Open semantic service networks

Online service marketplaces will soon be part of the economy to scale the provision of specialized multi-party services through automation and standardization. Current research, such as the *-USDL service description language family, is already defining the basic building blocks to model the next generation of business services. Nonetheless, the developments being made do not target to interconnect services via service relationships. Without the concept of relationship, marketplaces will be seen as mere functional silos containing service descriptions. Yet, in real economies, all services are related and connected. Therefore, to address this gap we introduce the concept of open semantic service network (OSSN), concerned with the establishment of rich relationships between services. These networks will provide valuable knowledge on the global service economy, which can be exploited for many socio-economic and scientific purposes such as service network analysis, management, and control

Business models and information systems for sustainable development

Businesses are expected to explore market opportunities in the area of sustainable development, thus contributing to finding solutions aiming at sustainable quality of life. This will require adaptation and innovation of business models and information systems, with challenges of particular interest to the business modeling and software design community. This paper briefly discusses two relevant topics in this respect, namely (i) goal and value modeling, and (ii) model-driven development. We mention existing work that can be taken as a starting point for addressing sustainability issues, and we make some observations that may be taken into account when extending existing work

Comparing business value modeling methods: A family of experiments

[EN] Context A value model is used to describe how an organization creates, delivers, and captures its business value. Value-driven development methods use the notion of "economic value exchange" to define more efficient business strategies and align Information Systems (IS) with organizational goals. Current value-driven methods are complex and there is insufficient empirical evidence regarding which of the existing methods are more effective. Objective: This paper compares two different value-driven methods to provide empirical evidence regarding both their efficacy when modeling business value and their likelihood of acceptance in practice. Method: This goal was addressed by performing a family of three controlled experiments with a group of novice software engineers and business analysts to compare the Dynamic Value Description (DVD) method with the e3value method, with respect to their effectiveness, efficiency, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness and intention to use. The experiment was initially performed in Spain and then replicated in Portugal and Brazil with other participants with different backgrounds. A meta-analysis was performed to aggregate the empirical findings obtained in each experiment. Results: The results indicate that the DVD method is superior with respect to all the variables analyzed. Conclusion: The DVD method is a promising and alternative method to specify business value when compared to the well-known e3value method for the analyzed variables.We should first like to thank the participants from Spain, Portugal and Brazil who took part in these experiments, for their effort and valuable time. We would also like to thank the Value@Cloud project (MINECO TIN2013-46300-R), the NOVA LINCS Research Laboratory (Ref. UID/CEC/04516/2013), and CAPES - Ciencia sem Fronteiras (Ref. 99999.009047/2013-01) for their financial support.Souza, E.; Moreira, A.; Araújo, J.; Abrahao Gonzales, SM.; Insfrán Pelozo, CE.; Da Silveira, DS. (2018). Comparing business value modeling methods: A family of experiments. Information and Software Technology. 104:179-193. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2018.08.001S17919310

Realizing Traceability between the Enterprise Architecture and Business Value

An enterprise architecture (EA) is a high-level representation of the enterprise. An EA is designed to realize the business value of an organization. In the first part of this thesis a traceability relation between the EA, modeled with ArchiMate, and the business goals is defined and empirically evaluated. Afterwards the language is validated with practitioners and academics in terms of understandability. The conclusion is that the concepts of this modeling language are difficult to understand because the concepts are too closely related. We end this part with a simplification of the goal-modeling language.In the second part a traceability relation between two conceptual modeling languages, e3value and ArchiMate, is designed. This traceability relation is refined in an experiment with practitioners and evaluated in a case study. A key finding from this case study is that for the traceability to be useful, the quantifications of an e3value model have to be aligned with those in an ArchiMate model. The thesis ends with a quantitative alignment of an ArchiMate model with the quantifications of an e3value model. <br/

Matching Complex Consumer Needs with e-Service Bundles

e-Services are commercial services that can be ordered and provisioned via the Internet, satisfying a consumer need. Sometimes, such services are provisioned by a constellation of enterprises, and consist of multiple elementary services. A problem is then how to configure such a constellation, satisfying a complex consumer need. To this end, we extend the notion of consumer need in the e3value methodology, as originally intended for designing value constellations. We also show how needs can be (automatically) matched with services provisioned by suppliers. As such, our contribution can be seen as a first step towards on-demand dynamic value constellations, provisioning e-services

Evaluating the Efficacy of Value-driven Methods: A Controlled Experiment

A value model is an abstract representation of an organization and is used for capturing and describing the rationale of how the organization creates, delivers, and captures business value. Value-driven development methods use the notion of “economic value exchange” to define more efficient business strategies and align Information Systems with the organization goals. However, current value-driven methods are complex and there is not enough empirical evidence about which of the existing methods is more effective under what circumstances. This paper addresses this issue by presenting a controlled experiment aimed at comparing the Dynamic Value Description (DVD) method, which is a recently defined cognitive early requirements approach, with the well-known e3value method, with respect to their effectiveness, efficiency, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness and intention to use. The results show that DVD has proved to be a promising method for specifying business value

Costs, Benefits and Value Distribution – Ingredients for Successful Cross-Organizational ES Business Cases

This paper introduces my PhD research project on developing guidelines for creating successful business cases for Enterprise System implementations in network settings. Three important aspects that were found to be important in such business cases are: the costs, benefits and the value distribution within a network. Each of the three aspects is addressed in this paper and the relationships between them are pointed out. A research model is presented showing how all three aspects contribute to the main goal of defining successful business case guidelines

BUSINESS MODELS FOR EGOVERNMENT THE BMeG METHOD

So far, business models have been investigated in the context of eCommerce focusing on economic issues but they do not consider the viewpoints of authorities embarking on public private partnerships for citizen services. This paper describes our modelling method BMeG that is dedicated to the planning of business models for eGovernment services. BMeG allows one to model options of value chains with various perspectives including advantages and disadvantages with impacts on policies. BMeG depicts the added value of potential partnerships and thus supports authorities to decide on alliances for public private partnerships or other financing models for eGovernment services