From Service Design to Enterprise Architecture:

The Alignment of Service Blueprint and Business Architecture

with Business Process Model and Notation

Pornprom Ateetanan

Sirindhorn International Institute of Technology, Thammasat University,

131 Moo 5, Tiwanont Road, Bangkadi, Pathumthani 12000, Thailand
d5722300257@studentmail.siit.tu.ac.th
Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, 1-1 Asahidai, Ishikawa 923-1211, Japan
pornprom@jaist.ac.jp

Sasiporn Usanavasin

Sirindhorn International Institute of Technology, Thammasat University,

131 Moo 5, Tiwanont Road, Bangkadi, Pathumthani 12000, Thailand
sasiporn.us@siit.tu.ac.th

Kunio Shirahada

Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, 1-1 Asahidai, Ishikawa 923-1211, Japan
kunios@jaist.ac.jp

Thepchai Supnithi

National Electronics and Computer Technology Center,

112 Phahonyothin Road, Khlong Nueng, Khlong Luang, Pathumthani 12120, Thailand
thepchai.supnithi@nectec.or.th

Abstract. In this study, we argue that important of strategy, business, design,

and technology alignment affecting an organization’s ICT enterprise architec-
ture is also reflected by business management perspective and business process
model. Enterprise Architecture (EA) is an effective way to develop current and
future views of the entire enterprise. EA does this primarily by integrating the
processes for strategic, business and technology planning in a way that also in-
tegrates with other business and technology process. The seamless collaborate
and synergize working between technology and non-technology executives and
professionals are needed in the designing and formulating enterprise architec-
ture. Therefore, in order to facilitate this analysis, we propose an approach to
relate EA specified business architecture to business process innovation, mod-
eled using Service blueprint and Business Process Model and Notation
(BPMN). Our approach is accompanied by a method that supports the process
automation of business process model and is illustrated by a Healthcare service
practice as a case study.

À
c Springer International Publishing AG 2017 202
Y. Hara and D. Karagiannis (Eds.): ICServ 2017, LNCS 10371, pp. 202–214, 2017.
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-61240-9_19
From Service Design to Enterprise Architecture 203

Keywords: Business architecture, Business process model, and notation,

Enterprise architecture, Healthcare service practice, Service blueprint,
Service design

1 Introduction

One of the grand challenges that complex enterprises face is to develop a way to ho-
listically see as they are in this current situation and as they want to be in the future.
Enterprises also are looking for the way to formulate business and strategic planning
that aligns information and communication technology (ICT) with their service and/or
business functions that it supports. Since enterprises are facing with two issues which
are
1) System complexity: enterprises were spending more and more money
building ICT systems,
2) Poor business alignment: enterprises get difficult to keep increasingly ex-
pensive ICT systems aligned with business and service need and commu-
nication gap between ICT and Non-ICT executives and professionals.

To make this possible, a technique is necessary for relating business to ICT or linking
service design to enterprise architecture. Therefore, we conclude with the formulation
of our research goals:
1) To relate service design to enterprise architecture through their modeling
formalisms and
2) To explore the relating of business architecture, service blueprint and
business process model and notation (BPMN).
The remainder of this article is organized as follows; section 2 covers some back-
ground on service design, enterprise architecture, and its applications. Then section 3
and 4, we present the proposed approach for relating the two applications into busi-
ness architecture. To demonstrate the method and how we relate business architecture,
service blueprint, and BPMN, in Section 5, we elaborate an example used in
healthcare service practice. We conclude the article with a discussion of the related
work (Section 6), a summary of our contribution and with some issues to future work
(Section 7).

2 Background

As we aim to explore the relationship between service design and enterprise architec-
ture, we first motivate our selection for these two formalisms and then introduce their
concepts and their essential model respectively.
204 P. Ateetanan et al.

