A New Service-Based Approach for Enterprise Modeling

At present, there exist many modeling techniques for capturing business semantics from different perspectives: transactional, goal-oriented, aspect-oriented, value-oriented, etc. The results of these modeling techniques serve as natural input for the software system generation process. However, none of these current modeling proposals takes into account the service nature of most business organizations and/or the growing importance of service orientation in computing. In this paper we present a solution to this problem: a new business service-oriented modeling approach which extends the i* framework. The proposed approach enables analysts to represent an organizational model as a composition of business services, where business services are the basic building blocks to encapsulate a set of business process models. In these models, actors participate in actor dependency networks through interfaces defined in a business service specification. Our proposal is illustrated by several real life examples.