Designing to attain and maintain business process flexibility

For SOA to be successfully, a guideline to design flexible business process is deemed necessary. Impact analysis and code decay studies may be used to find attributes that contribute to flexibility, but they are mostly done on source codes. When external services, such as those offered by SaaS, and an intermediary such as an ESB is used, these methodologies may not be applicable or yield meaningful results. This paper tries to concretely define business flexibility by defining terms related to business process, discussing when business process flexibility is necessary, and proposes using semantic model of messages between services instead of service interface and functionalities or service models as parameters of business process flexibility.