Towards Construction of Situational Methods for Service Identification

The service-oriented paradigm plays an increasingly significant role in designing and governing IT architectures in organizations. The identification of services belongs to the most important parts of the service management lifecycle and is essential for the successful implementation of service-oriented architectures (SOA). However, existing methods for service identification mostly ignore situation-specific factors for such projects. Situational method engineering can be used to design a meta method to support the development of situation-specific methods for service identification. Based on a literature review and two case studies, this paper elaborates on context factors and SOA implementation goals being constituting elements of situations. These situations are tailored to the service identification domain. Applying this meta method in concrete project situations will help to engineer appropriate methods for service identification.