Re: [soa-rm] OASIS SOA-EERP Whitepaper

[mpoulin@usa.com]

While I think that a White Paper would be really useful, replacement of the word 'service' by the word 'capabilities' may have unpleasant effect in the business meaning of 'service'. In Business, people, machines and HW/SW serve the business needs/tasks. Service as a means of accessing capabilities is too abstract and difficult to expand on the area of corporate business (according to RAF, SOA is in between and in both Business and Technology). 

An alternative interpretation is that people, machines and HW/SW perform service by utilizing capabilities. Service cannot exist without associated capabilities. If capabilities are unaccessible, no service exists. Service is an activity/action with capabilities. Service can exist w/o consumers; the opposite is also correct - consumers may have needs/intents to use a 'service', which is not available yet (it is known as 'demand'). 

That is, the capabilities may exist w/o a service while opposite is incorrect. How much this re-interpretation changes the 'service' semantic in RAF?

- Michael

-----Original Message-----
From: Bashioum, Christopher D <cbashioum@mitre.org>
To: soa-rm@lists.oasis-open.org <soa-rm@lists.oasis-open.org>
Cc: Laskey, Ken <klaskey@mitre.org>
Sent: Thu, Apr 1, 2010 7:08 pm
Subject: [soa-rm] OASIS SOA-EERP Whitepaper

Has anyone else from the SOA RM TC reviewed the OASIS SOA-EERP whitepaper

 

http://docs.oasis-open.org/soa-eerp/whitepaper/EERP-Model-UseCase-WhitePaper-cd03.pdf

 

They reference the RM, however, there is one paragraph that caught my attention:

 

Services are performed by people, machines, and hardware/software applications, and represented by SOA services. The qualities of a business service are expressed by means of the Business Quality of Service (bQoS) specification. The nature of bQoS varies across industries and services.

 

The RM would change this to

Capabilities are performed by people, machines, and hardware/software applications, and represented by SOA services. The qualities of a business service are expressed by means of the Business Quality of Service (bQoS) specification. The nature of bQoS varies across industries and services.

 

I think we may need to do something about addressing the idea of a capability that is intended for “others”, i.e., a business service – which is enabled in Software by a SOA service in front of a capability.  We’ve talked about it, but I think a whitepaper on this will be useful. 

 

Note that such a whitepaper would also go a long way towards helping to navigate the SOA Standards landscape, as I think the main issue between the various SDOs on SOA is about using the term “service” to mean “functionality intended for others” vs. as an IT artifact that enables access to such funtionality (which is the RM view).

 

Thoughts?