2.1 Service design

The design has several definitions, but at its kernel it is the process of transforming
ideas into reality, making abstract thoughts tangible and concrete. Service design (SD)
[1-3] is
1) A multidisciplinary area that helps innovate services by bringing new ide-
as to life through a design thinking approach.
2) Human-centered and holistic, which requires the integration of service sci-
ence, management, engineering, the social sciences, and the arts through
the creation and use of design-based method and tools.
3) All about making services we use usable, easy and desirable.
4) A comprehensive term used in various knowledge domains for solving dif-
ferent problems and it helps enterprises keep competitive and desirable of-
ferings for their customers.
Service design is also a process of creating touchpoints and defining how they interact
with each other and the customer or user. Using design tools and methods can deliver
an understanding of customer behaviors and needs which can enable new solutions to
be developed.
Regarding service research, there are two key methods which are 1) Process-oriented
service design method and 2) Interaction design and software engineering methods.
Thus, service blueprinting and lean consumption come from service management and
use case and activity diagrams from software engineering are applied for the process-
oriented method. Unified Modeling Language (UML) provides useful contributions
for designing interaction processes respectively.

In industrial practice, the design process is divided into four phases: discover, define,
develop and deliver. Tools and methods of each phase [2] can clarify as below
1) Discovery: user journey mapping, user diaries, and user shadowing
2) Define: user personas, brainstorming, and design brief
3) Develop: service blueprinting, experience prototyping and business model
canvas
4) Delivery: Scenarios

The service design methods and techniques summarize above provide partial views
that should be integrated or synergized with other methods to solve the business and
ICT alignment issues in the enterprise.

Service blueprint
Service blueprinting has a long history of service marketing and innovation and is
used in understanding existing services or planning new ones [4]. A service blueprint
is a detailed visual representation of the total service over time – showing the user’s
journey, all the different touchpoints and channels, as well as the behind the scenes
parts of a service that make it work [2].
From Service Design to Enterprise Architecture 205

The main objective of service blueprinting is to create a solid foundation for service
improvement across the service system through enhancement, redesign, or re-
engineering [5].

There are five components of a typical service blueprint as Fig. 1 for a diagram of key
components [6] which are 1) Customer actions, 2) Onstage/Visible contact employee
actions, 3) Backstage/Invisible contact employee actions, 4) Support processes, and
5) Physical evidence.

Service blueprint components

Physical Evidence
Customer actions Line of interaction
Onstage/Visible contact employee actions Line of visibility
Backstage/Invisible contact employee actions Line of internal interaction
Support processes
Fig. 1. Service blueprint components

2.2 Enterprise Architecture

Today, and for the future, EA will help organizations address such difficult terrain by
guiding the design of adaptive and resilient enterprises and their information system
[7]. EA is a practice and emerging field intended to improve the management and
functioning of complex enterprises and their information system [8]. Another com-
monly referenced definition of the term EA was given by the open group, which con-
siders EA as having two meaning depending on the context [9]: EA is
1) a formal description of a system or a detailed plan of the system at com-
ponent level to guide its implementation
2) the structure of components, their inter-relationships, and the principles
and guidelines governing their design and evolution over time
The simplest form of EA, the idea of EA is that of integrating Strategy, Business, and
Technology (EA=S+B+T) which proposed by Bernard, S. [10]. EA is both a man-
agement program and a documentation method that together provides an actionable,
coordinated view of an enterprise’s strategic direction, business services, information
flow, and resource utilization.

In summary, EA [10-12] is
1) the authoritative source for reference documentation and standards, mak-
ing governance more effective
2) repeatable, scalable methodology, making the agile enterprise
3) approach to manage and drive change, in alignment with strategic and
business goals, making the enterprise more successful
206 P. Ateetanan et al.

EA Framework is a discipline or guidelines for defining and maintaining the architec-

ture models, governance and transition initiatives needed to effectively coordinate
disparate groups towards common business and IT goals. It also links an enterprise’s
business strategy to its change programs. There are several independent EA frame-
works the most well-known among them are The Open Group Architecture Frame-
work (TOGAF) [11] and the Zachman framework [12].

