The increasingly mobile, remote and distributed nature of today's workforce makes it difficult for an organization to provide adequate administrative support for their workers. As a result, the workers themselves must spend part of their working day identifying, procuring, managing, coordinating and accessing the services they need to perform their job. Additionally, even people who are not mobile or remote workers find that they have less time to spend in organizing the services they need for their business or personal life.
This problem is further exacerbated when many workers must attend off-site events requiring travel plans including airfare, sleeping accommodations and local transportation. The distributed nature of the workforce could result in numerous people staying in varying hotels, renting individual cars and/or transportation to and from airports and event locations. This can add up to the redundant cost of travel-related services.
Another problem is the inherent lack of knowledge between workers as to who is attending a given event, further hindering a chance for coordinated travel arrangements. Online systems such as Evite, Yahoo Calendar and Microsoft Outlook have brought together group notices of events and meetings. This has allowed workers to know who has been invited and whether they plan to attend a given event. However such systems do not alleviate the problem of redundancy in the booking of event-related services to attend such off-site events. Organizations have an interest in reducing redundant expenses such as individual rental cars and hotel rooms. However, they often lack the bandwidth to coordinate a sharing of such services.
In generic terms, a service is a unit of work done by a service provider to achieve desired end results for a service consumer. For such a broad, generic application, many different aspects apply. For example, there is no inventory in the classic sense, as, for example, unused seats on a flight just departed may no longer be sold. On the other hand, as some people do not come to their flights (no-shows), airlines typically overbook flights, meaning, they typically sell more seats than are available, following statistical patterns of no-show behavior, occasionally leading to overbooking, etc. Therefore, a system interacting with such types of services requires capabilities to deal with the type of issues that can occur.