From Business Services to IT Services by Capturing Design Decisions

The main goals of any service-oriented design include flexible support and adaptability of business services and improved business-IT alignment. The existing approaches, however, have failed to fully meet these goals. One of the major reasons for this deficiency is the gap that exists between how the computer science and management science communities perceive the concept of service. We present a flexible, semi-automatic, model-driven approach to designing IT services that directly satisfy business needs and requirements. We begin with the design of business services and the capture of the design decisions that transform the business design through multiple model layers to the IT service design. All layers can be simulated using the Alloy Analyzer tool. The last layer can be run on a given target platform. This approach is demonstrated on the running example based on the consulting project conducted at the company General Ressort. The central aspect of our approach is separating the design decisions from anything that can be automated. It provides the multi-perspective view of the system, by making the modeling process faster, leaving the designer the space to focus on the design decisions and not on drawing the models.