Understanding Business Services in TOGAF: Definitions, Identification, and Modeling

In the TOGAF 9.1 metamodel, the central box labeled "Business Service" is defined as a capability supported by an explicitly defined interface and governed by the organization. While business capabilities help determine needed services for agility, the definition does not fully explain the meaning or identification of business services.

According to the SOA part of the specification, a service is a logical representation of a repeatable business activity with a specified output, such as credit checking or weather data provision, and it must be independent, composable, and act as a "black box" for consumers.

ArchiMate 2.1 adds that a business process, function, or interaction may be used to realize a business service, but it still leaves the exact nature of a business service unclear.

Examples illustrate business services: in a potential customer management system, services like "Lead Identification" and "Prospect Identification" are accessed by sales staff as part of the sales process, emphasizing that services are identified by the service set rather than underlying applications.

Business services are characterized as unique "business behavior elements" performed by specific roles to support particular business goals, and they can be linked to the TOGAF metamodel entities.

Starting from Business Processes

One can begin with a landscape of core and non‑core functions, represented at various abstraction levels (descriptive, analytical/operational, executable). A top‑down approach extracts business services from higher‑level abstractions (providing inputs for composite services) and lower‑level abstractions (providing fine‑grained candidate services), helping to identify functional redundancy across the enterprise.

Examples of identified business services include:

Insurance: Customer Contract Creation (capability, goal, activity, function, process, role, service)

Insurance: Claim Acceptance (capability, goal, activity, function, process, role, service)

Banking: Cash Withdrawal/Deposit (product, service)

These examples show how services support business functions and may be internal or external to the organization.

Service Model

Even if the chosen architecture style is not SOA, ignoring a service model makes it difficult to correctly identify business services at the right granularity. Many business services are implemented as SOA services directly linked to software functions, while ITIL services also provide a perspective on service clarity.

The service model should connect business services with TOGAF Application Architecture's Information System (IS) services, then relate them to SOA and ITIL services. IS services are described as the automation elements of business services, and SOA services can be seen as a subset of IS services that deliver results such as processes, data, or applications.

ITIL services, especially customer‑facing IT services, directly support business processes and are defined in service level agreements, while supporting services are not used directly by the business but are required to deliver the customer‑facing services.

Illustrative diagrams (omitted) show the extended TOGAF metamodel linking functions, processes, products, business services, IS services, SOA services, and ITIL services, demonstrating dependencies and integration paths for enterprise architects.

From an enterprise architecture or ITSM viewpoint, business services are delivered to customers to meet their needs, sometimes via supporting business processes or directly through products. Business functions can be delivered by one or more ITIL services, which may be implemented by SOA services depending on the chosen architecture.

Original sources: http://sergethorn.blogspot.com/2014/08/business-services-what-are-they-really.html and http://jiagoushi.pro/node/1231.