2.2.1 Overview of TOGAF

TOGAF [11] is a framework for EA which provides a comprehensive approach to
designing, planning, implementation, and governance of enterprise information archi-
tecture. It provides a high level and holistic approach to design, which is typically
modeled at four levels as shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Architecture types supported by TOGAF

Architecture Description
type / Layer
The business strategy, governance, organization, and key busi-
1. Business ness processes
The structure of an organization’s logical and physical data assets
2. Data and data management resources.
A blueprint for the individual application to be deployed, their
3. Application interaction and their relationships to the core business processes
of the organization.
The logical of hardware and software capabilities that are re-
4. Technology quired to support the development of business, data, and applica-
tion services.

TOGAF uses Architecture Development Method (ADM) for providing a tested and
repeatable process for developing architectures. All of the activities are carried out
within an iterative cycle of continuous architecture definition and realization that
allows enterprises to transform themselves in a controlled manner in response to busi-
ness goals and opportunities. The basic structure of the ADM [13] which consist of
eight phases is shown in Fig 2.

2.2.2 Overview of Zachman framework

The Zachman Framework for Enterprise Architecture (ZFEA) depicted in Fig. 3 as a
6x6 bounded matrix where the columns depict the fundamentals of communication or
primitive interrogatives, namely what, how, when, who, where, and why [8]. The
intersection between the interrogatives and the transformations in the ZFEA are the
framework classifications and primitive elements. Each cell in the ZFEA is a normal-
ized fact so that no one fact can show up in more than one cell. The architecture of an
enterprise is the total set of intersections between the abstractions and the perspective
and the enterprise itself is the implementation, depicted in the framework as row six.
From Service Design to Enterprise Architecture 207

Fig. 2. Architecture Development Cycle

As Fig. 3, the Zachman Framework has six perspectives and six dimensions. The six
perspectives are 1) Scope (Planner’s perspective), 2) Enterprise model (Owner’s per-
spective), 3) System model (Designer’s perspective), 4) Technology model (Builder’s
perspective), 5) Detailed model (Subcontractor’s perspective), and 6) Functional rep-
resentations (Operator’s perspective). Another six dimensions are 1) Data (What?), 2)
Function (How?), 3) Network (Where?), 4) People (Who?), 5) Time (When?), and 6)
Motivation (Why?).

2.3 Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN)

BPMN [14] is a business process modeling standard and certainly the language most
used for diagrammatically representing process [15]. It provides a standard business
process model notation for describing and analyzing the business process in detail. It
consists of five types of elements: flow, data, artifact, swimlane and connector for
visually business processes as shown in Table 2.
208 P. Ateetanan et al.

Fig. 3. The Zachman Framework [12]

Table 2. Elements of BPMN

Element Description
Flow business process activities, tasks, events, and gateways
Data business data objects and data stores
Artefact business process-related textual descriptions, annotations and
groups
Swimlane business process orchestration and choreography patterns by
using pool and lane elements
Connector the association, message flow and sequence flow between differ-
ent elements

3 Relating Service Blueprint (SB) and Business Process Model

and Notation (BPMN)

The relationship of SB and BPMN can be clarified as below [16]

1) Service blueprinting processes are similar to BPMN's idea of swimlanes. In
service blueprint, swimlanes separate customer actions, customer facing em-
ployees’ actions and functions, and backstage functions, actors, and infor-
From Service Design to Enterprise Architecture 209

mation systems, thereby effectively mandating certain swimlanes for the

purpose of analyzing points of contact between the enterprise and a custom-
er.
2) Service blueprinting also intentionally differentiates between different func-
tional areas and roles within each area to highlight and IT systems.
3) BPMN and service blueprinting has physical evidence as front-stage indica-
tors to customers of service quality and to constrain customer actions by
carefully designing the servicescape.

