Business Services

Business services are the supporting activities that enable a business to function. These activities are not directly linked to the production of a physical product and therefore do not result in any tangible output. They include IT services, banking services and insurance services to name but a few. These specialised businesses are the backbone of many industries worldwide.

All companies depend on specialised business services. This is because they are very valuable to them and are usually very expensive. In the case of a bank, their business services involve accepting payments through various methods including e-banking, taking checks and providing credit to a business. Similarly, a insurance company offers a range of insurance cover for goods and property.

Another important category of business service involves outsourcing services to other firms. This can be done because it is often cheaper and more efficient than performing the work in-house. This also allows a company to focus on its core business and leaves non-core activities to the service providers.

A business-oriented approach to service composition provides a mechanism to structure automated logic in such a way that it can be readily re-modeled in response to changing business requirements. This enables service-oriented architecture (SOA) to be a key driver for business agility. In practice, this is achieved by abstracting process logic from the underlying application orchestration and expressing it in a manner that can be reused by other applications. This is called a service blueprint.