Integrated modeling of technical and business aspects in service networks

The current trend towards a global services economy provides significant opportunities and challenges. For establishing complex services and delivering competitive advantages, several service providers have to work together. This collaboration creates a service network as an organizational form to be managed by a so-called service integrator. Within a service network, multiple dependencies between the resulting service and the contributions of the various service providers exist, on both technical and business aspects. In addition to the functional aspects, the non-functional service properties and respective service levels are of great importance. Successful joint management of the technical and business dependencies is a key prerequisite for the successful management of service networks. This paper contributes an approach to the integrated modeling of dependencies in service networks. The relations between services and the relations between service levels are made explicitly and form the basis for effective decision support and management of service networks. The concept has been implemented and evaluated in various case studies and industrial settings.