Inter-organizational fault management: Functional and organizational core aspects of management architectures

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the core organizational and functional aspects of architectures designed for fault management across multiple organizations involved in IT service outsourcing and cooperation.

Contribution

It presents a detailed requirements analysis and a conceptual model for inter-organizational fault management architectures in IT services.

Findings

Requirements analysis for inter-organizational fault management architecture

Organizational and functional models of ioFMA

Highlights importance of fault management in multi-provider setups

Abstract

Outsourcing -- successful, and sometimes painful -- has become one of the hottest topics in IT service management discussions over the past decade. IT services are outsourced to external service provider in order to reduce the effort required for and overhead of delivering these services within the own organization. More recently also IT services providers themselves started to either outsource service parts or to deliver those services in a non-hierarchical cooperation with other providers. Splitting a service into several service parts is a non-trivial task as they have to be implemented, operated, and maintained by different providers. One key aspect of such inter-organizational cooperation is fault management, because it is crucial to locate and solve problems, which reduce the quality of service, quickly and reliably. In this article we present the results of a thorough use case based requirements analysis for an architecture for inter-organizational fault management (ioFMA). Furthermore, a concept of the organizational respective functional model of the ioFMA is given.