Model based services discovery and management

Service systems fail all too frequently. "Overdue, over budget and disappointing\´ are the words frequently used by organisations to describe their experience in the development and commissioning of complex information systems enabled services. More considered analyses question anticipated productivity gains, and in the longer term, a failure of service provision to track the changing requirements of the organisation. As a major supplier of IT and IT-enabled services, Hewlett-Packard has invested heavily in developing and understanding of the reasons that services fail to delight, as well as developing technologies and management processes that mitigate against failure. This paper describes a (predictive) model based approach to service-systems analysis that aids in understanding the goals, the specifications and dynamics of a service system. Our contribution is a model based service discovery process and technology that can be used to dramatically improve inter-stakeholder communications, provide a design and management infrastructure that is robust to the inevitable changes that affect any commissioning organisation, and lay the grounds for more sophisticated cost-benefit analyses than are currently commonly used. We draw on a number of large scale (multi-billion dollar) service projects to illustrate the application and benefits of this approach to service discovery and management.