Supporting Strategic Decision Making on Service Evolution Context Using Business Intelligence

With the growing demand for service-oriented applications, the complexity of service change management is increasing. Existing work essentially addresses change decisions from a technical perspective (e.g. versioning, compatibility), but providers need to make decisions considering the business impact in terms of clients affected, revenues, costs and penalties. This paper suggests the use of Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing techniques to support business-oriented decisions throughout service life-cycle in a deep change context, i.e. a portfolio of services consumed in large scale by direct/indirect clients. The approach is centered on financial and usage indicators related to the service provision business, a data warehouse that provides a unified and integrated view of these indicators according to different analysis perspectives, and a data warehousing architecture that integrates heterogeneous data sources. We illustrate the impact analysis support provided by the approach through a case study inspired by a real world scenario.