--- In [email protected], Michael Poulin 
<m3pou...@...> wrote:
>
> Lawrence, you ared doing a wonderful work!

Thanks! :-)


> 
> I have three questions to your post:
> 
> 
> 1) why a Business Service is a Business Service if it has zero business model 
> elements, i.e. has no Business Service Subjects (in your definition)?

Good question. I went back to my colleagues and asked why did we do that?  Was 
it a completeness issue, i.e. you could add a business service to the model 
without knowing just yet what business subject it was related to? This would be 
essential behavior for tools.

Or was it actually a rule? i.e. business services do not have to be related to 
business subjects. In which case, why is it a business service?

The answer was a bit of both... primarily we felt we didn't have all the 
possible business subjects identified, so wanted to leave that open. Also, 
there may be services that provide "business utilities" that might be hard to 
classify against the business subjects you might typically find in business 
models.

We didn't think the meta model should be overly draconian about what's 
mandatory, in order to accommodate different opinions or development processes. 
So a particular methodology adopted by an organization might want to make 
something mandatory, when its optional in our meta model. or vice versa...
> 
> 2) in "if a Service doesn't have these associations to objects in the 
> business model, then it isn't a business service" - you, probably meant 
> 'subjects' rather than 'objects', didn't you?
> 

Yes. I meant subjects
> 3) what does mean "Business Types"?
> 

our SAE approach suggests organizations build a canonical Business Type Model

"A model of all the data that the Solution software needs to access and 
possibly update. This may be in the form of a detailed Business Type Model, 
which defines all the attributes, associations and constraints of all business 
types that the Solution software will need to process."
 
The model is built from these constructs:

   1. Business Types (a.k.a. Entity Types, Entities, Conceptual Classes)
   2. Attributes
   3. Associations
   4. Generalizations (a.k.a. inheritance)
   5. Invariants (a.k.a. Constraints or Integrity Conditions).

The model is then used to identify core business services that manage the data 
for these business types. We have specific techniques as to how to perform the 
identification - it isn't a simple one-to-one mapping. 


regards
Lawrence


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