Mapping the Enterprise by Tom Graves

Author:Tom Graves
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781484298367
Publisher: Apress

A well-designed service should be able to switch between different capabilities, to cope with different needs such as load balancing and emergency business continuity and disaster recovery, without requiring significant changes in the service’s function interface. To support this, the function should specify the parameters for the respective service-level agreement (SLA), but allow different parameter values to permit variance in the conditions for the SLA to support those different operational needs.

These distinctions between service, capability, and function can sometimes seem confusing at first, in part because function and service may seem to be the same thing when seen from the outside, and also because function and capability can often become merged together in machine design and in some common forms of IT-systems design. Yet we need to note that merging will not apply when services and processes are enacted by real people, or when we move back to the abstract for process or service redesign. Architecturally, it’s important to keep the functions and capabilities separate at a conceptual level and be aware of how and why we merge them in each service implementation.

For ZapaMex, its physical functions include the work surfaces and controls for the shoe-making machines in the factory; its virtual functions include the user interfaces of the applications upstairs in the office. Its composite functions include the entryway for the warehouse, which receives physical goods and the virtual information associated with those goods; the bar-code scanners in the stores that likewise link physical shoes and shoe-boxes with their virtual tracking information for stock management and sales management; and the physical front door of each store, which enables person-to-person relational-asset sales connections and aspirational-asset links to brand, guided by virtual assets such as sales protocols.

See the “Function Content Elements” checklist in the “Into Action” section at the end of the chapter for more on how to apply this to your own organization’s services.

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