Conceptual Business Service: An Architectural Approach for Building a Business Service Portfolio

Abstract

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is gaining acceptance, offering advantages including closer alignment of IT systems with business. Ideally, within large enterprises, capabilities would be used by solutions from a number of business units while matching the detailed requirements of each; this level of interoperability is difficult to achieve. While much of the current activity focuses on technical interoperability we propose that the focus shift to business interoperability as the key consideration to bring clarity to the engineering aspects of technical interoperability. A model-driven architectural approach is presented that views an organisation’s business processes as structured assets requiring formalisation. A new concept is presented, the conceptual business service (CBS), which provides abstraction through modeling, and promotes building a portfolio of navigable business services at the appropriate level of abstraction and granularity. A method for specifying a CBS is outlined using reference domain meta-data allowing easier service solution recognition among other benefits.