What Are Service Genres?
A Service Genre is a collection of related behaviours describing an abstract capability that supports a business process. It represents an interoperability point or interface to a set of individual activities or capabilities - actions that would be needed to carry out the process.
While Service Genres convey the broad essence of the set of activities, abstractly describing the different capabilities that a service of that type might provide, they are not intended to be used to specify the detail required for an implementation of the service. Rather, Service Genres are only intended to convey the key concepts of a grouping of related services. It is the Service Expressions that are implemented to develop the Applications that actually provide the service. (If you need only a portion of the total functionality of the Service Genre, implement just those parts that you need from the Service Expressions.)
In practice, Service Genres are abstracted from Service Usage Models or refactored from existing Service Genres or CORE SUMs based on the processes they need to support. Service Genres are by definition generic, so they can easily be part of more than one Service Usage Model or CORE SUM.
There is no set process for defining a Service Genre, but it may include thinking about how the service's behaviours might be bound to specific technologies as Service Expressions, or it might be created by examining related existing Service Expressions. Regardless of the back-and-forth process used to fully define a Service Genre, ultimately Service Expressions are 'derivatives' of a Service Genre.
Illustrative Example
Consider a company that is in the business of shipping packages. An analysis of the steps that have to occur between the shipper, the sender and recipient would reveal a myriad of individual actions related to getting the package from point A to point B. If you organize these actions into logical groups or sets of activities, you will have identified the key business processes.
The services that you would need to support these processes are the Service Genres: services such as transferring the package to the shipper, delivering the package, tracking the location, etc. The example lists five Service Genres and the related groups of Behaviours.
|
Service Genres |
Behaviours |
Service Expressions |
Preparing Bill of Lading/
Shipping instructions |
Select sender
Select recipient
Select delivery method (standard, express)
Select payment
Select insurance
Select customs info |
Online form
Paper form prepared by sender
Paper form prepared by shipper
|
|
Transfer to shipper |
Ingest into delivery system
Track pickup/Notify sender
Track pickup/Notify recipient |
Drop box
Counter
Home pickup
Business pickup |
|
Delivery |
Track delivery/Notify sender
Track delivery/Notify recipient
Delivery release |
Pickup from shipper
Delivery to address by truck
Delivery to address by postal carrier |
|
Tracking/Alert |
Track status |
Notify (push email)
Check status (lookup) |
|
Delivery confirmation |
Send confirmation |
Electronic
Post |
The Service Expressions describe the binding of these behaviours to specific technology choices. In this example, the Service Genre “Delivery” could in practice use different ways (Service Expressions) to achieve “Delivery”.