It's not how you do it, it's what you do.
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.
