Or, 'Delivering Software plus Services (S+S)'

A while ago a small group of people in Microsoft started an incubation project code named ‘Motion’.  Principally Motion is a methodology that establishes *what* a business does, and not how it does it.  It does this by following a well defined methodology.  It so happens that these capabilities, things that describe what the business does, map quite nicely on to what services a company might need to run its business.

The project has moved on.  Now Microsoft Consultancy Services have a formal offering that not only analyses a business’s capabilities, but creates the relevant models that that describe the business.  These models are exposed in Visual Studio.  In other words, a customer gets their business modeled in Visual Studio which they can start developing against.

I think this is a fantastic product, and offers a business a good accelerator into a service based architecture.  It also offers good value as every business has over 70% of the same services, meaning that capabilities and models that Services already have can be reused.  Incidentally an average business has between 1000 and 2000 capabilities.  This results in a huge delivery for the customer in a short timeframe and at a fraction of the cost.