Identification of Services through Functional Decomposition of Business Processes

In a layered service-oriented enterprise architecture, business processes are supported by application services which are, in turn, supported by technological services. Service-orientation promotes the reuse and modular design of information systems. But achieving these design qualities requires the business processes of an organization to be consistently decomposed so that their supporting services can be effectively identified. This paper proposes using the separation of concerns principle to facilitate the consistent decomposition of a business process and the unambiguous identification of its atomic activities thus contributing to the task of identifying the supporting services.