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Business companies are typically driven by underlying business processes, each referring to a set of activities that are coordinated to achieve a certain business goal. Although there are various definitions for business processes, three keywords have been widely used: , and . A business process always implies an integration of sub-processes, or so-called tasks, each being fulfilled by individual business entities or role players. These tasks are usually organized in an activity flow that specifies a specific integration order for the tasks, either parallel or sequential, guarded by particular conditions and rules. Above all, all tasks and the activity flows serve the same business goal for the entire business process. Summarizing these key points, we define a business process as a structured and measurable set of activities that consume certain resources and are designed to produce the specified output for a particular business requirement.

When most people think of a Grid, a picture comes to mind as an interconnected system for the distribution and sharing of electricity, supported by a network of high-tension cables and power stations. Around 1995, this concept of electronic grid was applied to the field of distributed computing and parallel computing to facilitate sharing of computing power and storage resources over computers on a network. An example definition for Grid and Grid Computing is as follows:

Why enterprise models are important? In general, there are two major reasons: the dynamics nature of service ecosystem that makes the modern business more sophisticated and the requirements from decision makers who ask for better internal communication.

According to Goyette and Lamar, “an enterprise involves an amalgamation of interdependent resources (including people, processes, facilities, and technologies) organized to obtain a strategic advantage in support of mission or business objectives.” One can see that the operational model of a modern enterprise has become significantly different than that of a traditional enterprise. The major cause is that enterprises have to survive unprecedented challenges, such as fluctuating market environments, world-wide competition, ever-changing customer requirements, increasingly demanded collaborations across enterprise boundaries, and disruptive technologies.

With the development of global economy, the business components in enterprises are becoming more complex. At early stage of a business entity, the boundary between business components could be quite clear and simple. However, when the enterprise grows and become large-scale, some of the business components may become overlapped with others, as shown in Fig. 15.1.

Services delivery is not a simple activity, nor is it the duty of a single role. It is the lifecycle of a service provider delivering services to a service customer as committed in a previously signed contract to satisfy the customer. The goal here is to deliver the services in an efficient way with high quality, and secure the service provider’s profit. During the services delivery lifecycle, a service provider would organize relevant resources such as people with necessary skills, using relevant software tools. It goes far more beyond project management by including setting up the IT governance before hand so that the services delivery team could follow a common principle. Common good practices covered by the governance includes asset reuse and compliant with service-oriented architecture (SOA). The lifecycle comprises of services delivery readiness phase, services delivery creation phase and services delivery operation phase.

Over the last several decades, software has become an integral part of all government, military, and business systems. After enabled by SOA and Web services, software systems have become more flexible, extensible, and scalable. When such an SOA-enabled software system is deployed on the Web, any users who have access to the Internet can access the software system and consume the provided services from the Internet. Such a typical scenario represents a rapidly emerging computing and business model: .