A METHOD FOR CONTEXT MODELLING IN CAPABILITY MANAGEMENT

Enterprises exist in the context of their dynamically changing environment, which has a strong impact on service design and delivery. Within areas such as ambient intelligence or robotics, most relevant context has a physical nature. However, the context of an enterprise requires a different conceptual-ization of context awareness. Beyond physical context, enterprises need to be aware of their market, legal and social context. Moreover, in order to monitor context and configure services systematically, we need a context modelling method that is integrated within enterprise modelling and supports in-formation and communication technology (ICT) engineering and runtime. The work in this paper has been performed as part of developing Capability Driven Development (CDD), a new paradigm for ICT design where services are customised on the basis of the essential business capabilities and deliv-ery is adjusted according to the current context. The contributions of the paper are (i) the investiga-tion of industrial needs for context modelling, (ii) eCoM, a context modelling method for enterprise ICT addressing such needs, iii) application of the method in an industrial use case and (iv) the evolu-tion of eCoM based on various evaluation cycles by means of Framework for Evaluation in Design Science Research (FEDS)

A capability-based context modelling method to enhance digital service flexibility

The thesis argues that the enterprises need to understand their application context to be able to offer flexible digital services. Furthermore, after analysing the state of research in Services Science, it concludes that different roles with varying backgrounds participate to design and implementation of digital services, which adds the need for alignment between those as a further challenge for flexibility. To fulfil this, the thesis designs a context modelling method and evaluates it by means of Design Science Research (DSR).Digitalisierung in der Dienstleistungökonomie erfordert, die Auswirkungen von veränderten Anwendungskontexten an die zu erbringenden Services genau zu verstehen. Es wird nach der Analyse des Standes der Technik in Services Science festgestellt, dass unterschiedliche Rollen in der Gestaltung und Umsetzung von Digital Services beteiligt sind, was die Notwendigkeit der Abstimmung zwischen diesen Rollen als eine wichtige Herausforderung an die Flexibilität stellt. Um ein solches Alignment zu erreichen, entwickelt dieser Beitrag eine Kontextmodellierungsmethode und evaluiert diese mittels DSR

A method for developing Reference Enterprise Architectures

Industrial change forces enterprises to constantly adjust their organizational structures in order to stay competitive. In this regard, research acknowledges the potential of Reference Enterprise Architectures (REA). This thesis proposes REAM - a method for developing REAs. After contrasting organizations' needs with approaches available in the current knowledge base, this work identifies the absence of method support for REA development. Proposing REAM, the author aims to close this research gap and evaluates the method's utility by applying REAM in different naturalistic settings