Towards a flexible service integration through separation of business rules

Driven by dynamic market demands, enterprises are continuously exploring collaborations with others to add value to their services and seize new market opportunities. Achieving enterprise collaboration is facilitated by Enterprise Application Integration and Business-to-Business approaches that employ architectural paradigms like Service Oriented Architecture and incorporate technological advancements in networking and computing. However, flexibility remains a major challenge related to enterprise collaboration. How can changes in demands and opportunities be reflected in collaboration solutions with minimum time and effort and with maximum reuse of existing applications? This paper proposes an approach towards a more flexible integration of enterprise applications in the context of service mediation. We achieve this by combining goal-based, model-driven and serviceoriented approaches. In particular, we pay special attention to the separation of business rules from the business process of the integration solution. Specifying the requirements as goal models, we separate those parts which are more likely to evolve over time in terms of business rules. These business rules are then made executable by exposing them as Web services and incorporating them into the design of the business process.\ud Thus, should the business rules change, the business process remains unaffected. Finally, this paper also provides an evaluation of the flexibility of our solution in relation to the current work in business process flexibility research

The ‘service turn’ in a new public management context: a street-level bureaucrat perspective

It is increasingly argued that public management should build on a service logic instead of the prevailing manufacturing logic of New Public Management (NPM). Drawing from three cases in Swedish public healthcare, key features of a service logic such as value creation, co-production, and collaboration are prominent in formal documents and everyday talk. However, the 67 interviews in this study reveal that the service logic ideal is practically unreachable in a context impregnated by NPM. Instead, we suggest that street-level bureaucrats often need to address service logic expectations (public values, relationship-building, etc.) using an NPM logic (measurements, control, etc.)

Blockchain: A Business Model Innovation Analysis

The adoption of blockchain-based technologies by organisations can bring benefits in terms of firms' profitability, productivity and efficiency, making companies rethink their existing business models. However, as the technology is still developing and the research on the implications of the different types of blockchain networks (i.e. public, private, consortium) is scarce, their role in business model innovation requires closer attention. To address this gap, the paper provides a conceptual insight into the role of blockchain technology in companies with different value configurations by examining the technological conditions that can impact business models and probing the role of technology benefits in driving company value. The analysis contributes to the literature by discussing the business implications of innovative technologies and uncovering their positive and negative consequences for the value creation, delivery and capture activities. Such analysis sheds light on the functions of blockchains that have a differentiating impact on business processes. Also, the paper puts forward managerial implications by discussing the paths of business model innovation using blockchain technologies

Adapting to Climate Change: The Case of Multi-level Governance and Municipal Adaptation Planning in Nova Scotia, Canada

Nova Scotia is the only province in Canada to use the gas tax as a financial incentive to create a regulatory mandate for ‘Municipal Climate Change Action Plans’ (MCCAPs). The MCCAP adaptation policy mandate initiated and enabled climate change vulnerability assessment and the development of climate risk priorities and adaptation plans to uniformly occur at the local scale in 53 Nova Scotian municipalities. This dissertation seeks to answer the question: What are the social factors that impacted municipal climate change adaptation policy and planning processes in the multi-level governance context of Nova Scotia’s MCCAP? The study develops and operationalizes a thematic, functional conceptual framework and exploratory, descriptive case study research approach for conducting adaptation case studies and comparative analysis of municipal adaptation planning processes in multi-level governance contexts. The framework enables thematic investigation and discussion about the social factors impacting municipal adaptation policy and planning processes in multi-level governance and municipal case settings. The study utilizes content analysis of adaptation plans in combination with focus groups, an iterative online survey and targeted interviews conducted with adaptation stakeholders to explore, describe and illustrate what and how social factors impacted the MCCAP process in Nova Scotia municipalities. The mixed methodology provides a pragmatic approach to generate data from which to compare evidence of the social impact factors that affect municipalities’ adaptation planning and policy development processes in multi-level governance contexts. The study offers new empirical and conceptual insights into the ‘how and what’ of municipal climate change adaptation policy making processes in multi-level adaptation governance contexts. The study conceptually affirms that significant resource and capacity-building gaps, a lack of governmental coordination, low levels of public demand and aspects of cross-scalar political leadership hinder and constrain adaptation capacity building and policy integration in municipal processes. Institutional fragmentation and lack of multi-level policy coordination may be key social factors impacting Nova Scotia municipalities’ adaptive capacities and the prospects for long-term resiliency and adaptation to climate change risks impacting communities at the local scale

A novel workflow management system for handling dynamic process adaptation and compliance

