Extending Organizational Modeling with Business Services Concepts: An Overview of the Proposed Architecture

Nowadays, there is wide consensus on the importance of organizational modelling in the definition of software systems that correctly address business needs. Accordingly, there exist many modelling techniques that capture business semantics from different perspectives: transactional, goal-oriented, aspect-oriented, value-oriented etc. However, none of these proposals accounts for the service nature of most business organizations, nor of the growing importance of service orientation in computing. In this paper, an overview of a new business service-oriented modeling approach, that extends the i* framework, is presented as a solution to this problem. The proposed modeling approach enables analysts to represent an organizational model as a composition of business services, which are the basic building blocks that encapsulate a set of business process models. In these models the actors participate in actor dependency networks through interfaces defined in the business service specification.