The Impact of Service-Oriented Architecture on Business Networkability

Increased networking among firms has become a competitive necessity in many industries and the ability to efficiently establish, operate and dissolve business relationships has become a competitive advantage. The degree of this networkability is influenced by several factors, such as organizational structure, business processes, people and culture, but also information systems. In fact, current technological developments aim at the efficient and flexible orchestration of standardized modules, referred to as services. Past research has analyzed networkability primarily qualitatively without providing a specific perspective on the concept of service-oriented architecture (SOA) which has only emerged on a broad scale since the beginning of this century. This paper is a first attempt to investigate the impact of SOA on the notion of business networkability. It is assumed that the ability to flexibly link business services among business partners also positively influences the firm’s networkability. Empirical evidence will be provided from the financial industry which is currently undergoing a strong vertical disintegration. The results show a moderate, but nevertheless significant impact

Towards assessing the networkability of health care providers: a maturity model approach

This paper presents a networkability maturity model as an approach to assess a health care organisation's capacity with regards to being able to efficiently engage in business relationships. Continuously rising costs and increasingly restrained budgets for health care put pressure on the public health systems. A low division of labour and integration of processes along cross-organisational patient therapy provides large potential for improvements in efficiency and efficacy. It is the aim of the presented model to enable identification of potentials for improvements and respective measures to advance the ability to benefit from specialisation and collaboration along the value chain. The presented model is developed based on a classification of related state-of-the-art in maturity models to assess individual factors of networkability which are integrated to form an overall framework comprising six components and respective factors to be assessed. As networkability maturity addresses the interrelation of strategy, organisational design and information systems design, the paper adheres to requirements for effective design science research applied to the process of construction of a networkability maturity model applicable for health care providers. It therefore concludes with a case-based evaluation according to the design research literature and identification of further researc

The Concept of Networkability - How to Make Companies Competitive in Business Networks

Business networking - the management of ITenabled relationships between internal and external business partners - is one of the most important features of enterprises in the information age. Currently, business networking is moving into the center of business engineering and aims at preparing enterprises in becoming part of IT-based business networks and in exploiting new process efficiencies and business opportunities. In this paper we develop an idea for describing, measuring and managing an enterprise’s ability to succeed in business networks: the concept of networkability. We illustrate the design objects of networkability using an example from the logistics industry and apply coordination theory to derive mechanisms which help to strengthen a company’s networkability

Increasing the Networkability of Health Service Providers: The Case of Switzerland

Extensive networking led to a high division of labor among the business partners and to an optimization of cost structures in most sectors of western economies. In competitive parts of the health care markets, the first signs of a similar development are beginning to crystallize. As a consequence, networkability, that is the ability to link up with other players (e.g. specialized health service providers, home care institutions) on the basis of commonly agreed standards for the joint provisioning of patient-centered and cost-efficient health services, will emerge to a key concept for future health service delivery. It is therefore the aim of this contribution to give a first overview of potential enablers for the networkability of health care organizations. In doing so, the discussion of the subject matter is carried out from an interdisciplinary point of view, basing on constituent knowledge of the fields of health services research, organization theory and information systems, and is further substantiated with initial empirical findings from the Swiss health care market

Framework for a business interoperability quotient measurement model

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova da Lisboa para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia e Gestão Industrial (MEGI)Over the last decade the context of Interoperability has been changing rapidly. It has been expanding from the largely technically focused area of Information Systems towards Business Processes and Business Semantics. However, there exists a need for more comprehensive ways to define business interoperability and enable its performance measurement as a first step towards improvement of interoperability conditions between collaborating entities. Through extensive literature reviews and analysis of European Research initiatives in this area, this dissertation presents the State of the Art in Business Interoperability. The objective of this dissertation is to develop a model that closely captures the factors that are responsible for Business Interoperability in the context of Collaborative Business Processes. This Business Interoperability Quotient Measurement Model (BIQMM), developed in this dissertation uses an interdisciplinary approach to capture the key elements responsible for collaboration performance. Through the quantification of the relevance of each element to the particular collaboration scenario in question, this model enables a quantitative analysis of Business Interoperability, so that an overall interoperability score can be arrived at for enhanced performance measurements.Finally, the BIQMM is applied to a business case involving Innovayt and LM Glassfiber to demonstrate its applicability to different collaboration scenarios

Design Options for Service Directories in Business Networks

Web services and service oriented architectures (SOA) are spreading in many organizations toachieve business interoperability of their intra- and inter-organizational business processes. SOA isbased on the idea that service providers develop and publish web services via standardized interfacesin directories (registries) where the services will be found and bound by service consumers. Whilethese registry structures have emerged into a standard for local SOA implementations, the questionremains how service directories should be organized in a business network, i.e. when multiple companieswith individual SOA solutions interact. This research develops a framework for the analysis ofservice directories in business networks and provides design options for combining separate and distributedservice directories. These design options are based on the range, reach, and richness of webservice markets in the business network. The framework is applied to two business network cases

An Architecture Driven Methodology for Transforming from Fragmented to Connected Government: A Case of a Local Government in Italy

Connected government implies that citizens and enterprises can interact with government as with a single entity rather than with a number of different public authorities. In countries characterized by a highly fragmented system of Local Government, connected government at the local level can be achieved only through a process of progressive integration on a wider area of systems of local government already integrated at the local level. In the chapter, the author argues that this process should be based on a maturity model and a reference model that define the technological and organizational conditions that allow the establishment of more and more integrated aggregations of municipalities. With reference to a study funded by the Region Lombardia (Italy), the chapter introduces the concept of Integrated System of Local Government (ISLG) and describes the process that leads to the establishment of ISLGs as an intermediate step toward connected government at the local level. Moreover, the chapter discusses the conditions that can induce different aggregations of municipalities to comply with a set of standard requirements in the implementation of their integration processes

Information and data quality in business networking: a key concept for enterprises in its early stages of development

Information and data of high quality are critical for successful business performance in general and Business Networking in particular. As the trend toward sharing information between business partners and value networks is still increasing, the position paper aims at providing a comprehensive perspective on the state of research with regard to information and data quality in Business Networking. The paper shows that much has been achieved, but that fundamental aspects still remain unaddressed. Based on the results of a literature review, the paper identifies consequential areas of research and makes six propositions for future research. In doing so, the position paper aims at offering novel perspectives and at introducing new areas of research in a field of particularly high relevance in the networked business and electronic markets domai