Business Ecology Initiative & Service-Oriented Solution

At a glance, the question in the post title is odd - of cause, it is the service. At the second thought... this answer seems incorrect.

Imagine an organisation that has its own IT. In many cases, the IT, with its computers, sits aside from the business somewhere in the cheap location and on the rented properties. Cloud Computing offers outsourcing (renting) the computers and SaaS talks about renting even the IT's applications. Does the business own the IT in such situations?

The same is with business services in service-oriented world. The fundamental statements are:

• business service owns business meta-data model of data it uses
• business service does not concern where data comes from until the data fits into the service's business meta-data model
• business service does not own data it uses
• business service does not own access to data stores/feeds
• business service does not own the data stores/feeds
• business service uses specialised data services to obtain data
• business service does not manage data it uses as well as data stores
• data that business service uses is owned by the data stores/feeds
• organisation has to construct and maintain shared business data model (centralised or distributed)
• each business service can have its own view on the shared business data model ( like a shared sub-model) and free to interpret data according to the business rules the service implements

I believe that the power of service orientation is in ability to support business efficiency via flexibility in adopting business changes. One of the most effective adoption techniques is composability offered by services. Majority of business changes may be addressed via new business service compositions. That is, service-oriented (SO) solution is a hierarchy of services and service compositions. At the bottom of this hierarchy, there are self-contained autonomous business services.

The autonomous business services have to demonstrate exceptional flexibility in adopting changes internally and addressing them externally by participating in service compositions. If such service owns data stored in the shared data stores operating under foreign or independent ownership, you can say 'good buy' to the service flexibility.

The opinion that the service has to manage the data it uses and even own the data sources where the used data are stored is very popular. However, the ownership of resources is typical application-oriented approach: applications try to occupy and own all possible entities they depend on at run-time. Service-oriented approach is based on separation of concerns and responsibilities placed on the top of service competition on the QoS arena. This is why I say that the business service does not care where data comes from and how it is stored whilst offered data can fit into business data meta-model owned by the service.

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