The need for Service Portfolio Management

Services in the form of Business Services or Software Services have become a corporate asset of high interest in striving towards the agile organisation. However, while the design and management of a single service is widely studied and well understood, little is known about how a set of services can be managed. This requires Service Portfolio Management. However, Portfolio Management in the context of Service Oriented Enterprises, Service Ecosystems and Service Oriented Architectures is still an ill-understood area. On the one hand, one can make use of existing Portfolio Management approaches to understand the goals and methods, such as maximizing the financial value by making use of financial parameters, such as ROI. On the one hand, there are the unique characteristics of services and service orientation that may require new or adapted approaches. In particular, we envision that the tasks for Service Portfolio Management require particular attention. A service portfolio should support the decision-making process in regard to managing the service lifecycle: the introduction of new services, the improvement or change of existing services (including versioning), and the retirement of existing services. In addition, it should also support business decisions geared towards the bundling of multiple services into one package, the commercialisation of services and the sourcing of services. The major premise of portfolio management is that these decisions are made taking the dependencies between services into account. Finally, the contextual factor has to be taken into account, such as, the number of services, the openness of the service portfolio and the dynamics of the service portfolio.