Approaches Regarding Business Logic Modeling in Service Oriented Architecture

As part of the Service Oriented Computing (SOC), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a technology that has been developing for almost a decade and during this time there have been published many studies, papers and surveys that are referring to the advantages of projects using it. In this article we discuss some ways of using SOA in the business environment, as a result of the need to reengineer the internal business processes with the scope of moving forward towards providing and using standardized services and achieving enterprise interoperability.Business Rules, Business Processes, SOA, BPM, BRM, Semantic Web, Semantic Interoperability

Factors influencing the alignment of SOA development with business objectives

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has gained focus as a driver for bridging and aligning business and IT-oriented views in information system development. The critical aspect of successful SOA is aligning technology and business; without proper alignment, the full potential of SOA will not be achieved. The current academic literature includes only few empirical studies on business-IT alignment aspects related to SOA adoption. In this exploratory study we explore factors influencing successful SOA implementation. We interview IT and business people from nine organisations appearing as SOA forerunners in Finland. Our findings indicate that successful SOA adoption is affected by several factors varying from organisation culture to processes and methods, communication and technology. The findings form a basis for future SOA research and a set of guidelines for practitioners

Combining goal-oriented and model-driven approaches to solve the Payment Problem Scenario

Motivated by the objective to provide an improved participation of business domain experts in the design of service-oriented integration solutions, we extend our previous work on using the COSMO methodology for service mediation by introducing a goal-oriented approach to requirements engineering. With this approach, business requirements including the motivations behind the mediation solution are better understood, specified, and aligned with their technical implementations. We use the Payment Problem Scenario of the SWS Challenge to illustrate the extension

Extensible Architectures: The Strategic Value of Service Oriented Architecture in Banking

Information and communication technology (ICT) has helped to drive increasingly intense global competition. In turn, this intensity increases the need for flexibility and rapid changeability in ICT to support strategies that depend on organizational agility. We report a comparative, cross-cultural case study of the implementation of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) at a Scandinavian bank and a Swiss bank. The strategic rewards in the adoption of SOA appear to go beyond marketplace issues of ICT capability acquisition, and unexpectedly arise in the creation of an extensible organizational ICT architecture. The extensibility of the ICT architecture that results from the adoption of SOA provides potential for greater organizational agility (and thereby competitiveness)

Investigating the Role of Enterprise Architecture in Big Data Analytics Implementation: A Case Study in a Large Public Sector Organization

Big Data Analytics (BDA) offers capabilities that can support a wide range of business areas across an organization. Organizations are increasingly turning to Enterprise Architecture (EA) to manage BDA implementation complexities. Through a case study in a large public sector organization, how EA supports various stages of BDA implementation is examined. The findings show that EA can address BDA challenges through 18 specific roles, which are categorised into four domains: Strategy (6 roles), Technology (4 roles), Collaboration (3 roles) and Governance (5 roles). While EA appears to have the most prominent role in strategy planning process, our study also identifies factors that can lead to the ineffectiveness of EA roles, such as frequent changes in business strategy. This study offers important implications to research and practice in EA and BDA implementation

Survey of Service Description Languages and Their Issues in Cloud Computing

Along with the growing popularity of cloud computing technology, the amount of available cloud services and their usage frequency are increasing. In order to provide a mechanism for the efficient enforcement of service-relevant operations in cloud environment, such as service discovery, service provision, and service management, a completed and precise service specification model is highly required. In this paper, we conducted a survey on existing service description languages applied in three different domains - general services, Web/SOA services, and cloud services. We discussed and compared the past literature from seven major aspects, which are: (1) domain, (2) coverage, (3) purpose, (4) representation, (5) semantic expressivity, (6) intended users, and (7) features. Additionally, two core dimensions semantic expressivity and coverage are employed to categorize and analyse the key service description languages by using Magic Quadrant methodology. These two dimensions are regarded as the most essential factors for the evaluation of a service description model. Based on this analysis, we concluded that Unified Service Description Language (USDL) is the language with the widest coverage from business, technical and operational aspects, while OWL-S is the one that has the highest semantic expressivity. At last, critical research issues on cloud service description languages are identified and analysed. The solution of these issues requires more research efforts on the standardization of cloud service specification, which will eventually enhance the development of cloud industry

