A Model-Driven Framework for Enabling Self-Service Configuration of Business Services

Abstract

In seeking more profits, many business service providers have turned their attention to the technologies that can enable the delivery and operations of the network-delivered business services more efficiently and highly automated. To that end, many service providers have adopted the shared service model where the service offerings are shared across multiple customers to reduce the costs associated with the services' delivery. One key challenge for service providers is how to configure various parameters and options of the services with highly automated and self-service modes to meet the customers' diverse requirements with minimized costs. Therefore, effective service configuration lifecycle management technologies and approaches have become the differentiations of successful service providers. In this paper, we propose a common service configuration framework as one of the infrastructure features of the service operation platform based on the shared service model to ease and unify the configuration lifecycle across service offerings. In this framework, we adopt the model-driven technology to automate the service configuration lifecycle. This novel approach combines the wizard technology and rule-based validation technology to enable the service customers to perform self-service configuration. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the framework is discussed at the end of this paper.