Realising Business Benefit with Service Orientation
I have been thinking about Services and how Services can have tangible business benefits.
First of all I began by thinking about project milestones and a specific realisable business benefit per milestone. The following benefits came to mind:
- Improved customer retention
- Can be used to maintain a SLA (usage, health etc)
- Improved customer Satisfaction
- Can be used to attribute services and more important than others
- Reduced operating cost
- Can extend functionality to other areas of business or aggregated to prform higher level functions
- Allows change of behaviour through configuration or at deployment time
- Increased revenue
- Billing per service
- Future sales
- Can open existing functionality to new channels in the business
- Reduces risk
- Improved quality through isolated service automated testing
- Services can encapsulate complicated and often hard to understand and maintain code
- Increases legal compliance
- Services can be monitored and reported upon
- Faster net product value
- Can be used to compare previous value with new value (and swap at equitable point)
There is a great slide from the www.netfx3.com site introduction to WCF found here
Function oriented: Built to last, prolonged development cycles, tightly coupled, application silos
Process oriented: Build for change, incrementally built and deployed, loosely coupled, connected systems
and the business drivers: Agility, Adapatability and Total Cost of Ownership