I'd make radical distinctions between business processes and services. They belong to concepts of two different levels (or domains): business (requirements to support customers) and systems (requirements to support business.) Supporting customers requires processes (loop of interactions or activities) and involves vocabularies of customers and domain knowledge such as finance and law etc depending on particular kind of customers. Supporting business involves vocabulary of technologies as well as business operations that may or may not involve customers.
So business processes are causal loops made of activities. Some of these activities (either mechanized by computers or manually) are persistent and shared by multiple loops. The systems requirements that support these persistent activities are called services. The more persistent services the company identifies, the more agile the company to redesign its processes to innovate. Without clear understanding business processes, SOA is not going to be fully utilized. Jerry Zhu --- Keith Harrison-Broninski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > patrickdlogan wrote: > > >>I would interest to know whether people find it > useful to talk about > >>processes and services as distinct concepts in an > enterprise > >>architecture sense? Does it pay to make the > distinction? > >> > >> > >First, keep them distinct. > > > >Second, define them because one person's definition > of "process" is > >likely to differ from another's. > > > >We may need to make five or six things distinct, > not just one or two. > > > >-Patrick > > > +1. We've already heard 2 completely different > concept of process, > haven't we. Ash says, "The business people manage > the processes, while > the technology people manage the services", while > Gregg says, "multiple > services live in a single JVM process." > > Mind you, this group's attempts at defining > "service" have not been very > successful to date, so we're just as likely to get > mired down in > definitions of "process". Myself, I'd go for > simplicity, and stay away > from IT when thinking about it. Something like: > > service = work provided on a contract basis > process = a collection of related activities > > -- > > All the best > Keith > > http://keith.harrison-broninski.info > > __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/service-orientated-architecture/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