In comparison, service blueprinting has a higher capacity to represent user experience

and is a suitable process modeling formalism to design customer-provider interface.
BPMN can be used when the practitioners aim to depict organizational department,
systems, and roles that involved in service delivery process in detail. BPMN has the
capability to represent any parts of the service provider organization and their interac-
tion with the customer [4].

Organizational and informational views of BPMN make a preferable modeling ap-

proach for information systems and business analyst. BPMN is now applied in the
healthcare sector; representing kidney transplantation process in Brazil [15]. It is evi-
dence that service design and ICT can enhance the effective governance for public
sectors’ service delivery.

4 The relationship among Business Architecture (BA) layer of

Enterprise architecture, Service blueprint and Business
Process Model and Notation.

The cross-disciplinary research and practice of BA, SD, and BPMN are applied. Re-
garding BA of EA and TOGAF as shown in Fig. 2, We can look at Phase B: Business
architecture, it shows the fundamental organization of a business, embodied in 1) its
business processes and people, 2) their relationships to each other and the environ-
ment, and 3) the principles governing its design and evolution. It also shows how the
organization meets its business goals with the business process. In term of contents,
Phase B presents 1) Organization structure, 2) Business goals and objectives, 3) Busi-
ness functions, 4) Business services, 5) Business processes, 6) Business roles and 7)
Correlation of organization and functions

For Zachman Framework as Fig. 3, row 2 represents enterprise model in owner’s

view which focuses on business process models. The main outcomes are 1) business
process models, 2) Business function allocation, and 3) Elimination of function over-
lap and ambiguity. For combination of row and column, we can describe as follows:
1) Motivation/Why: policies, procedures, and standards for each process, 2) Func-
tion/How: Business processes, 3) Data/What: Business data, 4) People/Who: Roles
and responsibilities in each process, 5) Network/Where: locations related to each
process and 6) Time/When: events for each process and sequencing of integration and
210 P. Ateetanan et al.

process improvements. In common area of TOGAF and Zachman framework, we

found that business process change is involved in Phase B of TOGAF-ADM and in
Row 2: enterprise model of Zachman framework.

In service design perspective, Service blueprinting visually depict steps in a service

delivery process [17]. The aim of service blueprinting is usually an improved under-
standing of a service delivery system. Service blueprinting support business process
modeling that mapping internal processes to service process can be done. Then the
Business Process Innovation is one of the key capabilities of the value creation sys-
tem. The modeling of business processes has become a focused aspect in how busi-
ness understands and collaborates about their processes. Business architecture (layer)
of Enterprise architecture can be modeled in terms of a number if views such as or-
ganization view, business capability view and business process view [18]. Three ap-
proaches are business architecture, service blueprint and Business Process Model and
Notation (BPMN). Service blueprinting supports customer service processes and
BPMN supports understand an enterprise’s processes with particular focus on how
ICT supports process automation.

Although, the scope of BPMN is strictly limited to the modeling of business process-
es, and the business strategy, organizational structure, functional breakdowns, data,
information, and rules models [18] are out of scope. We can use BPMN for modeling
each business process details including actor/rules in process swimlanes and pools.
Thus, this approach can fulfill the formation of EA starts from Business architecture
by illustrating business process model. Inclusion, Business process modeling can
support the reinventing business processes, modernizing, re-imagining and digitizing
business enterprise. A business process is the key linking point between arena of ser-
vice design and enterprise architecture which focus on business architecture.

5 Case study: Outpatient department service of public hospital

To demonstrate the usage of the method described in the previous section, we use an
example case in healthcare practice with Thai public general hospital. Referring to the
Hospital Management System, there are four main systems which are 1) service de-
livery system, 2) supportive service system, 3) development system and 4) Admin-
istration system. The first system, Service system has another four subsystems which
consist of 1) Emergency medical service (ER), 2) Outpatient department (OPD) ser-
vice, 3) Inpatient department (IPD) service and 4) Progressive service. Each
subsystem has workflow process since the beginning of the first entry until exit from
the system.

