Dynamic management of outsourced service processes' QoS in a service provider - Service supplier environment

Abstract

IT service providers typically must comply with Service Level Agreements that are part of their usage contracts with customers. Not only IT infrastructure is subject to service level guarantees such as availability or response time but also service management processes as defined by the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) such as change and incident processes and the fulfillment of service requests. SLAs relating to service management processes typically address metrics such as initial response time and fulfillment time. Large service providers have the choice of which internal service delivery team or external service provider they assign to parts of a service process, each provider having different costs or prices associated with it for different turn-around times at different risk. This choice in QoS and cost of different service providers can be used to manage the trade-off between penalty costs and fulfillment cost. This paper proposes a model as a basis for service provider choice at process runtime, taking into account the progress of a process so far and the availability of service capacity at service suppliers. This model can be used to reduce total service costs of IT service providers deciding on alternative delivery teams and external service providers when needed and based on current process performance. ©2008 IEEE.