A consolidated approach for service analysis

Dynamic market conditions and changes in customer demand are the major reasons why companies adapt the concepts behind service-orientation. Service-orientation on the business level enables organisations to expose and offer certain operations as business services to their business partners to facilitate on-demand collaboration opportunities. To support the responsiveness and agility of such an on-demand organisation, service-orientation on the technical level fosters the utilisation of software services. These software services encapsulate and expose application functionalities that can be reused and composed based on the business needs to react on changes in the environment. Although the benefits of service orientation are prevalent in literature, comprehensive approaches to identify and analyse business and software services are missing. This thesis represents a major effort to analyse and consolidate relevant approaches for service analysis. Based on an extensive literature review of 30 relevant, existing service analysis approaches, a study is conducted to evaluate these approaches. The finding of the analysis is that none of the existing approaches is comprehensive enough to provide a guideline for an organisation to identify and analyse business and software services. However, based on the analysis of the approaches and additional sources, an integrated, comprehensive approach for service analysis is proposed that combines the strengths of the existing approaches, as well as extends and adapts certain aspects that are of importance for an organisation in order to provide a comprehensive guideline for service analysis. The contribution to theory and practice is significant. Firstly, several authors stated that a comprehensive approach for service analysis is missing and thus a research gap exists which this thesis is attempting to fill. Secondly, this approach will provide an organisation with a methodology to not only understand and document its existing capability from a service perspective, but more importantly, to identify potential new services that may be provided on the business and technical levels.