Many thanks for taking the time to read and comment. You are quite right about the wide range of service types, and so far we have only been trying this out on a couple of public service organisations in the UK. For these, the use of the ISO 9126-1 quality model has proved extremely helpful, but this is far too little practical experience for me to yet claim any wider generalisability.

However, the use of scenarios in the trade-off analysis does help to make a relevant connection between the service being explored and the quality characteristics that are significant for that system (and that can otherwise seem quite abstract to business folks).

We have been pleasantly surprised how easy scenarios developed by the project team have been to classify with the model, and also how useful the model has been as a prompt to add significant scenarios that would otherwise have been ignored.

Combined with the stakeholder analysis, I think this is the biggest benefit of the approach – to view services from multiple people and characteristic perspectives. Indeed, the addition of stakeholder perspectives to ATAM is something that I am sure can benefit IT Architecture reviews as well.

Simon

Being somewhat familiar with different types of service research streams and SEI approach to software evaluation, my main concerns for the approach could be the too direct application of software quality attributes and ATAM practices to services. Services are a rather heterogeneous and abstract area, with very different views on what is
- service productivity and what is the productivity relationship to e.g. profitability (vs. what is a successful software product)
- what is the customer involvement with service interaction (vs. how enterprises evaluate software)
- and how is service quality measured (compared to software and IT system quality evaluation)

Still, should you have more on this, I would be interested in exchanging ideas. Noticed your servdes 2010 presentation and googled up the 2009 paper, but I do not other exposure to SARM approach…

Beyond this, there could be an issue between service architecture and service packaging, which might be beneficial to clarify, and potentially explore.

Cheers,
Tuomas Nurmela

You’ve reminded me of some interesting comments on the experience of open data in New Zealand. One of the key messages here is to find what people want, and value, first, otherwise you will waste a lot of money and effort freeing up information that nobody wants. I fear we may have to re-learn this lesson the hard way in the UK.

If only all our users were as intelligent as we are, right? ;-P

There is also an obvious issue of cost vs benefit (as always) and despite the noble intentions of making such data available, while I support the concept I do not support the vehicle – users will always wind up giving producers of data a ring/sending an e-mail asking for such-and-such. I would suggest having the data available online but not spending too much effort on presentation or advanced accessibility…then when a request comes in that has not been done before, uploading that dataset for everyone to see, with appropriate titles and notes accompanying.

Regards

Ian