Via BONSAI into the service ecosystem - Service Portfolio Management in NFDI4Biodiversity

NFDI4Biodiversity brings together a diverse community of more than two dozen service providers, supported by a strong network of scientific institutions, museums, government agencies and expert groups. Building on a foundation of established software solutions and infrastructures, the consortium's mission is to mobilise biodiversity and environmental data for collective use and to support users from research and practice with reliable, high quality services [1]. The service portfolio management in NFDI4Biodiversity has been initiated based on these shared goals and values, as expressed in the mission statement of the consortium, and guided by the specific needs of the community, gathered through use cases [2] and workshops, recognising the heterogeneous landscape of services, infrastructures, and resource availability among service providers, NFDI4Biodiversity aims to offer the best possible user experience and supports service providers all along the service life cycle. To operationalise this mission and ensure the efficient delivery of its services, NFDI4Biodiversity has established a service team responsible for the implementation of service portfolio management. As part of Task Area 3, this team has developed a comprehensive approach to structuring, coordinating and consolidating available services. For the integration of new services into the internal Service Portfolio and the public Service Catalog, an onboarding process has been established. Through this process, the service provider is guided by the service team. After a successful onboarding, measures and workflows for quality assurance and review of the services are in place [3]. This enables continuous improvement of the services within the portfolio management activities. The review process also allows an offboarding of services from the catalog e.g. in case the service has ended its life span. We will present the service-life-cycle within the consortium, the established processes and workflows as well as the supportive tools starting with the biodiversity onboarding service application form (BONSAI), Service Profiles and the KPI-Dashboard Scorpion [4] to support service reviews and requirements by the funding agency. Overall, the consortium ensures the service quality of the individual services via the defined processes and workflows. At the same time, this enables it to address the heterogeneous initial situation of the services provided and to achieve the consortium's quality objectives. ISO 9000:2015 defines quality as "degree to which a set of inherent characteristics of an object fulfils requirements" [5]. NFDI4Biodiversity has accordingly taken measures to identify the relevant characteristics in its context. Additionally, several frameworks for IT service management like ITIL [6], the ISO standards [7], in particular ISO 20000, and FitSM [8] were discussed. Alongside the frameworks, existing approaches of e.g. de.NBI [9] and EOSC Future [10] were taken into account as examples for distributed service provision within the big field of research (data) infrastructures for the scientific community. Together with the experience of the service providers within the consortium, this formed the basis for the development of strategies and guidelines. Important aspects for the quality strategy were to make sure that the service providers are enabled to meet the requirements of the different stakeholders or funders and also to support service providers in reaching the interoperability and sustainability requirements/objectives set by the NFDI and the quality expectations of the community.