AVS_FD_MVITS: an agile IT service design workflow for small data centers.

The systematic design, building and implementation of IT services for on-premise, cloud-based or hybrid data centers are a hard engineering and managerial process. Heavyweight IT service design workflows—from ITIL v2011, CMMI-SVC v1.3 and the ISO/IEC 20000 standard—have been used in the last decade. However, the current dynamic business requirements demand to accelerate IT service design, building and implementation. Consequently, agile workflows—from ITIL v4 and VeriSM—or lightweight ones—from ISO/IEC 29110-4-3 standard and FitSM—have been proposed. However, despite these IT service design workflows provide high valuable content, they are still reported in a coarse-grain level, and thus academics and practitioners interested in using to them must add ad-hoc roles, activities-tasks, and artifacts-templates. In this research, we address this relevant knowledge gap, and using a Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM), we elaborate and evaluate exploratory an agile IT service design workflow—called AVS_FD_MVITS—that provides fine-grain content regarding roles, activities-tasks and artifacts-templates. AVS_FD_MVITS was designed using design components taken from Scrum-XP and ITIL v4 IT service design workflows. To evaluate exploratory AVS_FD_MVITS, we applied it in a realistic case in an academic small data center. The exploratory qualitative-based evaluation suggests that AVS_FD_MVITS can be considered a valid agile IT service design workflow useful for academics and practitioners. However, confirmatory quantitative-based evaluations are asked for advancing this research stream. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]