e-Business challenges and directions: important themes from the first ICE-B workshop

A three-day asynchronous, interactive workshop was held at ICE-B’10 in Piraeus, Greece in July of 2010. This event captured conference themes for e-Business challenges and directions across four subject areas: a) e-Business applications and models, b) enterprise engineering, c) mobility, d) business collaboration and e-Services, and e) technology platforms. Quality Function Deployment (QFD) methods were used to gather, organize and evaluate themes and their ratings. This paper summarizes the most important themes rated by participants: a) Since technology is becoming more economic and social in nature, more agile and context-based application develop methods are needed. b) Enterprise engineering approaches are needed to support the design of systems that can evolve with changing stakeholder needs. c) The digital native groundswell requires changes to business models, operations, and systems to support Prosumers. d) Intelligence and interoperability are needed to address Prosumer activity and their highly customized product purchases. e) Technology platforms must rapidly and correctly adapt, provide widespread offerings and scale appropriately, in the context of changing situational contexts

SOA Based E-Business Systems Design

The development of e-business promotes the creation of new e-services; consequently, ways of fast and quality designing of e-services are required. When developing e-services in SOA, it is very important to build the architecture of e-business system that makes the e-service compliant with all and any quality criteria (QoS) specified for it, which would expand its usability; furthermore, it is necessary to implement any changes swiftly and in good quality to be able to adjust to the rapidly changing business environment. This means that effective design methods should be used in creating e-business systems and e-services, which would ensure the building of an acceptable e-business system architecture. A drawback of the existing methods is the subjective opinion of the system's architect, and that may not always lead to the best solution. Therefore, it is possible to apply the Quality Attributes Driven Design method for web services that is based on the use of formal optimisation methods. Initially the e-service is described as an algorithm graph, and by segmenting its vertices in all possible ways the web service graphs are obtained. The segmentation of the algorithm graph means that all the possible solutions that can affect the quality of the e-service system architecture are dealt with. Using multi-criteria optimisation, a Pareto optimality set is obtained from all the web service graphs. Web service graphs of the obtained Pareto optimality set can serve as the basis for selecting an acceptable e-business system architecture