Enhancing Service Lifecycle Management - Costing as Part of Service Descriptions

Outsourcing of IT and business processes results in an increased exchange of services. For inter-organizational service exchange to be successful, the participating network players have to establish unified and thus interoperable means of service description. An analysis of contemporary approaches identified a deficit of almost all approaches to address monetary aspects of a service, especially costs. This paper argues that costs are prevalent in almost all stages of a services’ lifecycle, and thus its’ role within Service Lifecycle Management (SLM) is paramount. Recognizing this discrepancy, the paper proposes a basic version of a costing model that allows for a multi-periodic depiction of service-related costs as part of a service description. It is modeled and implemented as an extension of USDL, the Unified Service Description Language. A case example from the financial services industry demonstrates the artifact’s applicability

The LIFE2 final project report

Executive summary: The first phase of LIFE (Lifecycle Information For E-Literature) made a major contribution to understanding the long-term costs of digital preservation; an essential step in helping institutions plan for the future. The LIFE work models the digital lifecycle and calculates the costs of preserving digital information for future years. Organisations can apply this process in order to understand costs and plan effectively for the preservation of their digital collections The second phase of the LIFE Project, LIFE2, has refined the LIFE Model adding three new exemplar Case Studies to further build upon LIFE1. LIFE2 is an 18-month JISC-funded project between UCL (University College London) and The British Library (BL), supported by the LIBER Access and Preservation Divisions. LIFE2 began in March 2007, and completed in August 2008. The LIFE approach has been validated by a full independent economic review and has successfully produced an updated lifecycle costing model (LIFE Model v2) and digital preservation costing model (GPM v1.1). The LIFE Model has been tested with three further Case Studies including institutional repositories (SHERPA-LEAP), digital preservation services (SHERPA DP) and a comparison of analogue and digital collections (British Library Newspapers). These Case Studies were useful for scenario building and have fed back into both the LIFE Model and the LIFE Methodology. The experiences of implementing the Case Studies indicated that enhancements made to the LIFE Methodology, Model and associated tools have simplified the costing process. Mapping a specific lifecycle to the LIFE Model isn’t always a straightforward process. The revised and more detailed Model has reduced ambiguity. The costing templates, which were refined throughout the process of developing the Case Studies, ensure clear articulation of both working and cost figures, and facilitate comparative analysis between different lifecycles. The LIFE work has been successfully disseminated throughout the digital preservation and HE communities. Early adopters of the work include the Royal Danish Library, State Archives and the State and University Library, Denmark as well as the LIFE2 Project partners. Furthermore, interest in the LIFE work has not been limited to these sectors, with interest in LIFE expressed by local government, records offices, and private industry. LIFE has also provided input into the LC-JISC Blue Ribbon Task Force on the Economic Sustainability of Digital Preservation. Moving forward our ability to cost the digital preservation lifecycle will require further investment in costing tools and models. Developments in estimative models will be needed to support planning activities, both at a collection management level and at a later preservation planning level once a collection has been acquired. In order to support these developments a greater volume of raw cost data will be required to inform and test new cost models. This volume of data cannot be supported via the Case Study approach, and the LIFE team would suggest that a software tool would provide the volume of costing data necessary to provide a truly accurate predictive model

A Reference Architecture for Service Lifecycle Management – Construction and Application to Designing and Analyzing IT Support

