Service Quality Management
written by gunther gerlach-2009
In wider spanning service ecosystems, several service providers may offer functionally replaceable services that differ in their extra-functional characteristics, such as usage terms and quality of service delivery. Service providers need to be responsive – potentially in real-time – to negotiate variations of service delivery requirements (e.g., price, deliverable timetable). Service ecosystems should therefore explicitly support the negotiation process, reducing non-critical human involvement and providing decision-makers with the information they require to formulate and assess service offers.
In particular, automated support for negotiation over services is needed for comparing requirements and preferences of prospective service users against capabilities and terms of usage of service providers. This calls for languages and tools supporting the capture of non-functional, business oriented service properties, including: temporal and spatial availability, pricing models, payment mechanisms, trust, reputation, promises, penalties, escalation, and dispute resolution mechanisms, to name just a few.
In many industry sectors, service contracts are in place that include precise definitions of service reliability and responsiveness guarantees, and penalties that apply when these guarantees are breached. Capturing these contracts in a machine-understandable way allows the associated guarantees and penalties to be monitored and enforced automatically, and facilitates the comparison and matchmaking of service offerings with respect to customer requirements.
Techniques for matching customer requirements and preferences, against possibly parameterized service offers, can build upon explicit representations of such properties. Making these non-functional service properties explicit is also a sine qua non condition to formally capturing service level agreements and, more broadly, service contracts. Being able to link these agreements to collaborative process coordination models allows these contracts to be automatically monitored.
Published by. BPTrends November 2005
