Requirements and concepts for an inter-organizational fault management architecture

The outsourcing of IT services to dedicated providers has been a successful — and sometimes painful — step for many enterprises in the past decade. More recently also IT services providers themselves started to either outsource service parts or to deliver those services in a non-hierarchical cooperation with other providers. However, splitting a service into several service parts, which have to be implemented, operated, and maintained by different providers, is a non-trivial task. One key aspect of such inter-organizational cooperation is fault management, because it is crucial to locate and solve problems, which reduce the quality of service, quickly and reliably. In this paper we present the results of a thorough use case based requirements analysis, which is part of our ongoing work to specify an architecture for inter-organizational fault management.