How to Define a Business Service
How to define a Business service is a pervasive and critical question that is essential to the success of any Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) initiative. SOA projects can consist of too many moving parts causing confusion on what to use, reuse, or leverage. It then becomes the challenge of the architect to reduce this confusion by identifying the proper best practices for defining Services properly to meet the business goals set out for them.
Such practices include a variety of approaches. Architects can define a Service:
- in the context of business processes
- in the context of existing assets leveraging the business, information that the Service is expected to send or receive
- in an iterative fashion that delivers business value and decreases risk.
Combined with SOA governance processes that alleviate the challenges with managing too many moving parts, the architect will have the necessary best practices to manage the art and science of Service definition and accelerate SOA adoption.