Classification Criteria for Governing the Implementation Process of Service-Oriented ERP Systems - An Analysis Based on New Institutional Economics

Service-oriented ERP systems promise to allow for a fine-grained alignment of IT with the specific functional requirements of an organization\u27s business processes. In this regard, studies particularly emphasize the potential to flexibly exchange services by means of market-based transactions. One important aspect widely neglected, however, is the endeavor of governing the implementation process of this new kind of information systems. Having applied New Institutional Economics, our research reveals that this implementation process, on the contrary, even calls for rather hierarchical modes of governance. However, different types of activities relevant to implementing a service-oriented system have to be taken into account. Hence, in this paper we present a set of criteria enabling organizations to classify these activities in more detail and to choose a suitable mode of governance. We demonstrate the approach by means of an example and indicate directions for future research

Service identification requirements for enterprise information systems

Identifying services is one of the most important step in developing service-oriented business systems. Existing service identification methods still have some shortcomings, e.g. unrepeatable approach, inapplicable to all enterprise information systems and unadaptable to business factor change. Some approaches focus on fixed cases or certain types of organizations neglecting the change of involvement and operation of the enterprise systems, which have limited value to apply to a broad range of real-life business cases In this paper, we investigate requirements of service identification from different types of information systems, from single systems to collaborative systems, from closed systems to open systems. The research is important for providing a solid foundation for further identifying services for developing different service-oriented system

Examining the Organizational Decision to Adopt Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) - Development of a Research Model

What are the determinants of an organization’s decision to adopt Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)? Although the paradigms of service orientation and SOA have become quite omnipresent in the IS literature, research is still lacking to provide a comprehensive view upon drivers and inhibitors of the organizational decision to adopt SOA. Based on the mature strand of adoption research, this paper develops a conceptual model in order to increase the understanding of the determinants influencing this decision. Thereby, the drivers and inhibitors are distinguished in organization-specific and innovation-specific factors. The organization-specific factors cover two aspects: (1) the compatibility of technology and organization (i.e., SOA expertise of the employees, management support for SOA, IT/ Business alignment, degree of process documentation) and (2) management fad and fashion. The innovation-specific factors cover the perceived benefits, perceived complexity, and standardization of available technologies related to SOA. Beside developing this theoretical model for laying the foundation for future empirical research, a further contribution of this paper is the development of a comprehensive measurement model for SOA adoption, which differentiates between the IT and the enterprise layer

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

From Sensor to Observation Web with Environmental Enablers in the Future Internet

This paper outlines the grand challenges in global sustainability research and the objectives of the FP7 Future Internet PPP program within the Digital Agenda for Europe. Large user communities are generating significant amounts of valuable environmental observations at local and regional scales using the devices and services of the Future Internet. These communities’ environmental observations represent a wealth of information which is currently hardly used or used only in isolation and therefore in need of integration with other information sources. Indeed, this very integration will lead to a paradigm shift from a mere Sensor Web to an Observation Web with semantically enriched content emanating from sensors, environmental simulations and citizens. The paper also describes the research challenges to realize the Observation Web and the associated environmental enablers for the Future Internet. Such an environmental enabler could for instance be an electronic sensing device, a web-service application, or even a social networking group affording or facilitating the capability of the Future Internet applications to consume, produce, and use environmental observations in cross-domain applications. The term ?envirofied? Future Internet is coined to describe this overall target that forms a cornerstone of work in the Environmental Usage Area within the Future Internet PPP program. Relevant trends described in the paper are the usage of ubiquitous sensors (anywhere), the provision and generation of information by citizens, and the convergence of real and virtual realities to convey understanding of environmental observations. The paper addresses the technical challenges in the Environmental Usage Area and the need for designing multi-style service oriented architecture. Key topics are the mapping of requirements to capabilities, providing scalability and robustness with implementing context aware information retrieval. Another essential research topic is handling data fusion and model based computation, and the related propagation of information uncertainty. Approaches to security, standardization and harmonization, all essential for sustainable solutions, are summarized from the perspective of the Environmental Usage Area. The paper concludes with an overview of emerging, high impact applications in the environmental areas concerning land ecosystems (biodiversity), air quality (atmospheric conditions) and water ecosystems (marine asset management)

Aligning a Service Provisioning Model of a Service-Oriented System with the ITIL v.3 Life Cycle

