Towards a Methodology for Service Construction

All large vendors of standard business software have announced to move to service oriented architecture. They claim benefits for their customers with regard to agility and openness. In contrast to the design of software services which has been a focus of research in the computer science community in recent years, the design of enterprise services has not been addressed as much by the information systems research community. This paper outlines a research program on the design of enterprise services. The necessity of different service understandings on different layers of enterprise architecture is shown, conceptual foundations for the design of enterprise services are presented, and first results of developing a method for enterprise service design are proposed