On 10/07/06, Keith Harrison-Broninski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > > > > I agree that a more high-level and less technical approach is productive for > enterprise architects (who wouldn't). However, as with (for example) user > interface design, I think it is more sensible to focus on business goals than > business services. > > In the end, the latter are only there to implement the former - you will get > a better set of services by thinking first about the business goals they are > intended to achieve.
I'm not really disagreeing here, but to me the business goals tend to sit in an area. So to find the goals you need the areas, hence the reason why I think that service have a hierachy. I completely agree about using goals as a way to refine services and determine the next level down, I've just found that you can start with the high level blobs (services) first and use them to contain the different goals. As an example Sales & Finance are two services within the business Scenario 1: Sales has a goal of receiving commisions. They realise this by selling stuff Finance has a goal of reducing spend and reporting accuracy. Sales talks to finance to report its sales numbers, their priority on this interaction is the speedy payment of bonuses. Finance's priority is information accuracy. Scenario 2 Sales has a goal of selling stuff (no commision) Finance has a goal of reducing spend and reporting accuracy again Sales talks to Finance to report figures, now however Sales has no real goal assigned to the reporting beyond that assigned by Finance. In scenario 2 there is a reasonable chance that the information latency and accuracy will be an issue, in scenario 1 over-reporting might be the challenge. By understanding the different competing goals you can understand how the services should be developed and driven. So I'd definitely agree, I'd just add services first as the context in which to understand the goals. > > You can find a discussion and example of this approach to SOA in my blog. > -- All the best Keith http://keith.harrison-broninski.info 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/
