A Review on Multiple Perspectives of IT Services in Information Systems and Computer Science

(A Multi-disciplinary Overview)

Akbar Nabiollahi Faculty of Computer science and

Information System Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM)

Johor Bahru, Malaysia nabi_ir@yahoo.com

Rose Alinda Alias Faculty of Computer science

and Information System Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM)

Johor Bahru, Malaysia alinda@utm.my

Shamsul Sahibuddin Advanced Informatics School (AIS)

Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM)

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia shamsul@utm.my

Abstract— Services innovations are intensively associated with ICT innovations and adoption and diffusion of ICT. Recently, various issues and views of services have been addressed through new disciplines of services. This paper attempts to review multiple disciplines of IT services in Information Systems and Computer Science briefly. While in SSME and ITSM, the focus is mostly on planning and management of IT services, in Services Computing discipline and in service oriented domains of services such as SOA and SOI, the emphasis is on service design and operation. As we discussed in this paper, there is a call to conducting research in service-oriented technology and management for the coming decade. Also there is a rich context for researchers on services design, services development, services marketing, services delivery, services management, and services operation from behavioural, economics, technical, and organizational perspectives in computer science, information systems, e-commerce and management disciplines. For achieving any research in this area, quantitative, qualitative and experiment methods, case and field studies, and design science approaches were encouraged to be considered.

Keywords: Service Science Management Engineering (SSME), IT Service Management (ITSM), ITIL, SOA, Service Oriented Enterprise Architecture (SOEA), Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF), CMMI-SVC, ISO/IEC 20000,Services Computing

I. INTRODUCTION The ‘service’ concept has different aspects and views.

Recently, several disciplines and domains have been defined and developed in order to support different issues and benefits of IT services. Also there is a call to conducting research in service-oriented technology and management for starting decade [1-2]. Major challenges and issues to service sciences can be reside in computer science, information systems, e-commerce and management disciplines [3] in order to be resolved by researchers and practitioners in academic and industrial domain. To respond to this requirement in multi-disciplinary research, various research paradigms and methods are advised [4].

II. SERVICE SCIENCE, MANAGEMENT AND ENGINEERING (SSME)

IBM developed a new academic field named Services Science, Management, and Engineering (SSME) in 2004 [5]. SSME involves three domains, namely, service science, service engineering and service management. Services Science is used as a way to create knowledge about services, Services Engineering is defined as a way to create service value by using use the knowledge, and Services Management invests to improve the process of creating the service value [6]. The goal of the SSME discipline is to make quality, productivity, sustainability and innovation rates across the service sector [2]. “Services innovations are intensively associated with ICT innovations and adoption and diffusion of ICT, there is a rich context for researchers on services design, services development, services marketing, services delivery, services management, and services operation from behavioural, economics, technical, and organizational perspectives” [2, 6].

III. SERVICES COMPUTING Service Computing is developed by IEEE and is defined as “The use of information technology (IT) to support customer-provider interactions. Topics include web services, e-commerce, service-oriented architectures (SOA), self-service technologies (SST), software as a service (SaaS) and IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)”. In Services Computing discipline [7], service has been defined as “a represented type of relationships-based interactions (activities) between at least one service provider and one service consumer to achieve a certain business goal or solution objective.” Business services are realized by IT software systems, called services systems. Therefore, a services system can be viewed as a self-contained encapsulated system providing some services to the outside world [5]. The essential perspectives of a service system are including model, technology, architecture and optimization

[2]. The software architecture of a services system provides a guidance of designing and constructing a service system, by identifying system components along with the connections and interactions between them [7].

IV. IT SERVICE MANAGEMENT (ITSM) ITSM is defined as a set of process that detail best

practices based on ITIL standards to enable and optimize IT services in order to satisfy business requirements and manage the IT activities [3]. ITSM is process focused and shares common themes with the process improvement movement (e.g., TQM, Six Sigma, Business Process Management, and CMMI). ITSM provides a framework to structure IT-related activities and the interactions of IT technical personnel with business customers and users [3]. ITSM is often associated with the British Government’s Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). The definitions of IT service and IT service management have been extracted from ITIL V3. IT Service is defined by OGC as “A Service provided to one or more customers by an IT Service provider. An IT Service is based on the use of Information Technology and supports the customer’s business processes.” IT Service Management also is defined as “The implementation and management of Quality IT Services that meet the needs of the Business. IT Service Management is performed by IT Service providers through an appropriate mix of People, Process and Information Technology” [8].

In the following subsections main frameworks on service management have been skimmed in summary, namely, ITIL, ISO/IEC 20000, Microsoft Operation Framework (MOF) and CMMI for Services (CMMI-SVC). These frameworks have been surveyed in order to capture any architecture solution for IT services. In spite of special features of each one, except ITIL, none of these framework doesn’t provide any service architecture [9].

A. IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL)

has been introduced by Office of Government Commerce (OGC). The original version mainly was focused on IT Infrastructure and includes 31 books. In next version which published mid 1990s, it was concentrated more on service delivery and support and includes 8 books [10]. OGC published the latest version, ITIL V3, in 2007. This version is focused on establishing Service Management across a lifecycle and consists of 5 volumes as service life cycle stages [11]. The aim of this library is to define a framework and a source of good practice in IT service management (in ITIL V2) and Service Management (in V3) [12].

