Service identification of a collaborative design workflow in a dynamically changing environment

In order to adapt to a dynamically changing world, business organization focuses on its core competencies and collaborates with other companies to develop new products. The information systems in this kind of enterprises need to quickly response to the changes and dynamically change workflows accordingly. This paper proposed a systematic way to deal with designing a collaborative design workflow built upon the SOA reference model. The most critical part is to identify services in the model, and this paper proposes and applies several techniques to generate proper services for collaborative design. These services could fulfill the business requirements, they were aligned to the information technology, and they could be developed in later stage or be mapped to associated service components. A real world case was investigated to identify services for collaborative design workflow, and some services were derived by using multiple complimentary analyses. In such a case, the workflow of a collaborative design will be flexible for modifications as the environment changes.