A Business Capability Driven Approach For Service Extraction

Extracting service-oriented architecture (SOA) from business architecture is one of the hottest topics in the research field of enterprise resources planning (ERP). This business-driven IT architecture not only ensures the consistency between business and IT, but establishes a solid foundation for SOA as well. Most well-known service extraction methods used nowadays are based upon business process models. Since business processes tend to change frequently the resultant SOA becomes unstable. In order to solve this problem a more stable business architecture model is desired and the business capability map (BCM) turns out to be an ideal choice. Hence the focus of this paper is to propose a BCM-based approach for service extraction.The paper aims at solving two major problems: 1. improve the current BCM to facilitate the service extraction and design a BCM modeling tool; 2. define the procedure and rules to extract services from the BCM and develop a program for implementation.Firstly, in order to facilitate the extraction of services from BCM, the paper proposes the improvement of BCM based on the consideration that BCM should have similar features as SOA. The improved BCM is equipped with exposed interfaces, independent data structure and clear quality of service.Secondly, since the current BCM modeling tool depends highly on Excel, which complicates the service extraction. It does not support the improved BCM, either; hence a new BCM modeling tool is desired. In this paper the BCM model is defined as a domain specific language (DSL). Thus the modeling tool is implemented using the DSL Tools based on the meta-model-driven approach. The modeling tool saves the model file as xml document which allows program to further analyze the model to automate the service extraction.Thirdly, based on the proposed BCM model the paper defines a series of service extraction steps which follow a top-down approach from service granularity determination to service interface definition. Taking the results of existing relevant researches into account, the paper proposes the key-capability-based service identification rules specifically designed for BCM.Finally, the"BCM Service Extractor"software is developed to better implement and illustrate this approach. It supports the complete service extraction approach from loading BCM model file, identifying services, extracting service details to generating service model file.In the end of the paper the whole process is demonstrated by a case study. The result proves that the service extraction approach proposed is practical and feasible and the resultant SOA is consistent with the BCM in both granular and functional aspects. Extracting SOA from BCM is an intuitive process which is automated with the help of the"BCM Service Extractor"software. A new approach for enterprise SOA design is provided.