A Multi-concern Method for Identifying Business Services: A Situational Method Engineering Study

Business services are offerings that enable organizations to achieve their strategic objectives by making their functionality accessible to their customers and business partners. Thus, organizations pay significant attention to and invest in the explicit identification and definition of their business services. This is, however, not a trivial endeavor as multiple concerns that are intrinsic to the concept of business service should be taken into consideration in identifying services. Existing business service identification methods used in isolation do not offer adequate coverage for these concerns. Addressing this issue, we propose a novel method assembled by situational method engineering from a set of existing service identification methods, taking the best aspects from each of them. In this paper, we present an instantiation of the situational method engineering approach alongside the details of the constructed method. We also provide a demonstration of the method with an illustrative scenario based on a real-life business case.