As CEO’s of today’s enterprises are looking at reducing the bottom line of the organization. More pressure is on the CIO and CTO of today to justify the cost associated in managing the growing IT infrastructure demand. Though we have seen a traditional switch in acceptability of outsourcing non-core processes. There is still room for reduction of cost associated with management of core-business processes.
As more and more organization starts to derive value from e-enabled business processes of other organizations off course available in public domain. They can forsee a significant cost reduction in total operation cost to manage such e-enabled core business processes.
E-Services as defined is the value derived from a business process. Being a service provider to B2C sector its very important as a developer to reduce development time for commercialization of business ideas as many of them are dependent on first movers advantage.
If we look at the specific vertical of E-Retailing things like Shopping Cart, Newsletter management, Ad Management has been done over again by many service providers. The Latest example being Google Ads using their Ad Management Program to publishing industry for selling of newspaper ads.But even today if you would like to come up with a good e-store with management control customized to your requirement. It will still cost 2000$ to setup and another 5-7K to manage it. Though in comparison to previous years the cost has come down to 70% of what it exist. But learning from experience complexity of business has also increased by at least 60-70%.
This brings us to our topic Why E-Services Management
- With increasing number of software provider turning into service providers. The enterprises have to align their management plans accordingly. As the ASP model provides the necessary cost savings and opportunity for scaliblit.y. It makes more sense for CTO of today to take advantage of Pay as use or on-demand format.
- Secondly With new communication interfaces and devices coming into the enterprises. Its becoming the responsibility of the CIO to make available information wherever the business is being conducted from.
- Amazon Elastic Cloud gives an opportunity to enterprises to bring scalability in organization with adding up investment on IT Infrastructure or computing power for applications
- Just like before hiring an employee you would like to do a reference check on how he worked and does his/her way of working would suite your organization. There is no common mechanism available to evaluate e-services external to you I n use.
BPM and E-Services Management
As BPM or Business Process Management is the latest buzword at any enterprise forum. We need to understand that are core of any BPM lays the basics of e-services management. As BPM’s role is to model,execute and manage sequence of activities in a business process keeping the tasks separate from business logic in backend application.
But important thing to look in here is with e-services management people are concentrating more on process logic than decision logic. For example, in loan origination, the activities described by process logic might include receiving the loan application, ensuring completion, gathering supplementary information, underwriting and approval, document generation, updating the transaction systems, archiving for compliance and notifying the customer. Decision logic in that process might determine whether the supplied information is complete, handle credit scoring and other risk assessment, execute the required level of approval and ensure regulatory compliance. You could implement that decision logic using BPM process logic or by embedding it in process tasks, but doing it with a Business Rules Management or Information dependent makes decision logic more visible to business managers, more consistent across the enterprise and easier to change as required.
QoS Variables
This is generally my way of putting things when we discuss with enterprises there needs. Generally in SME sector CIO/CEO roles are carried out by same individual. But with IT infrastructure converting into a cost unit. Its important that selection of service should not be a one time management decision but based on management decision logic and scalbility of organization the IT infrastructure meet the demand.
From CTO Perspective important factors are
- Throughput
- Response Time
- Availability
- Security
Though these attributes were focusing more on selection of service on the basis of Efficiency and Reliability, we believe they are still not a perfect measure keeping in mind enterprise IT computing requirement.
From CIO perspective
Time - Waiting Time + execution Time
Cost - Financial charge per transaction + cost to run the service
Reliability – . It can be termed as number of jobs successfully executed/ number of scheduled executions.
Fidelity – Measure of satisfaction of service
Recoverability – . A source consideration as to be reliable could also be added with constraint of recoverability. That in case of a failure does service has a method for recoverability. This can only be weighted for a service based on experiences with it or if the QoS attributes advertised with the service also has details on recoverability settings or methods implemented
Information – At time of selection of service has the domain of implementation being analyzed hence need for decision logic. As same service can be required for different functions in an organization. Example in case of Location based services – Maps as content is an important public service included in process workflow. But based on location of service requestor in an enterprise the service selection criteria can be different. Example when Routing function invokes the server different kind of map service is required. But when finding a service like the nearest florist different kind of detailed map service is required.
Hence there is a need for Domain knowledge based selection criteria. As it helps in Implementation of Organization Goal and objectives for evaluation of services
So what kind of Implementation will suite an organization of today.
With content becoming an integral part of services delivered by software for decision making in business process logic. We believe that an Information Dependent QoS Model for selection of web services and their management will be better suited for an organization.
E-Services management is here to stay as more organizations starts to consume each others enterprise services for collabratve public workflow creation. Though we need more consensus on frameworks for such interopability.
