Management Services – A Framework for Design

The Service-Oriented Architecture has rapidly become the de facto standard for modern information systems. Although recently considerable research attention has been paid to the management of services, several gaps can still be observed. Service management as far as it is automated is either mixed up with the operational service logic itself, or handled in a separate not service-oriented system, such as a BAM platform. In addition, there is a growing business demand for value-driven service management. In this paper, a general framework for management service design is presented that covers both business services and software services and is rooted in the business ontology REA, extended with a REA management ontology. The framework is applied to two different case studies, one in the Italian wine industry and one related to a robot cleaner.