paper [10], MedinaMora et al. categorize processes in an organization into
material processes, information processes, and business
processes. The scope of a material process was to assemble
physical components and deliver physical products.

II. RELATED WORK
In paper [1], Girish et al described Support analytics (i.e.,
statistical analysis, modeling and mining of customer/
operations support tickets data) was important in service
industries. In this paper, they adopt a domain-driven data
mining approach to support analytics with a focus on IT
infrastructure Support (ITIS) services. In paper [2], ERIK et
al conveyed the results from case-based research into three
firms. Firms seeking to offshore infrastructure management
need to develop effective risk mitigation strategies for
selecting service providers. Therefore it will become
increasingly necessary for Service Providers to develop
offshore outsourcing capabilities.
In paper [3], Borjo et al presented OpenNebula, an open
source virtual infrastructure manager that can be used to
deploy virtualized services on both a local pool of resources
and on external IaaS clouds, and Haizea, a resource lease
manager that can act as a scheduling backend for
OpenNebula providing features not found in other cloud
software or virtualization-based datacenter management
software, such as advance reservations and resource
preemption, which they argue to be specially relevant for
private and hybrid clouds.
In paper [4], Amit et al provided a high-level overview of
the current workflow management methodologies and
software products. In addition, they discuss the infrastructure
technologies that can address the limitations of current
commercial workflow technology and extend the scope and
mission of workflow management systems. In particular, they
© 2013 ACEEE
DOI: 03.LSCS.2013.1.574

III. PROPOSED INTEGRATED FRAMEWORK FOR IT INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT
The aim of the paper is to develop a framework to
automate the workflow in the IT field by processing the user
request and to manage the IT Infrastructure.
The summary of the paper is as follows: The IT
organization consists of different areas and each area is filled
with several resource persons. When the user submits the
97

Poster Paper
request, it will be processed by one of the resource person.
In this proposed method, to automate the process of
allocating the resource person to solve the problem submitted
by the user, we have to follow the steps given below:
First, each organization is represented with tree-based
structure, in which the detail about the resource person is
organized. The details includes, the name of the resource
person, their specialization, the area to be deal by the resource
person, what kind of problem can be solved by the person
and so on. The sample tree-based structure for representing
an organization is given in Fig. 2.

Fig.3 Tree Structure Representing Banking

V. IMPLEMENTATION ALGORITHM
Start
Categorize the Resource Person, rlist
Get the Service Request, req
Categorize the req, sr
For i=0 to rlist.count-1
If rlist(i) = sr then
Resource = rlist(i)
End if
Next
For j=0 to rlist(i).count-1
If Performance(rlist(i)) = “Better” then
Rp = rlist(i)
End if
Next
Allocate the ticket, req to resource person Rp.
End

Fig.2 Tree Structure Representing an Organization

When the user enters into the site, the user request called
Service Request (Ticket) has been taken and stored in the
queue of the Support Team. Upon receiving the ticket, based
on the concern, the ticket is classified into category and subcategory. Based on the classified category and sub-category,
the resource list on that category are noted and from the list,
the best performed resource person is identified automatically based on the tree-structure. After choosing the resource person, the ticket is assigned to that resource person
and the status of the ticket is set to “Assigned to resource”.
The status of the ticket is updated automatically as the ticket
being processed. Thus, by assigning the ticket to the best
resource person on the same category, the user gets the response within the specified SLA. Thus, the process is being
automated to get the better performance and the IT infrastructure can be managed successfully.

CONCLUSION
Thus this paper provides the framework to manage the IT
Infrastructure by organizing in a tree-like structure to assign
the service request to the resource person. In this scenario,
the workload can also be managed and the process of
assigning the ticket to the resource person is also automated
such that the manual effort is reduced. As already mentioned,
one-third of the IT spend in the management of infrastructure.
By implementing this methodology will reduce the expense
and also it yield better performance. Organizing in a treebased structure will helps to fetch the information much faster
and easier.

IV. FRAMEWORK APPLICATION
The proposed methodology can be applied on any area
to get the better result. In this paper, we take the banking
application. The banking can be organized in a tree-structure
as as shown in Fig. 3.
If the user request for amount transfer failure then based
on the tree-structure, the request is assigned to the resource
person in that branch. Thus the request has been processed
and the resolution has been provided to the user.
© 2013 ACEEE
DOI: 03.LSCS.2013.1. 574

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Poster Paper
REFERENCES

[6] Mahmoud R. HalfawyA, David PyzohaB, and Taymour ElHosseinyB, A Department of Civil Engineering, University of
British Columbia, Canada, B EMH&T, Inc., 170 Mill Street,
Gahanna, Ohio 43230, USA, “AN INTEGRATED
FRAMEWORK
FOR
GIS-BASED
CIVIL
INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS”,
Annual Conference of the Canadian Society for Civil
Engineering, June 5-8, (2002).
[7] Pablo L. Durango-Cohen, Department of Civil and
Environmental Engineering and Transportation Center,
Northwestern University, US, “A time series analysis
framework for transportation infrastructure management”,
Received 2 June 2005; accepted 29 August 2006.
[8] K. Keahey, I. Foster, T. Freeman, and X. Zhang, “Virtual
workspaces: Achieving quality of service and quality of life
on the grid,” Scientific Programming, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 265–
276, (2005).
[9] D. Nurmi, R. Wolski, C. Grzegorczyk, G. Obertelli, S. Soman,
L. Youseff, and D. Zagorodnov, “The eucalyptus open-source
cloudcomputing system,” in Cloud Computing and
Applications 2008 (CCA08), (2008).
[10] R.Medina-Mora, T. Winograd, and R. Flores,
“ActionWorkflow as the Enterprise Integration Technology,”
Bulletin of the Technical Committee on Data Engineering, IEEE
Computer Society, Vol. 16, No.2, June, (1993).

[1] Girish Keshav Palshikar, Harrick M. Vin, Mohammed
Mudassar, Maitreya Natu, Tata Research Development and
Design Centre, Tata Consultancy Service Limited, Pune, India,
“Domain-driven Data Mining for IT Infrastructure Support”,
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conference, Dec 2010.
[2] ERIK BEULEN, Tilburg University, PAUL VAN FENEMA,
Erasmus University, Rotterdam, WENDY CURRIE, Warwick
Business School, “From Application Outsourcing to
Infrastructure Management: Extending the Offshore
Outsourcing Service Portfolio”, European Management Journal
Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 133–144, April (2005).
[3] Borja Sotomayor, Rub´en S. Montero, Ignacio M. Llorente,
and Ian Foster, “An Open Source Solution for Virtual
Infrastructure Management in Private and Hybrid Clouds”,
IEEE Internet Computing, Special Issue on Cloud Computing,
July 7, (2009).
[4] DIIMITRIOS GEORGAKOPOULOS AND MARK
HORNICK, AMIT SHETH, University of Georgia, “An
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LEE, Julita VASSILEVA & Chee Kit LOOI, “A Framework of
User-Driven Data Analytics in the Cloud for Course
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DOI: 03.LSCS.2013.1.574

99

574An Integrated Framework for IT Infrastructure Management by Work Flow Management using Hierarchical Tree Structure

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