Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Business Process vs. Business Service

The purpose of this blog is to get some validation for how I look at Business Processes vs. Business Services. In simple terms, I differentiate between these concepts in the following manner:


Business Process
1) Triggered by business events
2) Issues a series of business actions that could involve the invocation of one or more granular business services
3) Interactions involve execution of a business activity that is representative of a value chain or is a core part of a value chain in the enterprise

Business Service
1) Typically triggered by a request from an online consumer or a single business transaction
2) Issues a single business action for the most part
3) Interactions involve the execution of a single business function or an inquiry against a single core business entity

Your feedback is invaluable.
surekha -

8 comments:

Alex said...

In my experience: each process is a service and some operation(s) of a service can be implemented as a process.

Thanks,
AS

Anonymous said...

My understanding: Business Process is triggered by an external event. Business service on the other hand is called by a business process and is not triggered externally. A new business process can be formed by stringing business services together.
Business service is an enabling composite,that can use manual activities and technology services to deliver. Business service is essentially internal and not trigerrred externally.

Anonymous said...

Another Perspective: There is a constant conflict between object(component) and flow representations. Typically IT folks are comfortable with object representation and business folks with flow representation. Business process is a flow representation, while Business services is abstraction/componentization which enables bridge the gap between business and technology.

Kasor said...

Many used terms remain unexplained and confused: business action, business activity, business function and business entity must be describe relative to BPS and BS. I generally agree with previous anonymous comments.
1. BPS is a sequencial description of a value-added businness activity's tasks.
2. a task can be simple (operation) or composite (composition of many sub-tasks in sequence/parallel/condition)
3. composite task are represented by sub-process called or trigerred from a higher business process
4. simple task are represented by manual actions or a call to a business service operation (interface method)
5. BPS and sub-process are structured identically (sequence of an activity tasks). The main difference is that BPS are triggered from external events, and sub-process are triggered by internal events only.
6. Business service must mainly be seen as automated process's tasks implementation.

Kasor said...

3 types of BPS are to be considered :

1. Domain Business Process service : defined at the edge of the enterprise's business. It can host (operational and support sub-processes) and simple activity tasks. (ex:Sales, procurement)

2. Operational Process service : defined at the edge of the organization's operational sub-unit, and used to sequence all necessary operational tasks and eventually trigger defined support process services. (ex: Production, manufacture ...)

3. Support Process service : defined at the edge organization's support sub-unit, to sequence needed support activity's tasks. (ex: IT-Support)

The sequence of activities, and all the related sub-process must be clearly defined in the the Domain BPS. The normal hierarchy dependence is Domain BPS ---> Operational-BPS ---> Support-BPS.

Usually, a Support process don't have to know Operational process. As simple activity task don't know who is using it. Their state are although used to trigger the next step in the process sequence.

Remind that the qualification of a process as being of operational or support type depend largely on the organization activities type and their overall business strategy.

People Find said...

I agree. Every business process is a service that should be given attention. And every good service given is due to the great planning process.

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