As a US holiday, today has long been designated as "clean my office" day.  Since I am often on the road, my office is my home study and over time, a number of papers, notes, mail, and computer parts seems to somehow accumulate (I swear sometimes these things must be breeding) to the point that I am left with nothing more than a patch of surface area on my desk to work with.  I probably have disposaphobia because I carefully scrutinize every scrap of paper or item before throwing it away - and of course when in doubt it stays clear of the trash bag.  Inevitably, I will find some long lost note or article I was looking for weeks prior. 

One of the things I came across this time is quite pertinent - thoughts on how to define SLE's and SLA's in the MSE to accommodate business capabilities and processes.  Between vacation and year end activities over the last several weeks, I have been working out just how to represent capabilities in our service model.  In this context, capabilities can be thought of as business-level services that could be standalone or steps of a process.  Of course a process itself could be represented as a capability, which starts to demonstrate some of the complexity that needs to be represented by the service model.  Examples of capabilities would be "Get Customer" or "Process Order".  I'm currently viewing these as logical representations of one or more operations in the MSE.  The "or more" perspective comes from seeing that you could have multiple interfaces that represent functions that are very similar.  For example, you could get a customer by name or by an account number.  The response could also vary from simply a name to a complete set of addresses and order history.  These would be different operations and yet the same capability from the perspective of a business owner. 

There is much that has to be learned about how this is best modeled and surfaced to users via the UI.  For now, we are going to extend the MSE UI to this "3rd layer" of the model to allow business analysts to define capabilities that an architect would then map to the operation items.  That will at least give us a palette with which to play with and learn from.  Should be fun!  Certainly moreso than cleaning my office, which I should now get back to.