Ein prozessorientierter, policy-basierter Ansatz für ein integriertes, dienstorientiertes Abrechnungsmanagement

IT has become a critical factor for corporate success for companies of all industrial sectors. To achieve cost–efficient and effective provisioning of IT services many companies decide to concentrate on their core business and hand over the operation of their IT infrastructure to third parties (outsourcing). In the same way planing, realizing and providing IT services is custo-mized according to customer needs, a customized accounting management is demanded. This includes among others the support of QoS–dependent, usage–based tariffs as well as customer– individual billing. Consequently, the accounting system, which provides the customized accounting functionality, is individually assembled by combining various HW/SW–components of different manufacturers. As a matter of fact, accounting management proves all but easy-to-handle, as standards for usage/management interfaces are either not yet adopted or not even specified. Thus, accounting management is realized as an error–prone, isolated, component– oriented solution in contrast to a preferable integrated management approach. Especially change management activities, which happen to be carried out very frequently during service operation and have enormous effects on service accounting, are not yet sufficiently supported by any known management solution. To overcome the afore mentioned problems, this thesis proposes the application of process– oriented, policy–based concepts to design an integrated, service–oriented accounting management. The basic idea is to manage any given system, like an accounting system, along the complete service life cycle by applying a process–oriented view. As the basic approach of applying policies to manage IT processes is not restricted to service oriented accounting management, we ensured the applicability of the proposed solution to other management domains like fault, performance, security and configuration management. Thus, accounting management serves solely for an in–depth process analysis of a given management domain leading to numerous process models as well as a static accounting service model. Afterwards, we develop a policy language as well as a management architecture which enable an automated, process oriented IT management after policy specification. We ensured that the management architecture can easily integrate already existing components. Furthermore, a methodology for declaring both policies as well as meta–policies is specified as user guidance. Finally, a prototypical implementation of the designed management application is presented as a proof–of–concept.