7.3 - Service Provisioning: Challenges, Process Alignment and Tool Support

Abstract

The provisioning of services in the field of information and communication technology (ICT) such as network and application services presents many challenges to service providers. Regarding the level of service customization, services span a broad range: from widely deployed commodity services, such as broadband internet access or email services, with millions of equal service instances, to individual services, such as an enterprise extranet or an in-house service like the service architecture of a World Wide Web (WWW) search engine with a single highly customized service instance. The vision of a service provider and also a competitive advantage is the achievement of “flow-through provisioning,” which means that a customer reviews a set of services offered to him by a provider, selects an appropriate service, chooses among the available service quality options, then places an accordingly formed service order, and waits for its almost instantaneous fulfillment. The high number of equal and relatively simple orders of commodity services allows automation of many steps in the provisioning workflow. Management systems and scripts are set up for this purpose, but they need constant maintenance and orchestrated resources. In contrast, individual services are characterized by a complex set of specific customer requirements and negotiations between service provider and customer on financial and technical matters. Automation is therefore less applicable. In customized services, service providers combine features of individual and commodity services.