Service-orientation and the underlying concept of service-oriented architectures are a means to successfully address the need for flexibility and interoperability of software applications, which in turn leads to improved IT support of business processes. With a growing level of diffusion, sophistication and maturity, the number of services and interdependencies is gradually rising. This increasingly requires companies to implement a systematic management of services along their entire lifecycle. Service lifecycle management (SLM), i.e., the management of services from the initiating idea to their disposal, is becoming a crucial success factor. Not surprisingly, the academic and practice communities increasingly postulate comprehensive IT support for SLM to counteract the inherent complexity. The topic is still in its infancy, with no comprehensive models available that help evaluating and designing IT support in SLM. This thesis presents a reference architecture for SLM and applies it to the evaluation and designing of SLM IT support in companies. The artifact, which largely resulted from consortium research efforts, draws from an extensive analysis of existing SLM applications, case studies, focus group discussions, bilateral interviews and existing literature. Formal procedure models and a configuration terminology allow adapting and applying the reference architecture to a company’s individual setting. Corresponding usage examples prove its applicability and demonstrate the arising benefits within various SLM IT support design and evaluation tasks. A statistical analysis of the knowledge embodied within the reference data leads to novel, highly significant findings. For example, contemporary standard applications do not yet emphasize the lifecycle concept but rather tend to focus on small parts of the lifecycle, especially on service operation. This forces user companies either into a best-of-breed or a custom-development strategy if they are to implement integrated IT support for their SLM activities. SLM software vendors and internal software development units need to undergo a paradigm shift in order to better reflect the numerous interdependencies and increasing intertwining within services’ lifecycles. The SLM architecture is a first step towards achieving this goal.:Content Overview List of Figures....................................................................................... xi List of Tables ...................................................................................... xiv List of Abbreviations.......................................................................xviii 1 Introduction .................................................................................... 1 2 Foundations ................................................................................... 13 3 Architecture Structure and Strategy Layer .............................. 57 4 Process Layer ................................................................................ 75 5 Information Systems Layer ....................................................... 103 6 Architecture Application and Extension ................................. 137 7 Results, Evaluation and Outlook .............................................. 195 Appendix ..........................................................................................203 References .......................................................................................... 463 Curriculum Vitae.............................................................................. 498 Bibliographic Data............................................................................ 49

Combining SAWSDL, OWL-DL and UDDI for Semantically Enhanced Web Service Discovery

UDDI registries are included as a standard offering within the product suite of any major SOA vendor, serving as the foundation for establishing design-time and run-time SOA governance. Despite the success of the UDDI specification and its rapid uptake by the industry, the capabilities of its offered service discovery facilities are rather limited. The lack of machine-understandable semantics in the technical specifications and classification schemes used for retrieving services, prevent UDDI registries from supporting fully automated and thus truly effective service discovery. This paper presents the implementation of a semantically-enhanced registry that builds on the UDDI specification and augments its service publication and discovery facilities to overcome the aforementioned limitations. The proposed solution combines the use of SAWSDL for creating semantically annotated descriptions of service interfaces and the use of OWL-DL for modelling service capabilities and for performing matchmaking via DL reasoning

The Life Cycle Management and Intellectual Capital factors that influence sustainability integration in organisational processes

Following the suggestions of the UNEP/SETAC Life Cycle Initiative publications on Life Cycle Management (LCM) as a business management approach to improve sustainability performance, this research explored LCM as a promising research area that could help identify the factors that influence the integration of sustainability aspects into organisational processes. The initial research strategy was comprised of LCM literature analysis to explore LCM and identify potential factors that could direct the data collection. The analysis of the LCM literature shows that LCM is vaguely described. This research analysis puts into context the various LCM approaches through the introduction of the four LCM elements. The LCM elements were used as a frame to analyse the LCM cases found in the literature and identify the factors that influence integration of sustainability in organisational processes. The next stage of the research strategy was to conduct action research studies to explore in close proximity the integration of sustainability aspects in organisational processes. Two in depth action research studies were conducted, influenced by engaged scholarship. During Case A, the LCM elements were used in practice to influence the project whilst the LCM factors were observed in practice. Case A demonstrated the complexity of sustainability-related information integration in organisational processes and the division of information flows towards different organisational functions to inform their own decision. The analysis highlighted that developing knowledge is a key LCM factor that influences the application of LCM. As the importance of developing knowledge became apparent, a novel sustainability related intellectual capital (SrIC) framework was developed then used during Case B. This framework is shown to assist the sustainability professionals of Company B in enhancing the sustainability related intellectual capital of the company, which in turn led to more effective sustainability integration. This research used LCM as a ‘vehicle’ to explore the integration of sustainability aspects into organisational processes and hence contribute to the LCM literature with the four LCM elements framework of analysis, descriptions of the factors that influence the application of LCM, bringing a focus on the importance of developing knowledge for the effective application of LCM, and identifying the intellectual capital factors that influence the integration of sustainability aspects into organisational processes.EPSR

Management accounting in new product development : case-study evidence from process-oriented high-technology R&D environment

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