Integration of IT services: Towards a pattern-based approach for eliciting service integration requirements

Current industry trends suggest that IT services are being sourced more selectively. A prominent example of such an IT service is the user help desk that is often an integrated service, where different sub-services are being delivered by different service providers. Hence IT service providers face the challenges of integrating business processes and IT elements as well as service management tasks such as managing service contracts within a service delivering network more efficiently. Due to the dynamic nature of the IT services industry eliciting integration requirements is a crucial and recurring step in such endeavors. Hence we propose the foundation of integration patterns that supports eliciting integration requirements in two dimensions: process & IT and service management. Such patterns support reusing gained experience by capturing integration problems and proven solutions. Although our approach is still research in progress we present two pattern candidates.