Statistics: (249 Views) (0 Comments) Posted by: adrian on Sunday, June 01, 2008 Categories: Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), Business Process Management (BPM), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

This is the first article in a six-part series dedicated to exploring how SOA and service-orientation relate to and affect business analysis processes and approaches. Acclaimed author Thomas Erl shares his insights into the world of service-oriented business analysis and business service modeling by providing customized excerpts from his second SOA book "Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology, and Design", supplemented with additional commentary.

Many still resist – or are even unaware of – the benefits of introducing service-orientation into the domain of business analysis. It is easy to ignore service-oriented business modeling and simply focus on service-orientation as it applies to technology and technical architecture. That, however, is missing the point of SOA. The architectural model established by SOA and further defined by the common principles of service-orientation provides the very real potential to finally unite the business and automation domains of an enterprise. To accomplish this, though, requires that organizations take the time to model and build services that encapsulate and express business logic in an accurate and extensible manner.

The creation of business services are therefore becoming the focal point of many contemporary SOA initiatives. They require the collaboration of business analysis and technology architecture expertise and introduce new requirements, roles, and processes to traditional development project lifecycles. In this six-part series we'll be exploring business services and discussing some of the more important aspects of how SOA and service-orientation relate to and augment traditional business analysis approaches. In this first installment we provide a brief overview of some of the tangible benefits associated with creating business services in support of building business-centric SOA.

Author: Thomas Erl