Service-Oriented Architecture Governance for the Services Driven Enterprise

8.6. SERVICE LIFECYCLE GOVERNANCE BEST PRACTICES

8.6.1. The Business Domain Perspective: Meeting in the Middle

Business architecture is focused on the actions required by the enterprise in order for it to function. Often, business architectures are derived from a high-level business process analysis combined with an initial effort at normalization of the functions identified from that analysis. Where organizations can get into trouble with business architecture is when they take the up-front analysis efforts too far. In an ideal world, our business analysts would have infinite knowledge of their business domains and would have unlimited time to discuss, debate, and ultimately isolate the ideal service definitions required to flexibly support the enterprise. However, we know that the world is not ideal, and even if we had a large amount of time to fully analyze our business domain, we need to remember that the business domain itself is a moving target.

We are much better off in spending a focused amount of time laying out broad brush business architecture (aka SOA services roadmap) fleshed out by a first-pass business process modeling effort which simply attempts to identify the major functions required and assemble those functions into business ontology. What is an ontology? To quote The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, an ontology is "the hierarchical structuring of knowledge about things by subcategorizing them according to their essential (or at least relevant and/or ...