Generic Business Model Types for Enterprise Mashup Intermediaries

The huge demand for situational and ad-hoc applications desired by the mass of business end users led to a new kind of Web applications, well-known as Enterprise Mashups. Users with no or limited programming skills are empowered to leverage in a collaborative manner existing Mashup components by combining and reusing company internal and external resources within minutes to new value added applications. Thereby, Enterprise Mashup environments interact as intermediaries to match the supply of providers and demand of consumers. By following the design science approach, we propose an interaction phase model artefact based on market transaction phases to structure required intermediary features. By means of five case studies, we demonstrate the application of the designed model and identify three generic business model types for Enterprise Mashups intermediaries (directory, broker, and marketplace). So far, intermediaries following a real marketplace business model don’t exist in context of Enterprise Mashups and require further research for this emerging paradigm

IT impacts on operation-level agility in service industries

A new kind of Web-based application, known as Enterprise Mashups, has gained momentum in the last years: Business users with no or limited programming skills are empowered to leverage in a collaborative manner user friendly building blocks and to combine and reuse existing Web-based resources within minutes to new value added applications in order to solve an individual and ad-hoc business problem. Current discussions of the Mashup paradigm in the scientific community are limited on technical aspects. The collaboration and the peer production management aspects of the Mashup development have received less attention yet. In this paper, we propose a reference model for Enterprise Mashups which provides a foundation to develop and to analyse grassroots Enterprise Mashup environments from a managerial and collaborative perspective. By following the design science research approach, we investigate existing reference models and leverage the St. Gallen Media Reference Model (MRM). The development of Enterprise Mashups is structured by market transaction phases similar to electronic markets. The user roles, the necessary processes and the resulting services are modelled according to the views of the MRM. By means of the SAP Research RoofTop Marketplace prototype we demonstrate the application of the designed reference model for grassroots Enterprise Mashups environments

Enterprise Mashup Systems as Platform for Situational Applications - Benefits and Challenges in the Business Domain

Currently, several Enterprise 2.0 platforms are beginning to emerge. This paper introduces Enterprise Mashup technology as a means to improve IT alignment of individual work processes and changing business needs. Enterprise Mashups enable users to create customized applications to easily find and transform business information and functionalities, as well as collaboratively share pre-built Mashup applications. Therefore, the concept of Enterprise Mashups integrates Web 2.0 technologies and principles with well-established paradigms such as Enterprise Information Integration, Business Intelligence, and Business Process Management. Involved organizational key drivers, technical challenges and inhibitors are discussed to assess the potential business value and explain the emerging expansion of Mashup platforms in companies

Assimilation of Enterprise Mashup Systems − The Impact on Changes in Work Processes

A number of Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platforms are beginning to proliferate. By leveraging typical Web 2.0 attributes, these platforms provide enterprises with a collaborative environment to develop capabilities by collectively generating, sharing and refining business knowledge (including information, functionality and business processes). Deductively deriving from the assimilation literature stream, this article conceptually discusses a quantitative research model to constitute a deeper understanding of Enterprise 2.0 technology assimilation on an individual level. Our research contributes to the existing assimilation and adoption theory by integrating the social exchange theory as well as emphasizing the impact of Enterprise Mashup system assimilation towards changes in work processes. Furthermore, we include several object-related constructs like user perceptions about technology-specific aspects and work characteristics as well as moderator effects which are emphasized to have an impact on usage behavior of work-productivity systems and the resulting work processes

A user-centric approach for developing and deploying service front-ends in the future internet of services

Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) based on web services have attracted a great deal of interest and Internet Technology (IT) investment over the last few years, principally in the context of business-to-business integration within corporate intranets. However, they are now evolving and breaking through enterprise boundaries in a revolutionary attempt to make the approach pervasive. This is leading to what we call a user-centric SOA. A user-centric SOA is an SOA conceived as an internet of services made up of compositional resources empowering end users to collaboratively remix and ubiquitously exploit these resources. In this paper we explore the architectural basis, technologies, frameworks and tools considered necessary to tackle this novel vision of SOA. We also present the rationale behind Ez Web/FAST, an ongoing EU-funded project whose first outcomes could serve as a preliminary proof of concept

End User Empowerment through Platforms for Situational Applications

In recent years, new technologies help to enable the vision of agile business platforms leveraging the abilities and innovativeness of knowledge workers. In this article, we refer to the current trend of utilizing platforms for situational applications to increase the level of business agility in terms of improved environmental sensing and responding capabilities. Drawing from the extant literature and informed by the insights of a case study, conducted at a financial services provider, we elaborate on Enterprise Mashups as a new technology that empower end users to create and adapt situational applications. Thereby, we contribute to current requests for further research in the field of digital option generation and realization of business agility capabilities through IT innovations. Moreover, we expand the nomological network by the construct of user empowerment as an important mediator between IT capabilities and business agility

Web-palveluiden suunnittelu sijaintitietoisille mobiililaitteille - Tapaus: liikenteenvalvontajärjestelmä

