An approach to align business and IT perspectives during the SOA services identification

Abstract

Service-oriented architectures are a widely used business practice to develop enterprise information systems. However, the current analysis and design methods consider the software engineering perspective only, what is not sufficient for a proper alignment between business and IT, resulting in demand for new approaches offering the business perspective as well. Such new approaches are required crucial to identify software services that are aligned to the business values, hence contributing to customer satisfaction. This paper describes an approach that focuses on business value modeling and uses model-driven techniques to generate the input required by current software service identification methods, thus aligning business and software perspectives. This approach was evaluated in two parts. First, a quasi-experiment evaluates the perceived efficacy of the business perspective, and a proof-of-concept tool was built to check the feasibility of generating typical inputs needed by software service identification methods. The results show a promising approach for the alignment of business and IT perspectives.