Open Challenges for Consulting Service Lifecycle Management: What Service Research Should learn from Software Lifecycle Management

Abstract

In the last two decades, research in software engineering has hada focus on software lifecycle management. Rather than a narrowfocus on programming languages environments and softwaredevelopment, researchers are considering the end-to-end lifecycleof software, including design, development, deployment, supportand retirement. Business IT consulting has a similar lifecyclefrom request for proposal, to proposal, delivery, on-goingoperation and retirement. For the past 5 years we have beenworking with IBM Global Business Services to address issues indelivering Business IT services. From this experience, we'veidentified a number of open challenges and have begun workingon solutions and a platform for addressing these challenges. Weare starting with lessons learned in software lifecyclemanagement, and building on them to address challengesparticular to service delivery. For example, like softwarelifecycle management, services lifecycle management requiressupport for end-to-end traceability, coordination between peopleworking on related activities and on hand offs between one phaseof a consulting project and the next. In this paper, we enumeratea set of open challenges for service lifecycle management. Wesuggest how lessons from software lifecycle management can beapplied and give a preliminary report on our implementation ofan open architecture environment to support services lifecycle management.