Introduction

 

The telecommunication sector has mainly been driven by the deregulation and liberalization of PTT monopolies within the last decade. The emerging universal service market exposes all players to strong competition and forces providers to think in terms of services, quality of service (QoS) parameters and service agreements when talking to their customers rather than discussing parameters of network devices or end systems. Increasingly, new requirements such as business process outsourcing and e-commerce extend the range of services from (classical) communication and internet services to complex application and value added services.

Due to the increasing complexity of those services, they are typically not implemented by a single provider. Instead, they are composed of interdependent and layered services of different carriers, Internet Service Providers (ISP), Application Service Providers (ASP) and Business Process Outsourcers (BPO). Generally speaking, all these organisations use terms such as service, QoS parameters and service agreements, but lack a consistent and common understanding of what these terms mean.

This evolution has serious implications on the management of these IT and telecommunication environments: Despite the substantial work that has been carried out in the area of service management, a common and overall accepted understanding of terms and tasks associated with service management has not been reached yet. One major reason is that most approaches focus on specific scenarios and management environments and thus, use a different terminology regarding service management. In our opinion, the development of generic service management solutions is not possible until a common terminology is defined.

Moreover, complex service hierarchies cross-sect all involved organizations, span multiple organizational, administrative and jurisdictional boundaries and lead to inter- and intra-organizational dependencies. These dependencies relate to all resources, systems, tools, applications, people, workflows and processes that are necessary to operate, administer, manage and provision services in heterogeneous environments and thus have a great influence on the management processes of all involved organizations. It is one major task of service management to identify and to model these dependencies, for example using roles, interactions and communication relationships.

In order to address some of the problems associated with service management, this paper proposes a generic service model that defines commonly needed service-related terms, concepts and structuring rules in a general and unambiguous way. This service model can be applied to all kinds of scenarios and helps to analyze, identify and structure the necessary actors and the corresponding inter- and intra-organizational associations between these actors. Since it also covers the whole service life cycle, it helps to establish, enforce and optimize information flows between organizations or business units. To abstract from all service and organizational details, the service model is the result of a top-down oriented and systematic methodology. This methodology ensures, that functional, organizational and life cycle aspects necessary for service management are considered. Finally, the service model can be used to identify and structure research issues.

To sum up, the generic service model that is presented in this paper fulfills the following requirements:

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: Section gives a brief overview of current research work related to service management. Section presents the top-down methodology used to develop the generic service model. Section presents the service model itself and its application in provider hierarchies. It also points out the benefits of the proposed service model and identifies unresolved research issues from the building blocks of the service model. Section concludes the paper and presents further work.