SUMMARY
Business processes more and more use services. Therefore, during the business process, life cycle services have to be managed. They have to be defined, deployed, operated, and evaluated. Meta‐services are an approach to systematically and homogenously manage services during the business process life cycle. The idea of meta‐services is to capture the functionality to manage the services during the life cycle in turn as services. Meta‐services provide a symmetrical management approach to services. Using meta‐services provides a uniform interface for service provisioning and management and thus avoids redundant structures. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.