Towards a Consistent Service Lifecycle Model in Service Governance

Introducing an SOA in a company brings new challenges for the existing management. Small loosely coupled services allow the Enterprise Architecture to flexibly adapt to existing business processes that themselves depend on changing market environments. SOA, however, introduces a new implicit system complexity. Service Governance approaches address this issue by introducing management processes and techniques, and best practices to cope with the new heterogeneity. Service lifecycle management is one aspect. Existing definitions of service lifecycles vary greatly.. In this paper, we compare existing service lifecycle approaches concerning defined phases and process. In particular, we challenge the purpose of the distinctions made between design time, runtime, and change time. Concluding, we propose a consolidated service lifecycle model for usage in Service Governance.