Service Commitments and Capabilities across the ArchiMate Architectural Layers

Abstract

ArchiMate is a widely adopted enterprise architecture modeling language that includes the "service" construct as a key structuring element across its enterprise layers. A previous analysis of the use of this construct within ArchiMate's business layer concluded that it fails to represent some important social aspects associated with the dynamics of service relations, which led to recommendations for improvements in the form of modeling patterns with focus on the business layer of ArchiMate. In this paper, we extend that analysis to consider also service relations in the application and technology layers. We explore the importance of addressing two complementary views for service modeling: the capability-based and the commitment-based views. As a result, a more comprehensive modeling strategy for service relations in ArchiMate is proposed; this strategy is able to reflect business models that employ the service notion, including software-as-a-service (S aaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). We use a reference ontology for services (UFO-S) to support our analysis.