Information Technology Reference
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adds value to the transported goods. This value is reflected in the price that the
customer is willing to pay for the transport service. Transport
management
is an ex-
tensive task that includes capacity planning and scheduling as well as actual route
planning. The transport itself can be decomposed into subservices such as driving,
unloading and a coordination service for selecting a route. A policy may contain the
constraint that the lorry should select the cheapest route in terms of fuel consumption.
The software case can be illustrated as follows. The same transport company may
have a tracking & tracing service for customers. The resources used by this software
service are informational in nature: in particular, they include the GPS data about the
lorries. The service adds value to the transport (the transport service has a higher
value for the customer when he can track his cargo - a case of “information enrich-
ment” [12]). For its implementation this web service makes use of utility or infra-
structural services based on resources such as CPU time, data storage and the
network. Once the service is in place, there may be a management service to support
it. For instance, the
management service may monitor and adapt the service interface
in order to maintain interoperability. Note that management services may be auto-
mated or semi-automated independently of the automation of the service itself.
The
value of a service
in a certain period of time is the difference between the total
value increase on the one side and the total decrease at the other side. In order to real-
ize value-based service management, it is therefore necessary that each resource is
valued. There is a long tradition of cost accounting that we can rely on to implement
this requirement, the details of which are not in the scope of this paper. What is im-
portant for keeping the valuation consistent is to integrate all services into the
value
cycle
of the company, denoted as “cash wheel” in [19]. As traditional audit theory
teaches, each company has a value cycle consisting of sales processes that generate
money, consuming resources, and purchasing processes that acquire resources spend-
ing money. Depending on the type of company - sales, manufacturing, etc. - the
value cycle can be drawn a bit more precise, but the structure is always the same. The
value of the value cycle
is the profit that is generated over a certain period of time
minus the investments that have been added. Each service is directly or indirectly
included in the value cycle, akin to Porter's distinction between primary and support
activities of the value chain [15]. Directly included are services such as manufactur-
ing, sales and purchasing. Indirectly included are for instance management services
that contribute to primary services or other enhancing services. At the end of the day,
the valuations of all services should be consistent, that is, the sum of these valuations
should be equal to the value of the value cycle (for a certain period). We regard this
principle not only important from an accounting point of view, but also as a useful
constraint for business modeling.
3.4 Management as a Service
We have conceptualized management as an enhancing service. In Software Engineer-
ing, the idea of separating operational and management concerns is not new. In the
field of self-adaptive software, an equivalent distinction is made between internal and
external adaptation [20]. Internal approaches intertwine application and adaptation
logic. This has certain drawbacks. External approaches use an external adaptation
engine or manager that contains the adaptation logic, the other part being called the
