Towards an operationalisation of governance and strategy for service identification and design

Abstract

Service orientation is a promising paradigm for business architectures. Implementing a service-oriented architecture (SOA) promises increasing flexibility as well as agility and decreasing development and maintenance costs of IT landscapes. Simultaneously with these advantages, the implementation of an SOA entails some inherent challenges. The flexible orchestration of services increases the complexity of the whole system significantly and can even result in decreasing performance [1]. A holistic management of technology and business processes is therefore necessary [2]. We believe that the essential SOA management tasks include topics such as strategy, governance, processes as well as infrastructure. These management topics can be addressed on different levels of granularity, e.g. at an SOA governance level or a single service level. This article focuses on individual services and shows how to support their identification and design. Therefore, we present specific deduced dimensions of the generic topics governance and strategy. In addition, we present roles and techniques in order to consider these topics already during the early phases of an SOA implementation, i.e. in the identification and design process.