Creating Composite IT Services in the Global Enterprise

In large enterprises, there are an abundance of IT assets which provide employees with the productivity tools necessary to do their jobs. There are also large numbers of applications and services for running the 'back office'. A challenge to all enterprises is cataloging these services, in order that organization can effectively put the services into business use, retire unused services or duplicate services, and build new services to fill gaps in the catalog. Furthermore, it is necessary to understand the relationships among available services in order to combine them into convenient and useful packages/bundles which employees can immediately put into use. In this paper we will describe the process used in the IBM enterprise to create and distribute these bundles.