Speakers
Description of the work
Since the beginning of the EGI community, there has been an overall move from a project based structure to a more sustainable, self supporting approach that can to compete with commercial alternatives. This change has included the formation of National Grid Infrastructures, which are expected to be the primary entities that service user needs through signing agreements to provide services to Virtual Organisations and Virtual Research Communities.
NGIs have evolved out of the national groups involved in Grid computing over the last decades, and their variability represents the different size, approach, funding situation and user communities seen in the Grid community of different European countries. A mix of their different states, organisational structures and goals means that while all active NGIs work hard to provide value to a series of customers, it is often difficult to define either precisely who the customer segments they serve are or what set of services they consume. In many cases an NGI will provide dozens of technical services to a range of customers but they will not be relationally grouped.
This session will help NGIs to define their services and customers in a formal manner. This will not involve changing the technical service they provide, simply to use techniques from commercial IT Service Management (ITSM) to describe services and customers in a way that supports effective provision and management of services.
The session will be run by experts fro the gSLM and FedSM projects as well as EGI.eu staff, to demonstrate a process for defining a service portfolio. This will be illustrated with examples and will encourage participants to raise issues and concerns they have from their own NGI experience.
At the conclusion of the session, NGI participants should have an understanding of how to begin work on a service portfolio, as well as knowing whether they can seek support and expertise needed to complete this task.
Printable Summary
National Grid Infrastructures are currently in a transition phase from startup states to sustainable organisational structures. A key part of this is precisely defining what services they offer and who will make use of them, This is necessary as not only are NGIs variable in goals, structure and resources, but also because they have often grown out of other organisations. This means that they have often evolved to provide value to many groups without clearly defining either the groups or services.
This session will use knowledge and approaches from commercial IT Service Management and experts from the gSLM & FedSM projects to help NGIs understand who to clearly define service portfolios. This will support later development of business models and structures for efficient and cost effective management of NGIs. The session will work through the process of designing a service portfolio and provide a schema to support NGIs is carrying out the same process themselves.
Link for further information
www.glsm.eu
Wider impact of this work
This session will compliment the session on sustainability of National Grid Infrastructures, and continue the collaboration of EGI with the gSLM and FedSM projects on improving management and sustainability of NGIs and the EGI ecosystem. It will provide practical assistance for NGIs, to make the challenge of designing a service portfolio an approachable task. Through working on service portfolios, many fo the questions relation to business models and service level management identified as issues for EGI should also be raised, so this session should act as a first step in encouraging NGIs to tackle these issues in a formal manner.