Aligning business processes and IT of multiple collaborating organisations

When multiple organisations want to collaborate with one another they have to integrate their business processes. This requires aligning the collaborative business processes and the underlying IT (Information Technology). Realizing the required alignment is, however, not trivial and is the subject of this thesis. We approached the issue of alignment in three steps. First, we explored business-IT alignment problems in detail in a real-life business case. This is done in order to clarify what alignment of business processes and IT systems across a collaboration network entails. Second, we provided a business-IT alignment framework called BITA* (pronounce bita-star). The framework provides modelling abstractions for alignment. Third, we applied the framework in two real-life case studies, including the real-life business case used in step one. By applying the framework in practice we showed that the framework can, in fact, help to address the business-IT alignment problems that we identified in the first step. The work presented in this thesis is conducted over a number of years in the context of four large EU sponsored research projects. The projects focused on alignment problems in two very distinct application areas. Two projects were about realizing transparency systems for meat supply chains and constitute the first case study. The other two projects were about realizing multidisciplinary modelling collaboration systems and constitute the second case study. Although the projects were conducted sequentially the research questions were addressed iteratively over the years. The research methodology that shows how the framework is designed and how the case studies are applied is discussed in detail in chapter 2. In chapter 3 we present BITA*, a Business-IT Alignment framework for multiple collaborating organisations. The main challenges in designing BITA* have been what models to consider for alignment and how to compare them in order to make explicit statements about alignment. We addressed this problem by introducing allocation and alignment modelling constructs to help the alignment process, and the concept of business collaboration model to represent the models that have to be aligned. We identified three groups of stakeholders for whom we designed explicit design viewpoints and associated allocation and alignment models. The Business Process to Business Process (BP2BP) alignment viewpoint is designed for business analysts who have to align diverse business collaboration process models. The IT to IT (IT2IT) alignment viewpoint is designed for software architects to align the distribution of data and IT systems across a collaboration network. The Business Process to IT (BP2IT) alignment viewpoint is designed for an interdisciplinary team of business analysts and software architects who have to align the different ways of supporting business collaboration processes with distributed IT system. An essential element of this thesis has been elaborating how business-IT alignment problems occur in the context of multi-organisational collaboration. The case studies were used to demonstrate business-IT alignment concerns. Particularly, the details of the first case study presented in chapters 4 and 5 were used in chapter 3 to help derive the alignment framework. The case study presented an ideal problem scenario since realizing transparency across supply chains is intrinsically a collaborative effort. The second case study was used to enhance the validity of our approach. The results of the second case study are presented in chapter 6. The alignment framework was designed during the iterative process we followed when realizing a generic transparency system for meat supply chains. To realize the required generic transparency system we needed a reference architecture. To derive the reference architecture we adapted an already existing and broadly-accepted generic reference architecture. We have to adapt the generic reference architecture in order to address specific requirements of the meat sector that were not considered in the generic reference architecture. The adaptation process made it clear that we needed models for representing business collaborations. We, therefore, introduced the notion of business collaboration model, which we used both to model reference architectures and to adapt them. Adaptation required aligning the generic reference architecture with the diverse business collaboration models adopted by the organisations that have to collaborate. The alignment framework is thus used for adapting a generic reference architecture in order to create a reference architecture that the collaborating organisations can, and are willing to, adopt. We identified three types of business collaboration models: business collaboration process model, business collaboration IT model, and a model for representing the relationship between these two. A business collaboration process model is a business process model that spans a collaboration network. A business collaboration IT model is a model of the distribution of the IT across the collaboration network. A business collaboration process-IT model is a model of the relationships between the elements of the business collaboration processes and the elements of the distributed IT. Each organisation is considered to adopt its own business collaboration models. For instance, different actors in meat supply chains have different views on how chain-wide transparency should be realized. Which business processes and IT systems each organisation has to deploy and use depends on the business collaboration models each food operator adopts. If two different food operators adopt the same set of business collaboration models, they are aligned; otherwise they are misaligned. Hence, alignment entails comparing the different business collaboration models adopted by the participating organisations. The results of the alignment process are explicit statements about how convergent or divergent the organisations are from the chosen generic reference architecture. The explicit statements of alignment guide how best the generic and the corresponding organisational business collaboration models can be adapted to create a better state of alignment. To further enhance the validity of the overall approach the second case study was conducted. The second case study was a retrospective investigation of two past research projects focusing on aligning environmental modelling processes and IT systems. A retrospective case study was chosen because launching a new business-IT alignment project involving multiple collaborating organisations was not feasible. The projects were undertaken to support the European Water Framework Directive, which mandated, among other things, participatory, multidisciplinary, river-basin wide and model-based studies to manage the water resources of Europe. The directive particularly required a collaborative approach to building environmental decision support systems and to deriving methodologies for applying existing decision support systems. We applied BITA* to aligning environmental modelling processes and IT systems in order to evaluate the suitability of the framework to addressing alignment problems in other application areas. The contributions of the thesis are summarized in chapter 7. The contributions include a number of design artefacts, which can be grouped into four categories: constructs, models, methods, and instantiations. The contribution in the first category includes the conceptualization of allocation and alignment. The contributions in the second category include allocation and alignment models, and reference architectures. Allocation models are representations of business collaboration models in a form that can be compared and are the basis for alignment modelling. The main contribution in the third category is the BITA* systematic approach to alignment modelling. The contributions in the fourth category are the software systems developed with the help of the reference architectures.</p

Digital Ecosystems: Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures

We view Digital Ecosystems to be the digital counterparts of biological ecosystems. Here, we are concerned with the creation of these Digital Ecosystems, exploiting the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems to evolve high-level software applications. Therefore, we created the Digital Ecosystem, a novel optimisation technique inspired by biological ecosystems, where the optimisation works at two levels: a first optimisation, migration of agents which are distributed in a decentralised peer-to-peer network, operating continuously in time; this process feeds a second optimisation based on evolutionary computing that operates locally on single peers and is aimed at finding solutions to satisfy locally relevant constraints. The Digital Ecosystem was then measured experimentally through simulations, with measures originating from theoretical ecology, evaluating its likeness to biological ecosystems. This included its responsiveness to requests for applications from the user base, as a measure of the ecological succession (ecosystem maturity). Overall, we have advanced the understanding of Digital Ecosystems, creating Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures where the word ecosystem is more than just a metaphor.Comment: 39 pages, 26 figures, journa

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