Requirements Modelling and Specification for Service Oriented Architecture

6.1. Business Process Modelling and SOA\hb in the Large

The aim is to construct an object model of a business. For a small business this is straightforward but, unfortunately, building an object model of a corporation as large as AT&T, British Petroleum, IBM, Toyota or UBS is likely to produce a model of such complexity as to be virtually meaningless. Like earlier attempts to produce corporate data models, the exercise is likely to take so long that it would be out of date years before it was complete. Even approaches based on the Soft Systems Method's rich pictures will not help a great deal with problems of this sort of scale. What then can be done to de-scope such a large problem to a scale where more conventional business process modelling notations are apposite and effective? To answer this question, I propose a technique which I designate mission grid analysis.

A mission grid is a two-dimensional matrix of high level business process areas, organized into columns representing logical rôles and rows representing value propositions (goals). The grid may be annotated with various data, metadata and comments including, but not restricted to, business rules, process interactions, service interfaces, existing systems and APIs, process categories and strategy.

In analysing any commercial enterprise, the first question we must ask is: 'who are the customers and other stakeholders in this business?'. Typical stakeholders might include - in addition to the ever-present customers - ...