Roadmap: How to Adopt the Service Identification Practice
This roadmap describes how to adopt the Service Identification Practice.
Main Description

Start by reviewing the following items:

These will introduce you to the basics of what you need to know about service identification.  Focus on the Service and Candidate Service concepts, which are key to this practice. Also emphasize to your team the importance of identifying candidates services that are clearly aligned with the needs of the business.  Many companies have failed in their initial service initiatives because they try to turn everything into a service.  Particularly in your early projects, be ruthless about scrubbing out candidate services that are not provably business-aligned.

The techniques that are presented in this practice can be adopted individually, to provide partial discovery of the candidate services that could be relevant for a given initiative.  Coverage will improve as more of the identification techniques become used.

If you are primarily interested in identifying services that follow most closely from business-related inputs, focus on the following approaches:

If you represent business processes as business use case realizations, replace the business process analysis approach with:

If you need to build a services layer to manage access to information, add this approach:

Finally, add this approach if you intend to leverage existing assets, such as Java™ Enterprise Edition (JEE) components or IBM® CICS® transactions:

Throughout Service Identification, look for opportunities to do this:

Common pitfalls

Many SOA initiatives fail technically because there was inadequate attention to the business inputs.  Even if a project is focusing on service-enabling existing assets, there still needs to be a focus on ensuring that candidate services identified from existing asset analysis can be traced back to a business driver.

Another common pitfall is not ensuring that each business goal is covered by at least one candidate service.  The goal-service modeling approach specifically focuses on ensuring that these types of gaps do not exist.

Further, don't overlook the services identification work that others in your organization have done.  If this is not your organization's first SOA-related project, one or more other teams most likely has exerted some efforts to identify candidate services, themselves.  Or, maybe your organization has a central repository or model for maintaining its candidate services portfolio.  Be certain to leverage this previous efforts and information resources.

Measures of success

  • All business goals map to at least one candidate service or to a candidate service operation
  • Each leaf-level task in your business processes map to a candidate service or to a candidate service operation
  • The business functions offered by business systems or business service interfaces map to candidate services or to candidate service operations
  • Information elements that are to be managed have been associated with candidate services
  • Each business rule that is to be service-enabled has been mapped to a candidate service
  • Each candidate service that has been derived from an existing asset also has been mapped to at least one business motivator