Value-Based Business-IT Alignment in Networked Constellations of Enterprises

Business-ICT alignment is the problem of matching ICTservices with the requirements of the business. In businesses of any significant size, business-ICT alignment is a hard problem, which is currently not solved completely. With the advent of networked constellations of enterprises, the problem gets a new dimension, because in such a network, there is not a single point of authority for making decisions about ICT support to solve conflicts in requirements these various enterprises may have. Network constellations exist when different businesses decide to cooperate by means of ICT networks, but they also exist in large corporations, which often consist of nearly independent business units, and thus have no single point of authority anymore. In this position paper we discuss the need for several solution techniques to address the problem of business-ICT alignment in networked constellations. Such techniques include: -RE techniques to describe networked value constellations requesting and offering ICT services as economic value. These techniques should allow reasoning about the matching of business needs with available ICT services in the constellation. - RE techniques to design a networked ICT architecture that supports ICT services required by the business, taking the value offered by those services, and the costs incurred by the architecture, into account. - Models of decision processes about ICT services and their architecture, and maturity models of those processes.The techniques and methods will be developed and validated using case studies and action research

Business models and information systems for sustainable development

Businesses are expected to explore market opportunities in the area of sustainable development, thus contributing to finding solutions aiming at sustainable quality of life. This will require adaptation and innovation of business models and information systems, with challenges of particular interest to the business modeling and software design community. This paper briefly discusses two relevant topics in this respect, namely (i) goal and value modeling, and (ii) model-driven development. We mention existing work that can be taken as a starting point for addressing sustainability issues, and we make some observations that may be taken into account when extending existing work

Semantic-based policy engineering for autonomic systems

This paper presents some important directions in the use of ontology-based semantics in achieving the vision of Autonomic Communications. We examine the requirements of Autonomic Communication with a focus on the demanding needs of ubiquitous computing environments, with an emphasis on the requirements shared with Autonomic Computing. We observe that ontologies provide a strong mechanism for addressing the heterogeneity in user task requirements, managed resources, services and context. We then present two complimentary approaches that exploit ontology-based knowledge in support of autonomic communications: service-oriented models for policy engineering and dynamic semantic queries using content-based networks. The paper concludes with a discussion of the major research challenges such approaches raise

Understanding business strategies of networked value constellations using goal- and value modeling

In goal-oriented requirements engineering (GORE), one usually proceeds from a goal analysis to a requirements specification, usually of IT systems. In contrast, we consider the use of GORE for the design of IT-enabled value constellations, which are collections of enterprises that jointly satisfy a consumer need using information technology. The requirements analysis needed to do such a crossorganizational design not only consists of a goal analysis, in which the relevant strategic goals of the participating companies are aligned, but also of a value analysis, in which the commercial sustainability of the constellation is explored. In this paper we investigate the relation between strategic goal- and value modeling. We use theories about business strategy such as those by Porter to identify strategic goals of a value constellation, and operationalize these goals using value models. We show how value modeling allows us to find more detailed goals, and to analyze conflicts among goals

Benefits and challenges of applying Semantic Web Services in the e-Government domain

Joining up services in e-Government usually implies governmental agencies acting in concert without a central control regime. This requires the sharing of scattered and heterogeneous data. Semantic Web Service (SWS) technology can help to integrate, mediate and reason between these datasets. However, since few real-world applications have been developed, it is still unclear which are the actual benefits and issues of adopting such a technology in the e-Government domain. In this paper, we contribute to raising awareness of the potential benefits in the e-Government community by analyzing motivations, requirements, and expected results, before proposing a reusable SWS-based framework. We demonstrate the application of this framework by a compelling use case: a GIS-based emergency planning system. We illustrate the obtained benefits and the key challenges which remain to be addressed

Federated Embedded Systems – a review of the literature in related fields

This report is concerned with the vision of smart interconnected objects, a vision that has attracted much attention lately. In this paper, embedded, interconnected, open, and heterogeneous control systems are in focus, formally referred to as Federated Embedded Systems. To place FES into a context, a review of some related research directions is presented. This review includes such concepts as systems of systems, cyber-physical systems, ubiquitous computing, internet of things, and multi-agent systems. Interestingly, the reviewed fields seem to overlap with each other in an increasing number of ways

Standards Framework for Intelligent Manufacturing Systems Supply Chain

ISBN 979-953-307-708-5 http://www.intechopen.com/articles/show/title/standards-framework-for-intelligent-manufacturing-systems-supply-chain#referenceThe global market is striving to increase competitiveness among organizations and networks. Nowadays, management of supply chains does not only consider business processes in the traditional value chain, but also processes that penetrate networks of organisations. Indeed, the formation of cooperation and collaboration partnerships between several small organizations can be, in multiple cases, more efficient by comparison with big companies (Rudberg et al., 2002). This way, the research on supply chain management has turned from an intra-enterprise focus towards an inter-enterprise focus with companies looking for enhanced interoperability between computer systems and applications. Supply chain networks are characterized by different structures such as, business processes and technological, organizational, topological, informational, and financial structures. All are interrelated but following their own dynamics. Thus, in order to ensure a high responsiveness level, the supply chain plans must be formed robustly and extremely quickly in relation to all the structures (Gupta & Maranas, 2003). In fact, with regards to supply chain in the advent of globalization, one of the difficulties enterprises are facing is the lack of interoperability of systems and software applications to manage and orchestrate the different structures involved (Jardim-Goncalves et al. 2006; Panetto et al., 2006; Farinha et al., 2007). The increasing need for cooperation and collaboration together with the rapid advances in information and communication technology (ICT) have brought supply chain planning into the forefront of the business practices of most manufacturing and service organizations (Gupta & Maranas, 2003). Moreover, there has been a growing interest and research in e-business solutions to facilitate information sharing between organisations in the supply chain network

Generating collaborative systems for digital libraries: A model-driven approach

This is an open access article shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). Copyright @ 2010 The Authors.The design and development of a digital library involves different stakeholders, such as: information architects, librarians, and domain experts, who need to agree on a common language to describe, discuss, and negotiate the services the library has to offer. To this end, high-level, language-neutral models have to be devised. Metamodeling techniques favor the definition of domainspecific visual languages through which stakeholders can share their views and directly manipulate representations of the domain entities. This paper describes CRADLE (Cooperative-Relational Approach to Digital Library Environments), a metamodel-based framework and visual language for the definition of notions and services related to the development of digital libraries. A collection of tools allows the automatic generation of several services, defined with the CRADLE visual language, and of the graphical user interfaces providing access to them for the final user. The effectiveness of the approach is illustrated by presenting digital libraries generated with CRADLE, while the CRADLE environment has been evaluated by using the cognitive dimensions framework