Towards Assessing Performance in Service Computing

Enterprises increasingly choose to focus on core competences and often outsource different services in order to achieve set goals. Although extensive research and development work is pursued on service computing, the main focus is on technical aspects. Business and economic issues in the context of service computing receive little attention. The scope of this article is to present preliminary results of an on-going research project aiming at advancing research in the area of economic performance assessment in service computing by developing a conceptual framework and metrics useful for economic performance analysis. Issues addressed in this article pertain to synthesize and discuss economic theories and approaches relevant for modeling and assessing the economic performance in service computing (e.g., game theory, graph theory, transaction cost economics, decision theory), emphasizing their strengths and weaknesses. Research challenges are then briefly discussed.