and objectives. These measures can be inferred from key Abstract -Business-driven IT management (BDIM) aims at corporate performance indicators. They can be of a finanmanaging enterprise IT infrastructure and services efficiently cial nature (revenue, cost ...) or different (personnel utiliand at improving business results at the same time. BDIM is zation ...) or even reflect intangibles such as impact on the based on mappings between IT technical performance metrics company's image. When ITSM uses business measures and business relevant metrics and exploit the linkage to provide for decision support instead of (or in addition to) convendecision support to IT management so as to maximize business tiona value and IT-Business alignment. As an example, the number of 1, tiehia mealsuresh(aailabiIT touput an successfully executed IT infrastructure changes can be mapped response time) to signal smoothness of IT operation, we to financial loss due to the service disruption experienced by call it Business-driven IT management (BDIM). customers when the changes take place. BDIM is a new IT management research area [7]. The Up to now, there has been some research effort in proposing term BDIM appears to have been first used in [8] in an and applying BDIMAsolutions to IT management with potential autonomic computing context. In general, however, gains for the business. However, much remains to be re-BDIM refers to a new culture and a set of new tools and searched, prototyped and validated before this new IT managedecision-making processes that explicitly focus on making ment discipline can become widely applicable. This paper IT help the business. BDIM attempts to gauge the impact presents a research agenda for BDIM. After reviewing BDIM concepts and proposing a framework to assist in defining andthat IT has on the busiess and aims at rethiking IT describing BDIM usage domains, the paper discusses ongoing management from this perspective, be this in an operawork and outlines some research challenges. tional, tactical or strategic context. The introduction of just a few, functionally limited, BDIM support tools in the Keywords -Business-driven IT management (BDIM), busimarket (see [9] for instance) so far, signals that BDIM is ness-oriented performance measures, modeling, performance still embryonic. On the other hand, BDIM can cover a lot evaluation, decision support, autonomic computing, Informaof ground, in autonomic or "conventional" IT infrastruction Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), IT Governance, tures as well as in manual IT management procedures. research topics.The proceedings of [7] offer an illustrative -albeit nonexhaustive -list of the many areas BDIM can successful-I. INTRODUCTION ly be applied to. There is growing interest in BDIM because of the benefit that it promises to bring to the busiThe contribution of Information technology (IT) to ness. business value creation is currently a hotly debated topic. A significant research effort is required in order for IT is expected to bring value to the bu...