Evaluation Model for Web Service Change Management Based on Business Policy Enforcement

Abstract

Today organizations in all industries particularly financial services, retail and communications are increasingly dependent upon IT and a highly available network to meet their business objectives. As customer expectations and demands rise, network operations teams are focusing on IT service-quality improvement and achieving higher levels of availability by re-examining processes and procedures particularly in the area of change management because changes to the network are often a source of downtime. Growing complexity of customer needs is one of the prevailing problems faced by IT enterprises at present, leading to increasingly complex IT service management systems. At the same time, quick response to unexpected problems and externally imposed requirements are testing the IT change management. Although there exists many change management issues and solutions, there is no proper support for efficient change evaluation and monitoring. Present change management works are done only in the web service interface such as WSDL Web Service Definition Language and there is no proper support for dynamic nature in them. In order to provide a flexible environment for the Business Analyst to perform the emergency changes over the service business logic without the need of IT staff and also to evaluate changes made, we propose a Finite State Machine based Evaluation Model for Web Service Runtime Change Management and also a set of change factors to evaluate runtime changes of web services. Among which we mainly focus on the factor Business Policy Enforcement which is used for checking whether there is any policy violation with respect to the changes made. We first define the various change factors and derive a mathematical solution for each one. The derived solution is considered as the change measure for individual change factor. A case study from banking domain is provided to validate the proposed framework.