BPTrends March 2007 BPM and SOA Handshake Service Identification BPM and SOA Handshake.pdfVIP

1 BPTrends ? March 2007 BPM and SOA Handshake Copyright ? 2007 Inagnanti and Behara. All Rights Reserved. Service Identification: BPM and SOA Handshake Srikanth Inaganti Gopala Krishna Behara Abstract Service identification is one of the first steps in the Service Oriented Development life cycle. This has been challenging to application development teams for several reasons, such as lack of business process documentation or perspective, reuse analysis expertise, and lack of business executive involvement coupled with turbulence in the project teams. This article emphasizes the need to do value-chain analysis – in depth business process analysis coupled with use case analysis across multiple projects identified in enterprise SOA initiative. This article mentions some best practices, wherever appropriate, to point out the vagueness involved in service identification. Introduction The process of identifying services can be approached from a number of perspectives, and in combination with a particular project type. Identifying services is most likely one of the first activities in the modeling of a service-oriented solution, and therefore errors made during identification can flow down through detailed design and implementation activities that may necessitate multiple iterations, especially in building composite applications. The following are the approaches for service identification. Top-down Bottom-up, exposing existing assets Top-down approach can be further divided in to two types such as business process driven and use case driven – based on whether the initiative is at the enterprise level, business unit level, or specific to one huge application within one functional domain. If the initiative is at the enterprise level, service identification should be driven by value-chain analysis and in-depth business process analysis. If the SOA initiative is specific to one project falling under a functional domain or ent