Business Services provide a logical flow to any enterprise.
Business Services can be considered coarse grain web services. Business
Services represent business functions, transactions, or processes that are
made available over an internal or external network and is a business function
whose execution can be adapted at runtime; based on business policy and user
context.
A Business Service is defined by three primary elements:
- Business Metadata: Business policy information used to dynamically tailor
the execution of the specific business function for a single instance
- Canonical Data Model - a standardized representation of data required
to dynamically select and tailor the execution of a business function
- Business Function - One or more services that are selected dynamically
based on business policy information, and whose execution leverages a subset
of the canonical data model associated with its function. A Business Function
service implementation may range in complexity from simple atomic services
to composite services, embodying business processes.
The following list defines the characteristics of a business service.
- Designed at business level to represent a discrete business function
- Uses business policies and meta data to enable flexible, adaptable behavior
- Leverages Reference Industry Models to simplify interoperability across
disparate internal and external systems
- Provisioned through multiple communication channels (Web, B2B, IVR, etc)
- Derived from disparate IT resources
- Built using Interface and industry standards