Introducing: Business-Driven Service Design Method

Updated on November 6, 2007 at 2:00pm for webcast replay link.

Over the last few years, in my public writing and soap-boxing, I’ve been talking about the need for a publicly available, cohesive yet reasonable, business-driven, analysis and design methodology for services and service-oriented business solutions.  Not content to merely point out the problem, I began working on the problem, starting with a service discovery step that complemented (my then employer) Patty Seybold’s Customer Scenario Mapping methodology.

About a year ago, I ran into Beth Gold Bernstein at a conference.  Beth and I have known each other for a decade, and had our earliest conversations on SOA with each other.  Over lunch, we discovered we were both working on a business-driven service method and decided to join forces.  The result of that collaboration – Business-Driven Service Design – will debut publicly tomorrow during ebizQ’s SOA in Action virtual conference.  Our session is 1:00-1:45 ET on Wednesday, October 31. If you listen in tomorrow, we’ll be on the line for live Q&A.  If you opt to listen to the replay, then you can always drop me a note (or comment) with your questions.

As for the method, we refer to it as business-driven for two reasons. First, the services are identified and designed within the context of business modeling.  The business modeling might represent a business process, a business interaction, business event processing, or in all likelihood, a combination of the three.  The common element of these models is a business activity, and it is at business activity where services are first identified.  Once identified, services are compared to the existing catalog and then (if applicable) progress to design and provisioning.  At provisioning, we reconcile with existing IT assets and surface needs for intermediary and resource services.  A high level model of our process is shown below.

[click on picture to enlarge]

The second reason we refer to our method as business-driven is that we inject business discipline into the decision making around service and solution prioritization and service lifecycle management. 

If you are looking for a service design method, please check out our webinar. the replay here.

[Disclosure: SOA Illumination is a joint venture between Beth Gold Bernstein and me (Brenda M. Michelson)]