Towards a Methodology for Service Construction

Abstract

All large vendors of standard business software have announced to move to service oriented architecture. They claim benefits for their customers with regard to agility and openness. In contrast to the design of software services which has been a focus of research in the computer science community in recent years, the design of enterprise services has not been addressed as much by the information systems research community. This paper outlines a research program on the design of enterprise services. The necessity of different service understandings on different layers of enterprise architecture is shown, conceptual foundations for the design of enterprise services are presented, and first results of developing a method for enterprise service design are proposed.

Towards a Sophisticated Understanding of Service Design for Enterprise Architecture

“…[6,10,34]). Besides the realization through software services several authors also claim a comprehensive understanding of service orientation on business layers to the point of a service oriented enterprise [7,8,27]. The term "enterprise services" is often used in this context.…”

“…Additionally, LEGNER and HEUTSCHI identify the design principles of autonomy and modularity as well as business suitability from existing SOA research on the design of software services [19]. Several authors have presented ideas how enterprise services in particular can be identified and designed [15,24,27] but they still remain very close to the concept of software services that are used in a business context. Therefore they lack a business perspective on service design for a comprehensive EA.…”

“…Another crucial service design principle in view of the IT/Business Alignment and the flexibilisation of processes is a black box behavior of the services. KOHLMANN and ALT [15] as well as SCHELP and WINTER [27] present approaches for the design of enterprise services: KOHLMANN and ALT [15] propose a businessdriven identification of enterprise services by deducing them from reference processes while considering role models. The orientation towards processes, functions and data objects as well as the aggregation of self-contained activity sets is also named by SCHELP and WINTER [27] among the main design guidelines for enterprise services.…”

“…KOHLMANN and ALT [15] as well as SCHELP and WINTER [27] present approaches for the design of enterprise services: KOHLMANN and ALT [15] propose a businessdriven identification of enterprise services by deducing them from reference processes while considering role models. The orientation towards processes, functions and data objects as well as the aggregation of self-contained activity sets is also named by SCHELP and WINTER [27] among the main design guidelines for enterprise services. This approach seems to be applicable in practice, too: Company A identifies enterprise services by the means of given reference processes while company B is deducing the specification for enterprise services directly from their business activities and business objects that have to be realized.…”

“…Service orientation as a paradigm not only for software engineering but for enterprise architecture engineering addresses these goals and challenges [26,27]. However, service orientation precisely discussed in software engineering, e.g.…”