This guidebook produced by the Architecture Harmonization (AH) team focuses on guidance for using Business Services (aka Contracts), such as granularity guidelines, implementing Business Services, and Tooling for Business Services and other TM Forum Solution Frameworks. The intended audience for this guidebook is IT managers, architects and developers. It is recognized that due to their respective needs some sections of this book are more technical than others. This guidebook is also intended to be used in conjunction with the open-source tooling software being developed.

Business Services extend Service Oriented ArchitectureA computer systems architectural style for creating and using business processes packaged as servicesA computer systems architectural style for creating and using business processes packaged as services (SOA) to recognize that there is a relationship between specific client and server systems in the application environment. This relationship may be short-lived or long-lived based on the specification for a given Business Services. The relationship may be implemented via point-to-point interactions or via an integration framework, such as hub-and-spoke or an Enterprise Server Bus (ESB). These systems are defined by the Application Framework (aka TAM). SOA is also extended with granularity guidelines that derive from Business Framework (aka eTOM) and finally the information model that is implemented in Business Services is compliant with the Information Framework (aka SID).

We expect that TM Forum will manage real world, pragmatic Business Services based on the definition presented here using tooling so that the standards can be conformance-managed and change-controlled and so that the standards can be applied directly to integrations. The current Business Service meta-model is implemented in the Eclipse tooling as a standard Ecore meta-model.

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