The result of a Business Transformation Analysis is often a broad model of the entire business while focusing deeply on critical competencies and business components. The RUP/SOMA process may be focused on one of the following scopes:

• Broad transformation of the business to an SOA, re-engineering all core systems into core and composite services in support of agile business processes.
• Transformation of a key business component into a set of IT services.
• Addition of new services to implement new capabilities in support of an existing business process.

Additionally, the techniques here may also be applied to Infrastructure Services, those that are entirely defined and implemented in support of IT requirements, in which case the need will not be traced back to the work products from Business Transformation Analysis.

The purpose of this reference process is to provide the core activities and tasks for completing a SOA project. While it reuses aspects from core RUP and RUP Business Modeling, this reference process brings together only those aspects specific to SOA development. The intent is to apply this reference process in an iterative manner, see the RUP Classic delivery process for an example of such an application.

This process delivers the combined tasks, techniques and guidance from RUP/SOA and IBM Global Business Services SOMA method. The delivery process is intended to focus the reader only on those aspects core to a SOA project, and while there may be additional techniques in the rest of RUP which are useful, the delivery process brings to the fore the critical elements.

The four phases described in this delivery process are intended to be iterative in themselves as well as an assumption that multiple iterations of the overall process take place. For example, given a complete set of artifacts from the Business Transformation Analysis phase it may be that the multiple identification and specification phases are executed to divide up the business models and allow each identification iteration to deal with a subset (and the same for the specification of the identified services).