Using Enterprise Models to Configure Service-oriented Architectures

The possibility of a direct link between business workflows and the supporting application system is often seen as the critical strength of the SOA paradigm. Though in practice, today’s web-service technology is often used just to invoke detailed functions of particular application systems. The basic SOA does not address management and other concerns that apply to all components in an SOA. However, a real advantage of SOA will not evolve until web-services become configurable at the business level. For that kind of configuration the gap between analysis and design phase has to be bridged. Hence, we introduce a modeling grammar to model service function interfaces allowing a redesign of enterprise systems functionalities at the business level. We illustrate the usefulness of our approach with a pilot study conducted at the University of Munster (Germany).