We will use the Outpatient department (OPD) service of the public general hospital as
the case. From the point of medical provider, there are these following processes; 1)
Administrative and documentary services, 2) pre-meet medical doctor services, 3)
medical treatment, 4) post-meet medical doctor, 5) medical sciences laboratory ser-
From Service Design to Enterprise Architecture 211

vices, 6) X-ray services, 7) refer to another clinic, 8) admit services, 9) Refer to other
hospital and 10) Pharmacy and payment services. It has the advantage of being famil-
iar and realistic. As patient/customer-centered, service blueprint of OPD is illustrated
in Fig 4.

Fig. 4. Service blueprint of OPD service

Service blueprinting as an appropriate method when an enterprise has a customer-

centric view toward its service delivery process [4]. An enterprise can utilize service
blueprints to bundle a customer focus across the enterprise and enable customer-
oriented business practices. Many enterprises have successfully used service blue-
printing to increase customer satisfaction and repeat business.

Fig. 5 shows a BPMN diagram of the OPD service that we used in the service blue-
printing section. BPMN can be used when the practitioners aim to depict systems and
roles that are involved in service delivery process in detail. BPMN can make organi-
zational and informational views as a preferable modeling approach for information
system analysts, business analysts, and professionals.
212 P. Ateetanan et al.

Fig. 5. BPMN Diagram of OPD service

6 Discussion

Although, the idea of relating service design and enterprise architecture through ser-
vice blueprint and business architecture with BPMN seems to be quite justified and
adopted for ICT and Non-ICT executives and practitioners in ICT and business area.
EA represents a means for achieving coherency and consistency of a business system
for relating strategic elements with business processes [9], for relating the business
mission and goals with ICT mission and goals, and for ensuring more informed deci-
sions about important topics, such as integration with internal and external infor-
mation systems and business process optimization.
From Service Design to Enterprise Architecture 213

The common language for communicating with ICT and Non-ICT executives and
practitioners are needed, to bridge the capabilities gap and enhance competitiveness
from their end. Service design tool by service blueprint from the Non-ICT end is se-
lected and align with modeling language by BPMN to fulfill the business process in
the business architecture of EA. The ICT tool's clean process modeling engages busi-
ness and IT from the start with service blueprint concept. Business people are not
discouraged as they can visualize the process, make changes and drive the design.
Other tools are targeted at developers so they give IT the full control. The business
process model is designed to process for value co-creation with customer and stake-
holder and can produce good customer experience.

Business process modeling in Business architecture layer is the business process in-
novation which is one of the key capabilities within the value co-creation approach. It
is the approach to reinventing business processes to be modernized, re-imagined, and
business digitized. The further study, beyond process modeling, enterprises can turn
their process maps into running process applications without programming by ad-
vanced software tools and/or with Artificial Intelligence tools.

7 Conclusion

The main contribution of this study is first, we have related the service blueprint and
BPMN for business process modeling to business architecture layer of enterprise ar-
chitecture framework. Second, we have elaborated the method by a case study of
healthcare service practice. We also foresee possibility to extend this study. Future
work may concern on 1) the approach of digital transformation in the enterprise
through EA and 2) the alignment of service design tools with other enterprise archi-
tecture layer. Finally, as it can be seen, the linking method presented in this study has
been realized using an existing tool that supports business architecture and service
design with service blueprinting. However, evaluating the used method is still work in
progress.

Acknowledgements

This research was partially supported by Japan Advanced Institute of Science and
Technology (JAIST), Japan, the Center of Excellence in Intelligent Informatics,
Speech and Language Technology and Service Innovation (CILS) and by NRU grant
at Sirindhorn International Institute of Technology (SIIT), Thammasat University and
National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (NECTEC), Thailand.
 214 P. Ateetanan et al.

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