A pluggable service platform architecture for e-commerce

In the beginning of the e-commerce era, retailers mostly adopted vertically integrated solutions to control the entire e-commerce value chain. However, they began to realize that to achieve agility, a better approach would be to focus on certain core capabilities and then create a partner ecosystem around them. From a technical point of view, this means it is advised to have a lightweight platform architecture with small core e-commerce functionality which can be extended by additional services from third party providers. In a typical e-commerce ecosystem with diverse information systems of network partners, integration and interoperability become critical factors to enable seamless coordination among the partners. Furthermore an increasing adoption of cloud computing technology could be observed resulting in more challenging integration scenarios involving cloud services. Thus, an e-commerce platform is required that suites the advanced needs for flexible and agile service integration. Therefore, this paper aims to present a reference architecture of a novel pluggable service platform for e-commerce. We investigate on currently available online shop platform solutions and integration platforms in the market. Based on the findings and motivated by literature on service-oriented design, we develop an architecture of a service-based pluggable platform for online retailers. This design is then instantiated by means of a prototype for an e-commerce returns handling scenario to demonstrate the feasibility of our architecture design

Infrastructural Sovereignty over Agreement and Transaction Data (‘Metadata’) in an Open Network-Model for Multilateral Sharing of Sensitive Data

Organizations are becoming ever more aware that their data is a valuable asset requiring protection against mis-use. Therefore, being in control over the usage conditions (i.e. data sovereignty) is a prerequisite for sharing sensitive data in (increasingly complex) supply chains. Maintaining sovereignty applies to both the primary shared data and to the ‘metadata’ stemming from the data sharing support processes. However, maintaining sovereignty over this metadata creates an area of tension. Data providers must balance operational efficiency through outsourcing the data sharing support processes and the associated metadata to external, trusted, organizations against the added risk of transferring control over the metadata. At the same time, lock-in by community providers and major integration efforts due to multiple data sharing relationships need to be avoided. To address these issues, this paper elaborates an open network-model approach for maintaining sovereignty over metadata

Supply chain orchestration and choreography: Programmable logistics using semantics

Interoperability between enterprise systems in supply chains is increasingly essential for successful supply chain integration and key in the creation of innovative businesses / business models. In this paper we present a novel approach for supply chain choreography to support supply chain organizations in practice in creating seamless chain integration. The aim we set ourselves in this paper is to propose an architecture to enable and/or improve the exchange of information between supply chain organizations. To address this challenge we followed the design science methodology. First, we derived to a body of knowledge combining literature - on supply chain collaboration and challenges, but also corresponding areas such as web services - with empirical knowledge gained from applied research and industrial projects we were and are involved in. Secondly, we propose a semantic architecture that is able to support seamlessly integration and create an ecosystem where programmable logistics are the future. First implementations are promising, but also revealed a series of improvements to our architecture. Further research is required for more practical validation and improving the theory, and validation of the current research

Understanding task inter-dependence and co-ordination efforts in multi-sourcing: the suppliers' perspective

The last decade has witnessed a significant growth in the outsourcing of information technologies and business processes. Of a particular trend within the outsourcing industry is the shift from the client firm contracting a single supplier to utilizing multiple suppliers, which is also known as multi-sourcing. Multi-sourcing may potentially offer numerous advantages to client firms, however, it might present some challenges to suppliers. In particular, multi-sourcing could create coordination challenges, as there are inter-dependencies between the outsourced tasks to numerous suppliers. While the current outsourcing literature acknowledges the existence of inter-dependencies, little is known about the efforts required for coordinating the work between suppliers and how these coordination efforts are made to manage task inter-dependence. Three case studies at Pactera (case one) and TCS (cases two and three) serve as the empirical base to investigate the inter-dependence between outsourced tasks and suppliers coordination efforts. This research offers theoretical contributions to both coordination studies and the outsourcing body of knowledge

Coordination as a service to enable agile business networks

This paper surveys the current organizational requirements of agile business networks and then studies how emerging ICT are addressing the needs. The paper concludes that while several requirements are covered by novel cloud and Saas offerings, several requirements related to service coordination, collaboration, risk management and relation management are not properly addressed by ICT offerings yet. The paper proposes coordination as a service (CAAS) to fill this gap and outlines the key characteristics of CAAS