Moving from a heterogeneous IT landscape with a set of legacy applications to a more flexible SOA-based architecture is a major strategic concern for many large organizations. Key drivers are to build a robust, easy-to-maintain and cost-efficient architecture. Service identification is a key task in this context, and it must cope with the inherent complexity of existing IT systems and their constant evolution. In this paper we describe the CAPABILITY-BASED SERVICE pattern that identifies services and defines the service model based on a model of business capabilities. Business capabilities describe what an enterprise does, not how something is done in the enterprise. Service identification based on business capabilities is an alternative to process-based service identification, especially useful in cases where process modeling is not feasible, for instance, because of budget or time limitations or where processes are not stable enough over time.

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