service-oriented management (SOM)

Service-oriented management (SOM) is the operational management of service delivery within a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The primary objective of service-oriented management is to provide a differentiated service delivery capability during operation, using business objectives to drive system behaviour.

A SOM solution supervises and controls the delivery of a service from a service provider to a service requester. (It can also be seen as supervising and controlling the consumption of services by a requestor from a number of providers.) A SOM solution should be able to manage any service from any technology, without requiring code changes, special deployment, or special development environments. SOM solutions are runtime solutions rather than development or deployment solutions.