Business Services as a New Operational Model for Enterprises and Ecosystems

Enterprises continue to face the challenge of cost effective operations and thus, standardization and openness are becoming an imperative for operational efficiencies at a much higher business level than information systems and related IT infrastructure. Business processes have governed enterprise operational modeling for several decades and have provided the basis for many business transformation approaches. Business processes have thus become an early form of standardization and their continuous maturity has given rise to a very important outsourcing market that has helped companies produce substantial savings [1]. However, there is a clear need for new ways of modeling enterprise operations that exploit deeper levels of industry-specific commonalities across companies, thus realizing further economies of scale while yielding more savings and enhanced resilience. This paper introduces the concept of Business Service-based modeling of companies and related ecosystems as an innovative approach for attaining these goals. The concept of "services" is not new. Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), related web services and other service standardization efforts are well-known today. However, the focus of existing service models is primarily integration of IT systems based on interoperability. These models, which are targeted towards solution implementers, do not adequately address the needs of higher level, business-oriented modeling within the context of a service-oriented operation and corresponding service-oriented ecosystems.