Updated on November 6, 2007 at 2:00pm for webcast replay link.
Over the last few years, in my public writing and soap-boxing,
I’ve been talking about the need for a publicly available, cohesive yet
reasonable, business-driven, analysis and design methodology for
services and service-oriented business solutions. Not content to
merely point out the problem, I began working on the problem, starting
with a service discovery step that complemented (my then employer) Patty Seybold’s Customer Scenario Mapping methodology.
About a year ago, I ran into Beth Gold Bernstein
at a conference. Beth and I have known each other for a decade, and
had our earliest conversations on SOA with each other. Over lunch, we
discovered we were both working on a business-driven service method and
decided to join forces. The result of that collaboration –
Business-Driven Service Design – will debut publicly tomorrow during
ebizQ’s SOA in Action virtual conference. Our session is 1:00-1:45 ET on Wednesday, October 31.
If you listen in tomorrow, we’ll be on the line for live Q&A. If
you opt to listen to the replay, then you can always drop me a note (or
comment) with your questions.
As for the method, we refer to it as business-driven for two reasons.
First, the services are identified and designed within the context of
business modeling. The business modeling might represent a business
process, a business interaction, business event processing, or in all
likelihood, a combination of the three. The common element of these
models is a business activity, and it is at business activity where
services are first identified. Once identified, services are compared
to the existing catalog and then (if applicable) progress to design and
provisioning. At provisioning, we reconcile with existing IT assets
and surface needs for intermediary and resource services. A high level
model of our process is shown below.
[click on picture to enlarge]
The second reason we refer to our method as business-driven is that we inject business discipline into the decision making around service and solution prioritization and service lifecycle management.
If you are looking for a service design method, please check out our webinar. the replay here.
[Disclosure: SOA Illumination is a joint venture between Beth Gold Bernstein and me (Brenda M. Michelson)]
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