B. ISO/IEC 20000 ISO/IEC 20000 evolved from the BS15000 and ITL V2

framework, and was influenced by other quality standards (such as Six Sigma, COBIT and CMMI). ISO/IEC 20000

standard provides two reference guides, namely, ITSM-Specification [13] and ITSM-Code [14], for organizations to support them for implementation of service delivery and service support processes only.

C. Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) has been

developed by Microsoft Corporation and consists of principles, integrated best practices and activities [15]. MOF provide comprehensive guidelines for IT solutions and services. MOF is a question-based guidance to determine the needs of organization now and its requirements in the future. This guidance encompasses all of the processes and activities involved in managing IT services including conception, development, operation, maintenance and retirement. MOF organizes their processes and activities into Service Management Functions (SMFs) that are grouped in phases of IT service lifecycle [16]. MOF aims to provide guidance on how to create, operate, and support IT services. The IT service lifecycle (Figure 2.3) in MOF is composed of plan, deliver and operate ongoing phases and one manage layer which operates through other phases [15]. Figure 1 shows Microsoft core infrastructure optimization model and MOF service lifecycle.

Figure 2 MOF Service lifecycle model [15]

D. CMMI for Services (CMMI-SVC) Recently, in 2009, a maturity model for services has

been published by Software Engineering Institute (SEI) which is called CMMI for Services (CMMI-SVC). The scope of CMMI-SVC model is a guideline for CMMI maturity model in service provider organizations [17]. The CMMI-SVC, V1.3 model which is published in 2010 November [18], is a collection of best practices for service from government and industry that is generated from the CMMI V1.3 Framework [19].

V. SERVICE ORIENTED DISCIPLINES The main goals and characteristics of Service Oriented

domains are Reuse, Service Encapsulation, Loose-Coupling, Strong Cohesion, Service Granularity and Well-Designed Services. As a difference between process and service it is stated that processes are defined once and ideally within a single context [20]. Services, on the other hand, are defined once and reused many times over within diverse context such as business process, IT processes and systems [21]. The main drivers for SO domains are to facilitate the manageable growth of large-scale enterprise systems, to facilitate Internet-scale provisioning and use of services and to reduce costs in organization to organization cooperation.

A. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Reference Model Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has received

significant attention within the computer science community. OASIS has developed a reference model to provide a higher level of commonality, with definitions that should apply to all SOA [22]. The goal of this reference model is to define the essence of service oriented architecture, and emerge with a vocabulary and a common understanding of SOA. In this reference model OASIS defins “Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a paradigm for organizing and utilizing distributed capabilities that may be under the control of different ownership domains.” In this definition, entities (people and organizations) create capabilities to solve or support a solution for the problems they face in the course of their business.

B. SOA Integration Model SOA Alliance of The Open Group has defined three

domains for Service Orientation within the Information technology: the Business Architecture, the Data and Information Architecture and the Infrastructure Architecture (Figure 2). This will align three other models defined using different terminology: Service Oriented Enterprise, Service Oriented (Application) Architecture and Service Oriented Infrastructure [23].

Figure 2 The Open Group Service Oriented Integration Model

The Open Group defined a project to develop a reference model for Service Oriented Infrastructure (SOI). SOI is one of the three pillars of Information Technology next to Service Oriented Enterprise (SOE) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Service-oriented infrastructure (SOI) results from applying the principles of service orientation to IT infrastructure [23]. The term Service-Oriented Architecture most commonly refers to the application service oriented principles to software application. SOI should be viewed as a mechanism to deliver core infrastructure services as a “service” to the business rather than individual components [23].

C. Service Oriented EA One of the main ideas of SOA is to bridge the gap

between the business process layer and the application layer. The service layer is introduced for this purpose. Therefore SOA influences the business process, the service and the application layer [24]. Meersman suggests that integration of SOA into the ongoing EA efforts will benefit all business units of the target organization [25].

The trend of service-oriented EA is also considered at foundation stage and the integration of EA and SOA is needed [26]. Although the core of EA defines the architectural models of an enterprise to meet requirements of future changes in the efficient and planned manner, SOA represents the latest potential to complement and improve EA from [27]. SOA provides a unified foundation for migration from legacy systems to a consistent service-oriented framework [28-29]. The goal of using SOA to enable EA more executable, while EA makes SOA more manageable and organized [7].

VI. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION This paper has reviewed various disciplines on services

in Information Systems and Computer Science. This paper shows that the ‘service’ concept has different aspects and views. Recently, several disciplines and domains have been defined and developed in order to support different issues and benefits of IT services. While in SSME and ITSM, the focus is mostly on management perspectives of services, in Services Computing disciplines and in service oriented domains of services such as SOA and SOI, the emphasis is service design and operation. Figure 3 draws our view on these disciplines.

As we discussed in this paper, there is a call to conducting research in service-oriented technology and management for the current decade. Major challenges and issues to service science that should be resolved by universities can be resided in computer science, information systems, e-commerce and management disciplines.

Figure 3 Service Disciplines in IS and CS

To respond to this call and to conduct multi-disciplinary research, various research paradigms and methods are advised. In addition for achieving any research in this area, quantitative, qualitative and experiment methods, case and field studies, and design science approaches are encouraged to be considered.

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