Towards a Service-Oriented Enterprise: The Design of a Cloud Business Integration Platform in a Medium-Sized Manufacturing Enterprise

This case study research followed the two-year transition of a medium-sized manufacturing firm towards a service-oriented enterprise. A service-oriented enterprise is an emerging architecture of the firm that leverages the paradigm of services computing to integrate the capabilities of the firm with the complementary competencies of business partners to offer customers with value-added products and services. Design science research in information systems was employed to pursue the primary design of a cloud business integration platform to enable the secondary design of multi-enterprise business processes to enable the dynamic and effective integration of business partner capabilities with those of the enterprise. The results from the study received industry acclaim for the designed solutions innovativeness and business results in the case study environment. The research makes contributions to the IT practitioner and scholarly knowledge base by providing insight into key constructs associated with service-oriented design and deployment of a cloud enterprise architecture and cloud intermediation model to achieve business results. The study demonstrated how an outside-in service-oriented architecture adoption pattern and cloud computing model enabled a medium-sized manufacturing enterprise to focus on a comprehensive approach to business partner integration and collaboration. The cloud integration platform has enabled a range of secondary designs that leveraged business services to orchestrate inter-enterprise business processes for choreography into service systems and networks for the purposes of value creation. The study results demonstrated enhanced levels of business process agility enabled by the cloud platform leading to secondary designs of transactional, differentiated, innovative, and improvisational business processes. The study provides a foundation for future scholarly research on the role of cloud integration platforms in enterprise computing and the increased importance of service-oriented secondary designs to exploit cloud platforms for sustained business performance

Global dynamic E-marketplaces, and their role in the internet-based economy

Collaboration capabilities are what will most probably create the gap between winners and losers in business-to-business (B2B) commerce. In this context, the electronic marketplace (EM) comes as a medium for trade and collaboration, and a common entry point where partners can share business processes and adopt a decentralized business model fuelled by market evolution. The thesis illustrates the advantages of collaborative business and presents the information technologies that support it. The purpose of this thesis is to educate both the author and the reader on the technology and infrastructure that supports collaborative business and to posit that among the three major information technology infrastructures that enable B2B commerce, the EM model provides significant advantages for individual companies and industries compared to Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Peer-to-Peer (P2P). The thesis identifies key tools and value-added services EM\u27s should provide their participants to meet the requirements of modern companies and the Internet-based economy. Finally, the thesis suggests potential impacts of EM\u27s on the modern business ecosystem