Supposed you are working in IT Service Management especially in the field of Service Operations by means of delivering high quality Services to your company’s customer. The Services you’re responsible to monitor and safeguard are crucial and the enterprise you’re with has already established a process that covers all the way from Service composing, publishing, requesting down to implementation and monitoring. Despite many efforts to streamline this lifecycle, a gap may exist in the transition of bridging the more descriptive levels of providing Services from the details that are required for implementing and safeguarding them once reaching the infrastructure level.

Proper Meta Modeling helps Safeguarding of Services

Let’s pretend you’re done with modeling (or composing) a Service down to the assets to be assigned to do the job. As you’re skilled, the Service has been properly decomposed into intermediate Service components that where available to be reused and some newly defined Services that cover functionality derived as specific requirements for this particular business case. In case the forecast turns out to be right your Service is in demand and has to be delivered. Keeping in mind, that delivering a Service to a customer also requires managing and maintaining it, additional properties of your Service have to be defined and described accordingly. If it is done in a mature fashion, these parameters relate to several objectives that relate to the nature of the Service which will later be referenced in a contract or any other suitable agreement between the involved parties. However, in this early stage of the lifecycle you neither know about the final infrastructure your Service will be deployed into nor will you be able to guess how the outlined parameters will be gathered and measured. Nonetheless, some objectives have to be described already in order to give a customer the flexibility to request the Service tailored for his business needs. Of course the customer also needs to have a means for measuring and reporting in order to compare if your provided Service has lived up to the outlined expectations. Hence, your Service has to be enriched by e.g. monitoring details that are passed to the responsible Service Monitor within the delivery phase in order to provide the data for future reporting. As a designer you may define what has to be monitored but not how or what kind of tools are used to do it. Now what?

There is a saying, "one picture is worth a thousand words". The same applies to graphic reports and we in Service Economics Solution team had realized we had offered none of them for Valuemation 4.1. So let's create at least "Service Specification" and "Service Catalog" reports. As simple as saying this? Not at all!

Each customizer finds the way how to make things easier. That's why the first idea that came to my mind was: We can take advantage of new "Print to PDF" functionality in Valuemation 4.2. If you run "Print to PDF with..." action, you can see a nice Report Teplate dialog with four tabs, where you can fiddle with all those settings... and you come to believe everything is possible there. The only thing you have to create is view marked as "Print View". And you will get what you see in the view - the real WYSIWYG! I took the requirements from Peter and read: create header with title (should be easy), list all selected Services (easy) with parameters groupped by four levels (hmm, it could be problem) and put footer at the end of page (easy). So I have to create the catalog with groupped parameters. Done. Then to create the view and put the catalog as to-many view. Done.

Service Modeling … ain’t easy?

Imagine you have to come up with a Service Model that relates what has been outlined and defined in the Service Strategy phase. How do you start? First step could be to browse the existing Service Portfolio. Usually this reveals that you’re already managing a respectable amount of different business related Services that make use of intermediate Services. If you follow the path down the hierarchy by means of decomposing – and the Meta-Model has been applied properly – you will end up on the layer of dedicated or shared assets that are supposed to provide specific functionality which in total represents the Service. These assets may also be wrapper describing sourced Services that will or are provided from some other Service Provider and linked to the IT infrastructure accordingly.

This has been one of the core questions when I started at USU a good two years ago – and it continues to come back to me ever since.

Having worked on establishing Business Process Management (BPM) at large organizations for quite some time, my view on IT had largely been dominated by planning, selecting, and implementing new applications: in a classical “structure follows process follows strategy” approach, mostly functional requirements on applications and IT in general would be derived from a business process (re-)design as part of turning the company’s business strategy into operations. The bottom line argument of this top-down approach is that the resulting IT applications are beneficiary to business as they are in line with strategy and support the detailed needs of business processes. However, operational aspects of the applications and requirements of the services to be delivered in operations are only rarely considered. But it is in the operations of these application services that the benefits are really available for the business.

The Correlation Problem

The Situation: technical accounting information ⇔ economic beneficiaries

Meta-M …friends … – what? Alright, I agree it sounds kind of strange for those that do not have to do with it on a daily basis. Let me try to explain it by an example. So let’s step back for a second and talk about you constructing a house. Before you start building it in real, you usually start with a plan or a model that addresses different aspects such as the layout, shape, its static, supplies and many more in order to sort things out upfront and get a great understanding of it. If it is a small dog hutch it is definitely easier than building a shop floor or a family house like the one you want to have. In most cases – same as yours – it becomes quite obvious that some professional help is required at least to get it started. However, before you find suitable help you will need to define what kind of house you would like to construct. Let’s pretend you like to go for a prefabricated house that would life up to the expectation of your seven-member family including a dog. As a direct result, this will already reduce the number of possible companies that may be of help due to the fact that you’re most likely looking for someone that is specialized in that domain.

After two years working on different topics I am returning back to development of Service Economics.  As you may know, recently has been finished the productive version of Valuemation Process Engine, which occupied most of my time in the last year.

Seeing the amount of changes and enhancements in modules that I used to know (Service Manager, Planning and Calculation) I realize how difficult for the end user as well as for consultant is to understand and use all different possibilities offered by Valuemation. The same can be said from the point of view of developer.