A Framework for Goal-Oriented Methods for Services

An agile enterprise rapidly adapts to changes in business requirements by identifying, conceiving, deploying, and composing capabilities into solutions in response to normal or disruptive events. Service and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) plays a crucial role in promoting agility by rapid modeling and realization of such solutions as compositions of services. However, services that compose solutions are developed from an IT perspective, which yields brittle services, as they are not aligned with business requirements. A business perspective of service would raise the level of abstraction, which would better align IT with business. This work proposes a framework that considers four critical views of service in terms of What (subject), Why (goal), How (method), Who/Which (realization role). Each view presents a set of attributes. The framework questions: (1) to what extent a goal-oriented approach to service would consider services from different views representing intentional aspects, (2) to what extent these views would conform to the abstraction-refinement of services in order to align IT with business requirements, and (3) whether the existing approaches could be extended or consolidated into a new comprehensive approach. It is meant first to compare different types of approaches, then to propose a consolidated goal-oriented approach, and finally to highlight issues that need further research.