A service management framework for service-oriented enterprises

With a steady pace of adoption of service-oriented architecture, companies have made significant progresses in implementing various kinds of Web services and converting existing applications to service-oriented architecture. As significant number of services have been implemented and put into actual use, many service-oriented enterprises are faced with the problem of how to manage these services in an efficient manner. In this paper, we propose a framework for a more efficient management of these services. In this framework, the creation and maintenance of enterprise solutions are modeled by flows, finite state machines (FSMs) among other formal models. For instance, each enterprise solution would be modeled as composite services that can be described by respective flow and FSM models. These solution models can then be stored, and later retrieved for the execution of these composite services. Furthermore, formal models are also used to maintain and update these service-oriented solutions to improve the efficiency and quality of service management by taking advantage of the underlying service-oriented architecture. In this paper, we first provide a normalized categorization of enterprise services. We then describe the framework for managing services in service-oriented enterprises. We also discuss how this framework can help manage enterprise services more efficiently. Finally, we give a real-world example to illustrate how this framework can be used in practice.