Outsourcing service provision through step-wise transformation

Component-based development principles promise a flexible approach to system design and implementation. In particular service-based techniques provide a computational model whereby the physical location of components makes no difference to the overall system behaviour. Economic business models for organisations have led to outsourced services as an attractive way of reducing costs and allowing a business to focus on its key processes. In the context of business and IT alignment, this raises a problem of how to transform an organization and its enterprise systems so that it can take advantage of an external service, given that in most cases the existing processes will be embedded in many places across the organisation. This paper addresses this problem by proposing a simple component-based simulation language together with transformation rules that can be used to incrementally isolate a service as an external component.