Service Identification: BPM and SOA Handshake

Service identification is one of the first steps in the Service Oriented Development life cycle. This has been challenging to application development teams for several reasons, such as lack of business process documentation or perspective, reuse analysis expertise, and lack of business executive involvement coupled with turbulence in the project teams. This article emphasizes the need to do value-chain analysis – in depth business process analysis coupled with use case analysis across multiple projects identified in enterprise SOA initiative. This article mentions some best practices, wherever appropriate, to point out the vagueness involved in service identification.