A Candidate Services Portfolio provides an organized description of identified Capabilities that have not yet been
approved for exposure as discoverable services. Candidate Services Portfolios can be maintained at different
levels within an organization, including project-level, department-level, organization-level, etc. The portfolio
can be maintained within a "regular" Service Model or as a separate artifact. See, for example, the provided Service Solution Design template model and the Candidate Services template model.
During early stages of service identification, it is common for Capabilities to be captured as simply a list
of names, possibly structured as a hierarchical list or stored in a spreadsheet. Such a list is useful when working in
a workshop environment and eliciting Capabilities from source material. As the number of Capabilities increases,
an unstructured list can quickly become unmanageable. Therefore, as soon as possible a categorization
scheme needs to be identified so that Capabilities can be organized into groups within the category
hierarchy. It is important to be able to categorize the Capabilities in the portfolio in a number of ways,
but most commonly we use terminology that describes the service's purpose, ownership, or organization.
Each organization needs a consistent approach for determining which Capabilities are to be prioritized for
exposure as discoverable services, which ones will be implemented but not exposed, and which ones will remain (for the
current time) unimplemented. There must be information in the Candidate Services Model that supports this
prioritization. The service portfolio template can be used to document Capabilities at the level of
detail needed in the Candidate Services Portfolio.
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