Aligning a Service Provisioning Model of a Service-Oriented System with the ITIL v.3 Life Cycle

Bringing together the ICT and the business layer of a service-oriented system (SoS) remains a great challenge. Few papers tackle the management of SoS from the business and organizational point of view. One solution is to use the well-known ITIL v.3 framework. The latter enables to transform the organization into a service-oriented organizational which focuses on the value provided to the service customers. In this paper, we align the steps of the service provisioning model with the ITIL v.3 processes. The alignment proposed should help organizations and IT teams to integrate their ICT layer, represented by the SoS, and their business layer, represented by ITIL v.3. One main advantage of this combined use of ITIL and a SoS is the full service orientation of the company.Comment: This document is the technical work of a conference paper submitted to the International Conference on Exploring Service Science 1.5 (IESS 2015

The i* framework for goal-oriented modeling

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39417-6i* is a widespread framework in the software engineering field that supports goal-oriented modeling of socio-technical systems and organizations. At its heart lies a language offering concepts such as actor, dependency, goal and decomposition. i* models resemble a network of interconnected, autonomous, collaborative and dependable strategic actors. Around this language, several analysis techniques have emerged, e.g. goal satisfaction analysis and metrics computation. In this work, we present a consolidated version of the i* language based on the most adopted versions of the language. We define the main constructs of the language and we articulate them in the form of a metamodel. Then, we implement this version and a concrete technique, goal satisfaction analys is based on goal propagation, using ADOxx. Throughout the chapter, we used an example based on open source software adoption to illustrate the concepts and test the implementation.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Deferred Action: Theoretical model of process architecture design for emergent business processes

E-Business modelling and ebusiness systems development assumes fixed company resources, structures, and business processes. Empirical and theoretical evidence suggests that company resources and structures are emergent rather than fixed. Planning business activity in emergent contexts requires flexible ebusiness models based on better management theories and models . This paper builds and proposes a theoretical model of ebusiness systems capable of catering for emergent factors that affect business processes. Drawing on development of theories of the ‘action and design’class the Theory of Deferred Action is invoked as the base theory for the theoretical model. A theoretical model of flexible process architecture is presented by identifying its core components and their relationships, and then illustrated with exemplar flexible process architectures capable of responding to emergent factors. Managerial implications of the model are considered and the model’s generic applicability is discussed

Organization of Multi-Agent Systems: An Overview

In complex, open, and heterogeneous environments, agents must be able to reorganize towards the most appropriate organizations to adapt unpredictable environment changes within Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). Types of reorganization can be seen from two different levels. The individual agents level (micro-level) in which an agent changes its behaviors and interactions with other agents to adapt its local environment. And the organizational level (macro-level) in which the whole system changes it structure by adding or removing agents. This chapter is dedicated to overview different aspects of what is called MAS Organization including its motivations, paradigms, models, and techniques adopted for statically or dynamically organizing agents in MAS.Comment: 12 page

Learning more from crossing levels: Investigating agility at three levels of the organization

Scholars have tried to explain how organizations can build agile teams by only looking at one level of analysis. We argue in this short paper that lessons can be learned from organizational science results explaining variance on three different abstraction levels of organizations. We suggest agility needs to be explained from organizational (macro), the team (meso), and individual (micro) levels to provide useful and actionable guidelines to practitioners. We are currently designing such studies and hope that they will eventually result in validated measurements that can be used to prevent companies from investing in the wrong areas when trying to move towards more agility