I am engaging on a new project focusing on the processes needed to facilitate communication and collaboration to manage the SOA environment. I believe that the requirements for communication and collaboration should be aligned with the life cycle of a service. I have defined the life cycle steps associated with services in an SOA environment.

- Define the service requirement - Specifying the purpose, functionality, interfaces etc of the services as well as service level agreements.

- Plan the service development - Prioritizing when the service must be developed as well as approving the budget and resources required.

- Design/Selecting service - Specifying in detail how the service will comply with the requirements.

- Build/Acquire service - Developing the service or acquire the service according to the design specification.

- Test service - Making sure the service and actually can perform in an operational environment.

- Manage service portfolio - Monitoring services availability, service states and compliance against the agreed service levels.

- Deploy service - Making the service available so that it can be called on in the operational environment.

- Publish service - Making the service definition and state knowable so that the service can be found and used by consumers.

- Find service - A consumer requesting or identifying a service that will satisfy a requirement.

- Invoke service - Adhering to security requirements, and protocols to call on the service and receive a response from the service called within an operational context.

- Enable service integration - Enable the infrastructure with the capacity to coordinate and enable the execution of services.
- Change service - Extending the functionality of the service to adapt to new user requirements.

- Decommission service - phasing the service out when it will no longer be supported or needed.

Each step of the life cycle will require a contribution from different stakeholders and different decision parameters. Each step can be seen as a use case of the service oriented architecture with its own actors defining Business and IT requirements.Bottom line: To ensure communication and collaboration between Business and IT in the service oriented environment consideration must be taken of the complete life cycle of a service.


Robin Mulkers writes:
I see it like this.Define the service requirement, Find the service/Select the service and manage service portfolios are a single process of SOA change management. This process has 3 actors, the service consumer who comes with his requirements, thepotential service providers who do manage specific systems or resources that are potentially needed by the consumer and the enterprise architect or service librarian who makes sure that the service is compliant with enterprise policies and shares a commonlook and feel (cares about canonical models, naming conventions and granularity for example).Design, Build/Acquire, Change, Test is an optional process that is used when an existing service must be changed or a new service must be created.Deploy, publish, enable service integration, decommission service are operational processesInvoke service is not a process I think.There are also management processes like gathering service usage metrics, change metrics.If your SOA uses intermediaries like security appliances or ESB kind of platforms, then there are processes to manage those platforms as well.And last but not least, defining several processes is one thing. Having those processes working together is another thing which is maybe even more critical for a successful SOA.