05 December 2010

Sometimes it is difficult to explain things that appear to be extremely simple. I guess this is where tacit knowledge comes into the picture. It may very well be that service orientation falls into this category.

Let’s say that I wanted to pay a bill 50 years ago by sending my creditor a cheque by mail. I also expect a letter in reply stating that my cheque has been received. I firstly place my cheque, along with some relevant information, in an envelope and write the address of the creditor to send the mail to on the front. I could also write the return address on the back. I would need to add a stamp to the envelope to demonstrate payment of the requested service. Next I would place the letter envelope in a post box. If everything is in order I can reasonably expect the recipient to receive the letter. I can assume that the post office will provide the expected _service. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the service will be provided as expected. There are a number of things that could go wrong but we’ll hope for the best. So service orientation has been around for a while.

I, as the user of the mail system, see a very coarse-grained service, Within the post office there are many different services of varying granularity (some quite fine-grained) provided by different departments.

Now, although we expect a response from the creditor I am pretty sure that very few people will run off to their own post box and expect the reply to pop in; nor will they wait for the response. It is assumed that it will take a couple of days.

Let’s jump back to the present and send an e-mail to a creditor. Once again, we expect a reply but we will not be watching our e-mail client application all day to see when it comes in. Again we expect some time to pass but hopefully not a couple of days. So our service will be completed eventually.

On the other hand some services are expected to be completed immediately. It depends on how consistent our information needs to be at any one time. For instance, I have a bank account with no overdraft facility. I draw my last ZAR100 from an ATM. Since my wife may draw money using the same account from another ATM I guess that bank would prefer that she not draw _“the last ZAR100” also. So the first transaction would block the second until it has been updated after which the second would fail since there would be insufficient funds. There may be no place for eventual consistency here. I say ‘may’ because the bank could decide to allow such behaviour and simply impose penalties.