  Outsourcing -- successful, and sometimes painful -- has become one of the
hottest topics in IT service management discussions over the past decade. IT
services are outsourced to external service provider in order to reduce the
effort required for and overhead of delivering these services within the own
organization. More recently also IT services providers themselves started to
either outsource service parts or to deliver those services in a
non-hierarchical cooperation with other providers. Splitting a service into
several service parts is a non-trivial task as they have to be implemented,
operated, and maintained by different providers. One key aspect of such
inter-organizational cooperation is fault management, because it is crucial to
locate and solve problems, which reduce the quality of service, quickly and
reliably. In this article we present the results of a thorough use case based
requirements analysis for an architecture for inter-organizational fault
management (ioFMA). Furthermore, a concept of the organizational respective
functional model of the ioFMA is given.