Modern enterprise organisations rely on dynamic processes. Generally these processes cannot be modelled once and executed repeatedly without change. Enterprise processes may evolve unpredictably according to situations that cannot always be prescribed. However, no mechanism exists to ensure an updated process does not violate any compliance requirements. Typical workflow processes may follow a process definition and execute several thousand instances using a workflow engine without any changes. This is suitable for routine business processes. However, when business processes need flexibility, adaptive features are needed. Updating processes may violate compliance requirements so automatic verification of compliance checking is necessary. The research work presented in this Thesis investigates the problem of current workflow technology in defining, managing and ensuring the specification and execution of business processes that are dynamic in nature, combined with policy standards throughout the process lifycle. The findings from the literature review and the system requirements are used to design the proposed system architecture. Since a two-tier reference process model is not sufficient as a basis for the reference model for an adaptive and compliance workflow management system, a three-tier process model is proposed. The major components of the architecture consist of process models, business rules and plugin modules. This architecture exhibits the concept of user adaptation with structural checks and dynamic adaptation with data-driven checks. A research prototype - Adaptive and Compliance Workflow Management System (ACWfMS) - was developed based on the proposed system architecture to implement core services of the system for testing and evaluation purposes. The ACWfMS enables the development of a workflow management tool to create or update the process models. It automatically validates compliance requirements and, in the case of violations, visual feedback is presented to the user. In addition, the architecture facilitates process migration to manage specific instances with modified definitions. A case study based on the postgraduate research process domain is discussed

Vertically Integrated Research Alliances: A Chrysalis for Digital Scholarship. A White Paper for Community Discussion, Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

This is a time of transitions for the extended system of scholarly communication. Efforts are underway to create, disseminate, and sustain unprecedented new forms of scholarly inquiry which utilize the innovative capabilities of digital technologies. This white paper and the associated planning project that led to it is an attempt to better understand this time of transformation and the path forward. The planning project used a focal metaphor for this transitional period: a caterpillar entering a chrysalis to reform itself for a different kind of life as a butterfly. Hence the name: the Chrysalis planning project.The titular chrysalis of this white paper takes shape as a particular kind of quest: stakeholders engaged in scholarly communication today are now struggling to find new ways of undertaking their purposes in the digital age. The particular new organizational form studied in this project is something termed the “Vertically Integrated Research Alliance.” This white paper will set forth tentative claims regarding this organizational form, and how it might potentially be a better fit for sustaining new forms of digital scholarship. We do not claim that this is the sole new form of “butterfly” which will emerge from this transitional period, only that this form deserves some attention and experimentation. This white paper has been informed by a broad range of interviews with representatives from many different stakeholder groups that together comprise the system of scholarly communication, but rather than a final statement it should be considered a starting point for further discussions and experiments

Adaptive object management for distributed systems

This thesis describes an architecture supporting the management of pluggable software components and evaluates it against the requirement for an enterprise integration platform for the manufacturing and petrochemical industries. In a distributed environment, we need mechanisms to manage objects and their interactions. At the least, we must be able to create objects in different processes on different nodes; we must be able to link them together so that they can pass messages to each other across the network; and we must deliver their messages in a timely and reliable manner. Object based environments which support these services already exist, for example ANSAware(ANSA, 1989), DEC's Objectbroker(ACA,1992), Iona's Orbix(Orbix,1994)Yet such environments provide limited support for composing applications from pluggable components. Pluggability is the ability to install and configure a component into an environment dynamically when the component is used, without specifying static dependencies between components when they are produced. Pluggability is supported to a degree by dynamic binding. Components may be programmed to import references to other components and to explore their interfaces at runtime, without using static type dependencies. Yet thus overloads the component with the responsibility to explore bindings. What is still generally missing is an efficient general-purpose binding model for managing bindings between independently produced components. In addition, existing environments provide no clear strategy for dealing with fine grained objects. The overhead of runtime binding and remote messaging will severely reduce performance where there are a lot of objects with complex patterns of interaction. We need an adaptive approach to managing configurations of pluggable components according to the needs and constraints of the environment. Management is made difficult by embedding bindings in component implementations and by relying on strong typing as the only means of verifying and validating bindings. To solve these problems we have built a set of configuration tools on top of an existing distributed support environment. Specification tools facilitate the construction of independent pluggable components. Visual composition tools facilitate the configuration of components into applications and the verification of composite behaviours. A configuration model is constructed which maintains the environmental state. Adaptive management is made possible by changing the management policy according to this state. Such policy changes affect the location of objects, their bindings, and the choice of messaging system