Business application design and enterprise service design: a comparison

Abstract

The ever growing complexity of Information System (IS) landscapes is a transparency and simplification challenge by its own. When business requirements frequently change or when technical innovations are frequently implemented, IS agility has to be aimed at in addition to transparency and simplicity. Service orientation claims to support agility. An integrated methodology to service construction is needed which is based on an appropriate Enterprise Architecture (EA) framework, and which reflects the different life cycles on the various architectural layers. As a contribution towards service construction methodology, this paper compares Enterprise Service (ES) construction with the construction of conventional business applications in order to assess the (re)usability of business application construction techniques for ES construction. Based on an analysis of traditional business application design techniques, hypotheses for the design of ESs are developed. Five case studies are presented and analysed which represent ES design practices in large companies with heterogeneous IS landscapes. On the one hand, there is evidence that ESs are designed along the same guidelines which proved useful for traditional application development. On the other hand, there are indicators that the specific properties of ESs lead to adjusted design guidelines.