Service Elicitation Method Using Applied Qualitative Research Procedures - Advanced Design Approaches to Emerging Software Systems - page 6

Figure 1. Core categories for an enterprise in service elicitation

Core Categories QSE Process Phases

The Zachman Framework is used as a basis to
discover all of the important aspects of an en-
terprise. John Zachman (1987) developed the
framework in the 1980's and it “represents the
logical structure for identifying and organizing
the descriptive representations that are important
in the management of the enterprises and to the
development of systems”.
The columns defined in the Zachman Frame-
work (1987) act as core categories in QSE analysis.
Relevant elements from the service elicitation
point of view should fall into these categories.
The core categories are further divided into
sub-categories based on the service candidate
type characteristics derived from the existing
approaches discussed above. The predefined
categories are merged in Figure 1, and the service
candidate types and characteristics used are listed
in Table 1.

Development projects implement services, and the
identification of the services is often based on the
analysis for that particular project only. This does
not enforce that the services created are reusable
in following projects. To provide a wider context
for the service candidates, QSE analysis (Figure
2) starts with a conceptual analysis of the business
process descriptions, creating a skeleton for the
service categories of the enterprise.
In the next phase, this skeleton is comple-
mented with details from the project material
describing the use cases being implemented in
the actual project.
In the final phase, the service candidates are
prioritized based on how often similar needs were
identified at the business process level and how
likely they are to be re-used later. Both conceptual
analysis phases are conducted by applying the
basic procedures of the grounded theory (Strauss
& Corbin, 1998) to elicit the basic concepts of