Management of Service Process QoS in a Service Provider - Service Supplier Environment

IT service providers typically must comply with service level agreements that are part of their usage contracts with customers. Not only IT infrastructure is subject to service level guarantees such as availability or response time but also service management processes as defined by the IT infrastructure library (ITIL) such as change and incident processes and the fulfillment of service requests. SLAs relating to service management processes typically address metrics such as initial response time and fulfillment time. Large service providers have the choice of which internal service delivery team or external service provider they assign to atomic processs of a service process, each of which having different costs or prices associated with it for different turn-around times at different risk. This choice in QoS of different service providers can be used to manage the trade-off between penalty costs and fulfillment cost. This paper proposes a model as a basis for service provider choice at process request time. This model can be used to reduce total service costs of IT service providers using alternative delivery teams and external service providers.