Business and Software Service Lifecycle Management

Although the service-oriented paradigm has been well established in the technical domain for quite some time now, service governance is still considered a research gap. To ensure adequate governance, there is a necessity to manage services as first-class assets throughout the lifecycle. Now that the concept of service-orientation is also increasingly applied on the business level to structure an organisation's capabilities, the problem has become an even bigger challenge. This paper presents a generic business and software service lifecycle and aligns it with the common management layers in organisations. Using service analysis as an example, it moreover illustrates how activities in the service lifecycle may vary on lower levels of granularity depending on the focus on business or software services.