Operations requirements in SOA based solutions

A big advantage of SOA based technologies is the opportunity to react to changing environments with the help of service exchange and reusability. Service providers emphasize these functional properties of their products and this flexibility is especially helpful for adapting existing business solutions to new requirements. However, what does this mean for operations in these types of solutions? In this paper we show that the common system oriented approach for operations, as in client server based architectures, is not sufficient to manage the operations of SOA based solutions.. Exchange of services often requires new technology or new administration tools plus the associated additional knowledge and experience in IT Service and Support leading to an increased effort in operations. There is a high risk that the quality criteria of IT Service and Support cannot be fulfilled if operations are based on the outdated system oriented methods and tools. Therefore the system oriented operations have to be developed to a solution oriented approach and aligned with a central administration cockpit which should be considered a definitive element in SOA. We describe, with help of the IT Infrastructure Library, how the common IT service management processes change due to SOA. We show that there are new requirements for services within SOA and that it is possible and necessary to standardize these activities to support the approach of such a central administration cockpit.