Open remote programming interfaces and technologies that enable the development of mashup applications have revolutionized the way the World Wide Web is used. The emergence of smartphones has provided a new platform for which to build applications that people can use regardless of their location. The location-aware features of smartphones have made it possible for the mobile mashup applications to customize the content they provide for users based on their location. In this thesis I study how Web services should be designed and implemented so that they would serve location-aware mobile mashup application in the best possible way. I lay down the requirements that this sort of Web service has and then look into different technological and architectural solutions that are available to create a location-aware mobile-friendly Web service interface. As the practical part of the thesis, I use the knowledge gathered from my theoretical study to implement a new Web service interface for a traffic monitoring system. The new interface is created because the system currently lacks an interface that is mobile-friendly and enables the customization of content based on the location of the user. To prove that the new interface solves the problem at hand, I implement a mobile application that consumes the new Web service interface. The client application is also used to measure sizes of responses returned by the new API, the time used to process them and what kind of effect location-based optimization has on the API. Based on the results of the implementation process and the findings of the testing phase, I propose a set of design guidelines that can be applied when developing a Web service interface for mobile location-aware devices.Avoimet etäohjelmointirajapinnat sekä teknologiat, jotka mahdollistavat mashup -sovellusten kehittämisen ovat mullistaneet tavan jolla käytämme World Wide Webiä. Älypuhelimien yleistyminen on tarjonnut uuden alustan sovelluksille, joita ei ole sidottu mihinkään paikkaan vaan ne kulkevat ihmisten mukana. älypuhelinten sijaintitietoiset ominaisuudet ovat mahdollistaneet mobiilien mashup -sovellusten sisällön räätälöimisen käyttäjän sijainnin mukaan. Tässä diplomityössä tutkin, miten Web-palveluita tulisi suunnitella ja toteuttaa, jotta ne parhaalla mahdollisella tavalla palvelisivat sijaintitietoisia mashup -sovelluksia mobiililaitteissa. Esitän vaatimukset, joita tällaisella Web-palvelulla on sekä tutkin millaisia teknologisia sekä arkkitehtuurisia käytäntöjä on olemassa mobiiliystävällisten sijaintitietoisten Web-palvelurajapintojen kehittämiseksi. Työn käytännön osuudessa käytän teoreettista tutkimustani hyväkseni kehittäessäni uuden Web-palvelurajapinnan liikenteenhallintajärjestelmälle. Uusi rajapinta tarvitaan, sillä järjestelmästä puuttuu etäohjelmointirajapinta, joka mahdollistaisi mobiilit käyttäjäsovellukset, joissa sisältö on räätälöity käyttäjän sijainnin mukaan. Todentaakseni, että uusi rajapinta ratkaisee olemassa olevan ongelman, toteutan mobiilin käyttäjäsovelluksen, joka käyttää uutta rajapintaa. Käyttäjäsovelluksen avulla myös mitataan rajapinnan palauttamien viestien kokoa, niiden prosessoimiseen käytettävää aikaa sekä sitä millainen vaikutus lokaatiopohjaisella optimoinnilla on rajapinnan toimintaan. Kehitystyön ja testitulosten pohjalta esitän joukon suosituksia, joita tulisi noudattaa kun kehitetään sijaintitietoisille mobiilisovelluksille tarkoitettua Webpalvelurajapintaa

10301 Executive Summary and Abstracts Collection -- Service Value Networks

From 25.07.2010 to 30.07.2010, the Perspectives Workshop 10301 ``Perspectives Workshop: Service Value Networks \u27\u27 was held in Schloss Dagstuhl~--~Leibniz Center for Informatics. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

EXPRESS: Resource-oriented and RESTful Semantic Web services

This thesis investigates an approach that simplifies the development of Semantic Web services (SWS) by removing the need for additional semantic descriptions.The most actively researched approaches to Semantic Web services introduce explicit semantic descriptions of services that are in addition to the existing semantic descriptions of the service domains. This increases their complexity and design overhead. The need for semantically describing the services in such approaches stems from their foundations in service-oriented computing, i.e. the extension of already existing service descriptions. This thesis demonstrates that adopting a resource-oriented approach based on REST will, in contrast to service-oriented approaches, eliminate the need for explicit semantic service descriptions and service vocabularies. This reduces the development efforts while retaining the significant functional capabilities.The approach proposed in this thesis, called EXPRESS (Expressing RESTful Semantic Services), utilises the similarities between REST and the Semantic Web, such as resource realisation, self-describing representations, and uniform interfaces. The semantics of a service is elicited from a resource’s semantic description in the domain ontology and the semantics of the uniform interface, hence eliminating the need for additional semantic descriptions. Moreover, stub-generation is a by-product of the mapping between entities in the domain ontology and resources.EXPRESS was developed to test the feasibility of eliminating explicit service descriptions and service vocabularies or ontologies, to explore the restrictions placed on domain ontologies as a result, to investigate the impact on the semantic quality of the description, and explore the benefits and costs to developers. To achieve this, an online demonstrator that allows users to generate stubs has been developed. In addition, a matchmaking experiment was conducted to show that the descriptions of the services are comparable to OWL-S in terms of their ability to be discovered, while improving the efficiency of discovery. Finally, an expert review was undertaken which provided evidence of EXPRESS’s simplicity and practicality when developing SWS from scratch