Managing faults in the service delivery process of service provider coalitions

Abstract

In recent years, IT Service Management (ITSM) has become one of the most researched areas of IT. Incident Management and Problem Management form the basis of the tooling provided by an Incident Ticket System (ITS). As more compound or interdependent services are collaboratively offered by providers, the delivery of a service therefore becomes a responsibility of more than one provider's organization. In the ITS systems of various providers seemingly unrelated tickets are created and the connection between them is not realized automatically. The introduction of automation will reduce human involvement and time required for incident resolution. In this paper we consider a collaborative service delivery model that supports both per-request services and continuous high-availability services. In the case of high availability service the information stored in the ITS of the provider often includes information on the outage of a particular service rather than on the failure of a particular request. In this paper we offer an information model that consolidates and supports inter-organizational incident management and probabilistic model for fault discovery. © 2009 IEEE.