Concepts for service-oriented business thinking

As businesses scramble to adopt and implement Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) it is imperative that service-oriented thinking become an integral part of the business itself. We motivate the key concepts for service-oriented business thinking through a range of examples that give a flavor of a range of businesses. In this paper we establish three key concepts - Service Agreement, Service Transaction and Service Function. These concepts are discussed in depth and are related to our ongoing work in the area of modeling business services. © 2006 IEEE.