Context Factors for Situational Service Indentification Methods

Service identification is one of the earliest and very crucial activities in a service engineering lifecycle and requires adequate methodological support in order to be successful. Although there are numerous service identification methods to be found in the literature, most of them take a one-size-fits-all approach that fails to acknowledge the broad variety of concrete circumstances that can form the organizational context in which these methods need to be applied. In this paper, we argue that there is a need for configurable service identification methods that can be tailored to their particular application contexts using situational method engineering. As a first step towards this goal, we analyze two explorative case studies and related literature to derive a basic set of relevant context factors that can influence and determine the final configuration of situational service identification methods from available method fragments. Adapting service identification methods to concrete project situations will improve their applicability and lead to a better service design