Making Service Granularity Right: An Assistant Approach Based on Business Process Analysis

Service Oriented Computing (SOC) nowadays has been widely accepted as an effective paradigm to information system design both by the academia and by the industry. The term refers to the size of a service. As more and more services are available, making service granularity right gets more and more important. Although it has become a consensus that services should be coarse grained, the process is too tactical to operate in real world. In this paper, we propose an assistant approach to make the services granularity right by analyzing business processes that code very rich knowledge about business operations and that have existed long before the emergence of SOC. With our approach, the key services within an enterprise can also be revealed. A case study in this paper demonstrates these features.