Background Notification Traffic between Service Domains

The BIAN Business Scenario is well suited to modelling transactional activity associated with a discrete business trigger or event. A second type of information exchange ‘traffic’ occurring between Service Domains is the background coordination of reference information.

Many Service Domains need to reference business information that is governed by other Service Domains in the execution of their role. For example the Service Domain maintaining customer contract details needs to be kept up to date with changes in the reference information for that customer (such as their legal domicile).

Sometimes this information is exchanged within the flow of a transaction as would be revealed in a conventional BIAN Business Scenario – for example checking a customer’s available balance before making a payment. But a significant portion of this type of information exchange occurs in the background based on implied or explicit notification agreements established between Service Domains.

Up to this point the focus of content development within BIAN has been on capturing the transactional exchanges best revealed using business scenario based analysis. As the collection of business scenarios is expanded to provide comprehensive coverage of the main transactional events across the landscape BIAN will develop a second technique for isolating the background reference exchanges required to maintain the referential integrity between Service Domains. This technique will probably leverage an analysis of the business information governance and usage of the Service Domains. The technique and supporting concepts will be included in subsequent versions of the Service Landscape and this ‘How-to Guide.’