Cross-Organizational Service Evolution Management

Many organizations have started to outsource non-core information processing tasks to service providers. By doing this, organizations abandon their authority on the life cycle of their processes and depend instead on external services. A change in a service´s semantics or interface implies that the organizations consuming that service must adapt their dependent applications. To mitigate the risks related to the availability of a service version, organizations establish formal contracts with their service providers. Since service providers are un-coordinated, there is a risk that many services consumed by an organization evolve simultaneously. The adaptation work that is generated by these simultaneous evolutions can be greater than what an organization can handle within the contractual time frames of the evolving services. In this paper, we detail a model and a range of indicators that permit to quantify the capacity of an organization to manage the evolution of the external services it depends on.