Michael Blechar

Because I get to deal with both Gartner customers involved with business process management (BPM) initiatives and service-oriented development of applications (SODA) – and the collaboration issues between business and IT analysts – I find that there remains considerable confusion concerning the term “service”. On one hand the business users speak at both coarse-grained levels of abstraction such as having an “order-to-cash service” or in terms of services being more fine-grained business processes, transactions and workflows.

And, on the other hand, I find IT architects, analysts and developers who refer to just about anything which is reusable as a “software service”, especially if it can be invoked from a web browser. This, despite the fact that service-oriented architecture (SOA) application services have a much more specific set of requirements than just “reuse”.

So, to help our clients understand these differences in terminology and what the requirements are to be a “SOA service or application” we have just published a research note on the subject of “Defining Business and SOA Services*”.

In it we explain that, when implemented in a SOA,  a business service is a SOA-based software capability that executes the steps, tasks and activities of one or more business processes in an SOA or EDA runtime environment. A SOA service refers to a unit that follows five principles; it is modular, can be distributed, has a clearly defined interface "contract," can be swapped (substituted for a different implementation) and can be shared.

And, of course, we go into much greater detailed discussions regarding both business and SOA services and provide guidelines and recommendations concerning how to avoid confusion when the term “services” is used in business and IT contexts. One important recommendation is to “know your audience” and how they generally use the term “service”.

*Available to Gartner clients or for a fee

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