Explicating technological and organizational interfaces of modular IT service components to support the process of IT service composition

IT organizations and IT service providers decompose monolithic IT services in IT service components for reaching a higher degree of reusability and therefore realizing higher economies of scales. Existing concepts of modularity are being adapted when creating these IT service components. In the area of software intensive systems modularity is a widely-used design principle to implement reusable and combinable elements. The elements (e.g. classes in object-oriented programming or services of a service-oriented architecture) commonly integrate the data and its behavior as well as supply interfaces for communication between them. Typically these elements are considered from a technological point of view regarding the possibilities to be composed. But IT service components are slightly different: they can be described by both technological and organizational aspects. The following paper examines both aspects of IT services and its components and demonstrates possibilities to integrate these facts in the description of IT service components. This approach is useful to decrease the effort for retrieving the necessary information in the process of IT service composition and therefore leads to less time-to-market, higher degree of reusability and higher quality of the delivered IT service.