Understanding Business Services in TOGAF: Definitions, Identification, and Modeling

In the TOGAF 9.1 meta‑model the central box is labeled “Business Service”. The standard defines a business service as “a capability supported by an explicitly defined interface and governed by the organization”.

Although business capabilities help identify needed services for agility, the definition does not explain the concrete meaning or how to recognise them. In a Service‑Oriented Architecture (SOA) a service is a black‑box whose implementation is hidden behind a standard interface.

The TOGAF specification further describes a service as “a logical representation of a repeatable business activity that produces a specified output”, and lists three characteristics: it is independent, can be composed with other business services, and is a “black‑box” to the consumer.

ArchiMate 2.1 adds that a business process, function or interaction may be used to realise a business service, but still leaves the exact nature of a business service open.

Examples illustrate how business services are modelled in practice. In an insurance scenario, a “Customer Contract Creation” service supports the “Contract Management” function and is accessed by sales staff. In a second insurance example, the “Insurance Claim Acceptance” service supports the “Claim Management” function. In a banking scenario, services such as “Cash Withdrawal/Deposit” are linked to products like checking, savings, overdraft and credit‑card accounts and to delivery channels (ATM, kiosk, online, mobile, branch).

Identifying business services can start from the process landscape. By analysing processes at different abstraction levels (descriptive, analytical/operational, executable) and applying a top‑down approach, candidate services are extracted from higher‑level aggregates and refined at lower‑level granularity, helping to expose functional redundancy.

The service model extends the TOGAF meta‑model to relate business services to Information System (IS) services, SOA services and ITIL services. IS services are described as “the automated elements of a business service”. SOA services are software components that expose functionality via interfaces, while ITIL services are customer‑facing or supporting services defined in service‑level agreements.

Figures (included as images) illustrate the extended meta‑model showing dependencies among functions, processes, products, business services, IS services, SOA services and ITIL services, and how they can be layered under the TOGAF architecture domains.

From an enterprise‑architecture or ITSM perspective, business services are delivered to customers to satisfy their needs, either by supporting business processes directly or by underpinning products and applications.