Realising Business Benefit with Service Orientation

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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