Service oriented Enterprise Architecture for Enterprise Engineering

Several developments, such as the success of cloudcomputing show that not the ownership of IT resources but their management is the foundation for sustainable competitive advantage [1]. According to [2], smart companies define how they (will) do business (using an operating model) and design processes and infrastructure critical to their current and future operations (using an enterprise architecture). Enterprise Engineering (EE) is the application of engineering principles to the design of Enterprise Architectures. It allows deriving the Enterprise Architecture from the enterprise goals and strategy and aligning it with the enterprise resources. Enterprise architecture [2], [3] aims (i) to understand the interactions and all kind of articulations between business and information technology, (ii) to define how to align business components and IT components, as well as business strategy and IT strategy, and more particularly (iii) to develop and support a common understanding and sharing of those purposes of interest. Enterprise architecture is used to map the enterprise goal and strategy to the enterprise’s resources (actors, assets, IT supports) and to take into account the evolution of this mapping. It also provides documentation on the assignment of enterprise resources to the enterprise goals and strategy. There are different paradigms for creating enterprise architecture. The most promising is to encapsulate the functionalities of IT resources as services. By this means, it is possible to clearly describe the contributions of IT both in terms of functionality and quality and to define a service-oriented enterprise architecture (SoEA). SoEA easily integrates widespread technological approaches such as SOA or emerging ones as cloud computing because they also use service as structuring and governing paradigm. The enterprise goals and strategies are thus mapped to a SoEA. SoEA differentiates four layers of services. Thus, its scope is much broader than the scope of the serviceoriented architecture (SOA) and also includes services not accessible through software such as business and infrastructure services. Services of different layers may be interconnected in service (value) nets to provide higherlevel services. Business services are services, which directly support business processes. Business processes can be implemented dynamically (on-the-fly) using business services which are available in a repository for a given business domain. An example is call-centre services provided by an external service provider. Software services exist as two types: (i) humanoriented applications, which are provided as Software as a Service, (ii) application services which are part of SOA. Platform Services provide support of the development of applications. They provide services for the execution of applications, middleware stacks, web servers etc. Another important class of platform services are integration services. They enable the seamless exchange of business information between enterprises. Infrastructure services are services providing virtualized computing resources such as virtual machines, storage etc. They may have a human addressee but mainly they are used to support services on higher abstraction levels. They are an important topic in management and practice collections such as ITILV3 or standards such as ISO/IEC 20000 have gained a high popularity.