Distributed Cross-Domain Change Management

Distributed systems increasingly span organizational boundaries and, with this, system and service management domains. Web services are the primary means of exposing services to clients, be it in electronic commerce, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or on cloud platforms and are being used and integrated with customer-managed applications as well as in complex mashups. Maturing cross-domain relationships and an increase in loose coupling and ad-hocness makes managing configuration changes, e.g., changes in interfaces or endpoints, increasingly relevant. Traditional service management processes within organizations, in particular change management, relies on a central configuration management database (CMDB) to assess the impact a change has on other components of the system. However, this approach does not work in a cross-domain environment, due to the lack of a central CMDB, centralized management processes, and knowledge by service providers which clients depends on their respective services. This paper proposes the Change 2.0 approach to cross-domain change management based on an inversion of responsibility for impact assessment and the facilitation of cross-domain service process integration. We present the requirements imposed by cross-domain change management, the Change 2.0 architecture, and a brief evaluation of its benefits.