Catalog-based service request management

Abstract

To manage the delivery of services competitively on a large, global scale, an IT (information technology) service provider must efficiently use service delivery resources - in particular, skilled service delivery teams. Service requests form a large and important component of the management of a client's IT infrastructure. Currently, the fulfillment of IT service requests is often managed on a per-account basis. Service-delivery teams fulfill service requests according to account-specific processes by using an account-specific service-request-management environment, making it difficult to leverage the skills of the various delivery teams for multiple accounts. The service delivery management platform (SDMP) uses reusable service components that can be performed by multiple delivery teams and can be assembled into service compositions to which multiple clients can subscribe. The SDMP catalog is the information repository that manages service components, composition, providers, and subscriptions and is used by the service-request runtime environment to implement specific customer service requests. In this paper, we describe a catalog-based architecture for service delivery management and demonstrate how its use can provide a global service-delivery organization with a platform for achieving significant productivity gains. © Copyright 2007 by International Business Machines Corporation.