Bringing together the ICT and the business layer of a service-oriented system (SoS) remains a great challenge. Few papers tackle the management of SoS from the business and organizational point of view. One solution is to use the well-known ITIL v.3 framework. The latter enables to transform the organization into a service-oriented organizational which focuses on the value provided to the service customers. In this paper, we align the steps of the service provisioning model with the ITIL v.3 processes. The alignment proposed should help organizations and IT teams to integrate their ICT layer, represented by the SoS, and their business layer, represented by ITIL v.3. One main advantage of this combined use of ITIL and a SoS is the full service orientation of the company.Comment: This document is the technical work of a conference paper submitted to the International Conference on Exploring Service Science 1.5 (IESS 2015

Assessing IT-business alignment in service-oriented Enterprises

Nowadays, more and more businesses transform into service-oriented enterprises in order to sustain their competitive advantage. To ensure that the underlying information technology (IT) can best support the transformation, we aim to develop an IT-business alignment framework to assess the quality of alignment in the context of service-oriented enterprises. Based upon the existing literature, we propose three components of IT-business alignment: strategic alignment, operational alignment, and social alignment. We study their various contributions to the performance of service-oriented IT projects, together with the interactions with service integration level.Our data were collected from Web questionnaires. The total dataset is derived from 300 selected companies in an on-line technology management forum. Among the returned questionnaires, 104 were found to be complete and usable; this represented a response rate of 34 percent.A Partial Least Squares (PLS) analysis is conducted and derives the following three research findings: (1) IT-business alignment plays a significant role in improving the performance of service-oriented IT; (2) the service integration level is an important performance moderator for strategic and operational alignment; (3) the service integration level is an important contributor to social alignment. Available at: https://aisel.aisnet.org/pajais/vol3/iss1/3

The Value Proposition of Service-Oriented Architecture

The author of this thesis evaluates Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) design and implementation strategies. The purpose is to provide the reader with the definition of Service-Oriented Architecture. This report discusses: (1) The definition of Service-Oriented Architecture, (2) The problems solved by Service-Oriented Architecture, (3) Application of design principles to achieve Service-Oriented Architecture. As a result of this investigation, Service-Oriented Architecture is a design style that is fundamentally about sharing and reuse of functionality across diverse applications, so that organizations can quickly adapt to changing business requirements while increasing IT asset reuse and minimizing integration and development costs

Feasibility of SOA in a Legacy Environment

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is currently viewed as the “silver bullet” solution for all of the integration issues that a business faces in this very competitive world. SOA technologies vendors would also like everyone to believe the “silver bullet” myth. While there is definitely some truth to the notion of SOA being able to solve many integration issues, SOA does not apply to all integration issues and it should not be considered as the only technology solution. The core argument is whether SOA is a technology or a methodology. Most experts will argue that it is a methodology with definite software architecture pattern, but many case studies have shown that it is a complete mindset change, a new ideology as to how software should be created to solve business problems. This ideology of SOA has been around for decades in many forms and it is coming to fruition as the internet is creating the concept of a global information village. The global information village is giving people the opportunity to enhance communication and find solutions to all sorts of problems eliminating the need to recreate solutions. The idea of reusability is catching up very fast and that’s where SOA is claiming most of it benefits like speed to market and reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) for software development. SOA is definitely not for everyone, especially for environments that are accustomed to legacy technologies and associated software development practices. There is a limited scope for SOA in legacy environments and not all problems can be solved with SOA. For instance if a company already has a monolithic system that is performance oriented and is meeting the needs of the business, then future enhancements will never dictate the need for SOA as the initial investment into SOA is very high. From a performance perspective, a monolithic system will always be faster since network latency due to dispersed and segregated multiple computing engines integration is the nature of SOA. A good application of SOA in the legacy environment would be e-commerce where monolithic system capabilities can be abstracted out and made web enabled. In this approach one does not have to rewrite its monolithic system but only use SOA to define a new interface to interact with the monolithic system

E-finance-lab at the House of Finance : about us

The financial services industry is believed to be on the verge of a dramatic [r]evolution. A substantial redesign of its value chains aimed at reducing costs, providing more efficient and flexible services and enabling new products and revenue streams is imminent. But there seems to be no clear migration path nor goal which can cast light on the question where the finance industry and its various players will be and should be in a decade from now. The mission of the E-Finance Lab is the development and application of research methodologies in the financial industry that promote and assess how business strategies and structures are shared and supported by strategies and structures of information systems. Important challenges include the design of smart production infrastructures, the development and evaluation of advantageous sourcing strategies and smart selling concepts to enable new revenue streams for financial service providers in the future. Overall, our goal is to contribute methods and views to the realignment of the E-Finance value chain. ..