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 run time 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 uses 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.
- Defined in the Business Space to represent a discrete business
function
- Uses business vocabularies, policies and metadata to enable flexible,
adaptable behavior
- Uses Reference Industry Models to simplify interoperability across
disparate internal and external systems
- Provisioned through multiple communication channels (for example:
Web, B2B, IVR)
- Derived from disparate IT resources
- Built using interface and industry standards
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