Model-based integration of tools supporting automatable IT Service Management processes

Shifting towards process-oriented approaches for IT Service Management (ITSM) is a rather evolutionary than a revolutionary step, enabling IT service providers to automate parts of their management activities. Therefore the existing management tools have to be integrated into an architecture that is aligned with the ITSM processes. The challenge in achieving this lies in the decoupling of the processes from the functionality offered by a heterogeneous tool chain. Applying service-orientation to integrate the existing management tools can help to solve this issue. Existing work within this field hardly discusses the necessary concepts in integrating management tools from a management process perspective but mainly focus on technical details such as web service-based integration making it hard to adapt the proposed solutions to scenarios other than targeted. To address this situation exemplified by ISO/IEC20000's definition of Incident Management Process, we present an approach for designing management services independent of concrete tools. The interfaces of the management services are designed with respect to requirements that can be derived from management standards and thus can be reused in management processes that conform to ISO/IEC20000.