Policy-based automation to improve solution engineering in IT services

IT outsourcing service providers are increasingly required to balance cost-reduction challenges with quality-improvement goals. Such efforts can be aided by an improved methodology for services solution engineering - which involves requirements analysis, mapping requirements to service provider capabilities, documenting the service design and defining transformations of the customer's environment to facilitate more efficient service delivery. One such improved methodology leverages reuse in the form of a taxonomy of standardized service offerings and a repository of standardized service designs they can be mapped to. In this paper, we describe a prototype system that provides automation for such a methodology, by encoding design policies that are used to assist solution architects in gathering relevant information from the customer and cross checking design decisions. This paper presents the system architecture, discusses sources and models of knowledge, and illustrates how this knowledge can be used with specific examples from the services field.