A Business Intelligence Approach to Support Decision Making in Service Evolution Management

Abstract

Service evolution management imposes complex challenges to a service provider. Identifying which changes are necessary and choosing the ones to implement are some of the decisions that providers have to face. The decision making process involves the estimation of change effects to minimize the impact over the direct and indirect clients of the service portfolio. While most existent works address either shallow changes impact or change management from a technical perspective, this paper proposes a Business Intelligence approach to support providers in decisions related to service evolution. The approach is based on the integration of services usage data and related business data, which can be correlated and presented to providers according to distinct organizational levels. One of the analysis dimensions is represented by usage profiles, which group similar usage patterns discovered from logs of services interactions. Through an illustrative scenario, we demonstrate some analysis possibilities. We also relate decisions to stakeholders and to a change-oriented lifecycle.