One of important factor affecting the success of any SOA initiative is the proper identification of services. I found this to be major gaps with many SOA initiatives. The gaps needs to be addressed upfront otherwise it will lead to major cost escalation down the line which severely impacts the business agility. There are multiple techniques which could be used in identification process. It includes domain decomposition, goal service modeling plus others. Variation oriented analysis could be used along with identification. It will help in identifying the commonality and externalizing the variation. At the same time, existing enterprise assets should be analyzed to find out existing business functionalities which could be possible service candidates. So it is strongly recommended to adopt service identification process
