Towards Construction of Situational Methods for Service Identification

Abstract

Abstract. The service-oriented paradigm plays an increasingly significant role in designing and governing IT architectures in organizations. The identification of services belongs to the most important parts of the service management lifecycle and is essential for the successful implementation of service-oriented architectures (SOA). However, existing methods for service identification mostly ignore situation-specific factors for such projects. Situational method engineering can be used to design a meta method to support the development of situation-specific methods for service identification. Based on a literature review and two case studies, this paper elaborates on context factors and SOA implementation goals being constituting elements of situations. These situations are tailored to the service identification domain. Applying this meta method in concrete project situations will help to engineer appropriate methods for service identification.

Functional Method Engineering

“…Situation factors (Harmsen, Lubbers, & Wijers, 1995) Environment: management commitment, resources; Project Method implementation: Size of project team, capability of project team Projects: Innovation level, Clarity of project goal, complexity of project Project Characteristics (Harmsen, Lubbers, & Wijers, 1995) Team size Domain Characteristics etc. Project Environment (Harmsen, 1997) Existing information infrastructure, the users, the method implementational culture of both the supplier method implementation and the customer method implementation Project Characterization based on Project or contingency factors (Harmsen, 1997) Examples of project or contingency factors are Application/ domain characteristics, external factors, technical factors, and the available development expertise Situation Factors (Harmsen, 1997) Environment: management commitment, importance of the information system, impact of the information system, amount of resistance and conflict, scarcity of available resources, stability and formality of the environment, knowledge and experience of the users Project method implementation: skill of the project team, size of the project team, quality of information planning, interfaces with other projects and systems, dependency on other projects and parties Project: clarity and stability of project goal, quality of the specifications, size of the (Börner, Goeken, Kohlborn, & Korthaus, 2011) After (Börner, 2010) Compliance: general laws, industry-specific, regulations, internal policies IT department: existent, not existent Interaction: customer interaction, employee interaction our notion of functional method, introduce the functional method meta-model and postulate the attributes of a functional situation. The operations required to perform matching with the functional situation are also considered.…”

“…Bucher, Klesse, Kurpjuweit, and Winter (2007) is concerned about the poor understanding of the notion of a situation. According to Börner (2010), there is need to find a way to reduce the number of possible situations.…”