Business services as a new operational model for enterprises and ecosystems

Abstract

Enterprises continue to face the challenge of cost effective operations and thus, standardization and openness are becoming an imperative for operational efficiencies at a much higher business level than information systems and related IT infrastructure. Business processes have governed enterprise operational modeling for several decades and have provided the basis for many business transformation approaches. Business processes have thus become an early form of standardization and their continuous maturity has given rise to a very important outsourcing market that has helped companies produce substantial savings [1]. However, there is a clear need for new ways of modeling enterprise operations that exploit deeper levels of industry-specific commonalities across companies, thus realizing further economies of scale while yielding more savings and enhanced resilience. This paper introduces the concept of Business Service-based modeling of companies and related ecosystems as an innovative approach for attaining these goals. The concept of "services" is not new. Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), related web services and other service standardization efforts are well-known today. However, the focus of existing service models is primarily integration of IT systems based on interoperability. These models, which are targeted towards solution implementers, do not adequately address the needs of higher level, business-oriented modeling within the context of a service-oriented operation and corresponding service-oriented ecosystems. Companies are beginning to recognize the importance of business-level service orientation as a pre-requisite to becoming competitive. For on demand interaction with their customers, suppliers, partners, and employees, companies are actively exploring what business services to provide and how to develop them rapidly in order to be responsive and grow margins. Hence, there is a need for proper operational modeling constructs and corresponding SW tools that support design, representation, and analysis of services that are required by service-oriented, on demand businesses. Business Services provide such a new paradigm for extended business-level standardization and componentization. In this paper, the concept of Business Services is introduced and illustrated with several examples. A new metamodel exposing the different aspects of company operations comprised by these Business Services will be presented. Traditional functional modeling approaches including business processes will be related to Business Services. © 2006 IEEE.