The provisioning of IT services is often based on a variety of resources and underlying services. To deal withthis complexity the dependencies between these elements have to be well-known. In particular, dependenciesare needed for tracking a failure in a higher-level service being offered to customers down to the provisioning infrastructure. Another usage of dependencies is the impact estimation of an assumed or actual resource failure onto the services to allow for decision making about appropriate measures.

Starting from a set of requirements an analysis of the state-of-the-art shows the contributions and limitations of existing research approaches and industry tools for a configuration management solution with respect to the dependencies. To improve the current situation a methodology is proposed to model dependencies for givenservice provisioning scenarios. The proposed dependency modeling is part of a larger solution for an overall service management information repository.