From trading to eCommunity management : responding to social and contractual challenges

"The increasing pressure for enterprises to join into agile business networks is changing the requirements on the enterprise computing systems. The supporting infrastructure is increasingly required to provide common facilities and societal infrastructure services to support the lifecycle of loosely-coupled, eContract-governed business networks. The required facilities include selection of those autonomously administered business services that the enterprises are prepared to provide and use, contract negotiations, and furthermore, monitoring of the contracted behaviour with potential for breach management. The essential change is in the requirement of a clear mapping between business-level concepts and the automation support for them. Our work has focused on developing B2B middleware to address the above challenges; however, the architecture is not feasible without management facilities for trust-aware decisions for entering business networks and interacting within them. This paper discusses how trust-based decisions are supported and positioned in the B2B middleware.""The increasing pressure for enterprises to join into agile business networks is changing the requirements on the enterprise computing systems. The supporting infrastructure is increasingly required to provide common facilities and societal infrastructure services to support the lifecycle of loosely-coupled, eContract-governed business networks. The required facilities include selection of those autonomously administered business services that the enterprises are prepared to provide and use, contract negotiations, and furthermore, monitoring of the contracted behaviour with potential for breach management. The essential change is in the requirement of a clear mapping between business-level concepts and the automation support for them. Our work has focused on developing B2B middleware to address the above challenges; however, the architecture is not feasible without management facilities for trust-aware decisions for entering business networks and interacting within them. This paper discusses how trust-based decisions are supported and positioned in the B2B middleware.""The increasing pressure for enterprises to join into agile business networks is changing the requirements on the enterprise computing systems. The supporting infrastructure is increasingly required to provide common facilities and societal infrastructure services to support the lifecycle of loosely-coupled, eContract-governed business networks. The required facilities include selection of those autonomously administered business services that the enterprises are prepared to provide and use, contract negotiations, and furthermore, monitoring of the contracted behaviour with potential for breach management. The essential change is in the requirement of a clear mapping between business-level concepts and the automation support for them. Our work has focused on developing B2B middleware to address the above challenges; however, the architecture is not feasible without management facilities for trust-aware decisions for entering business networks and interacting within them. This paper discusses how trust-based decisions are supported and positioned in the B2B middleware."Peer reviewe

Foundations of B2B electronic contracting

Nowadays, flexible electronic cooperation paradigms are required for core business processes to meet the speed and flexibility requirements dictated by fast-changing markets. These paradigms should include the functionality to establish the formal business relationship required by the importance of these core processes. The business relationship should be established in an automated, electronic way in order to match the speed and flexibility requirements mentioned above. As such, it should considerably improve on the ineffectiveness and inefficiency of traditional contracting in this context. The result of the establishment should be a detailed electronic contract that contains a complete specification of the intended cooperation between organizations. Electronic contracts should contain a precise and unambiguous specification of the collaboration at both the conceptual and technological level. Existing commercial software solutions for business-to-business contracting provide low level of automation and concentrate solely on the automated management of the contract enactment. However, in the modern, dynamic, business settings, an econtracting system has to support high automation of the e-contract establishment, enactment, and management. In the thesis, the business, legal, and technological requirements for the development of a highly automated e-contracting system are investigated. Models that satisfy these requirements and that can be used as a foundation for the implementation of an electronic contracting system are defined. First, the thesis presents the business benefits introduced to companies by highly automated electronic contracting. Next, a data and process analysis of electronic contracting is presented. The specification of electronic contracts and the required process support for electronic contract establishment and enactment are investigated. The business benefits and data and process models defined in the thesis are validated on the basis of two business cases from on-line advertising, namely the cases of online advertising in "De Telegraaf" and "Google". Finally, the thesis presents a specification of the functionalities that must be provided by an e-contracting system. A conceptual reference architecture that can be used as a starting point in the design and implementation of an electronic contracting system is defined. The work in the thesis is conducted on the intersection of the scientific areas of conceptual information and process modeling and specification on the one hand and distributed information system architecture modeling on the other hand

Electronic institutions with normative environments for agent-based E-contracting

Tese de doutoramento. Engenharia Informática. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 201

Strategic assessment of product policy in the marketing of e-commerce companies

Doctoral thesis in Business AdministrationThe fast growth of the Internet-based economy has been mainly characterised by the emergence and impact of both information-technology products and virtual transactions upon businesses and communication. Research in the area has subsequently focused on evaluating the frameworks of online business portfolios. Notably, most studies carrying out an investigation of different aspects of the ecommerce paradigm have focused on the nature and effectiveness of online marketing structures, therefore overlooking a detailed understanding of the effectiveness of product policies employed by the vast majority of e-commerce companies. This research study addresses the gap which exists in e-commerce business portfolio literature by evaluating the effectiveness of product policies employed by e-commerce companies. The analysis begins by identifying the theoretical institutions that define e-commerce companies and how firms can maximise profits with selected factors that reduce their transaction costs. The empirical section of the research begins with a first study that utilises data from a leading software source, more specifically, the download.com platform, which contains data on the downloads from the majority of companies offering software products globally. Findings reveal that consumers have strong preferences for free products over paid products. Critics’ reviews and assessments and users’ reviews both have significant positive relationships with product downloads for both free and paid software. The factors with the largest positive associations with product downloads, of both free and paid software, are advertising and branding. Finally, advertising for paid products has the largest association with higher downloads. The second study employs a longitudinal approach by using companies’ financial data for a period ranging from 10 to 14 years to assess the effectiveness of e-commerce companies’ product policies. The empirical results support the economic premise that the most efficient companies satisfy the optimality condition that a firm’s marginal costs equal its marginal revenue. The findings from the research offer relevant, in-depth insights for theory as well as for managers/practitioners and education.O rápido crescimento da economia baseada na Internet tem-se caracterizado pela emergência e pelo impacto dos produtos ligados a tecnologias de informação e transações virtuais. A investigação na área tem-se focado em avaliar as carteiras de negócios on-line. Notavelmente, a maioria dos estudos que realizam uma investigação sob diferentes perspectivas ligadas ao e-commerce têm-se concentrado na natureza e eficácia das estruturas de marketing on-line, portanto, ignorando uma compreensão detalhada da eficácia das políticas de produtos empregados pelas empresas de comércio eletrónico. Este estudo borda a lacuna que existe na literatura de portfólio de negócios de e-commerce ao avaliar a eficácia das políticas de produto desenvolvidas pelas empresas de e-commerce. o estudo identifica as instituições que definem as empresas de e-commerce e como as empresas podem maximizar os lucros com fatores selecionados que reduzem os seus custos de transação. A seção empírica do estudo inicia com um primeiro trabalho que utiliza dados de uma das principais fontes de software, em particular, a plataforma download.com. Esta plataforma contém dados sobre os downloads de empresas que oferecem produtos de software globalmente. Os resultados demonstram que os consumidores têm preferência por produtos gratuitos quando comparados com produtos pagos. Revisões e avaliações de críticos e usuários têm uma relação positiva com downloads de software gratuito e pago. Os fatores com a associação positiva mais forte em relação ao download de software livre e pago, são a publicidade e o branding. Finalmente, a publicidade de produtos pagos tem a associação mais forte com o número de downloads. O segundo estudo realiza uma abordagem longitudinal, utilizando os dados de empresas durante num período de 10 a 14 anos para avaliar a eficácia das políticas de produtos das empresas de e-commerce. Os resultados empíricos sustentam a premissa económica que as empresas mais eficientes satisfazem a condição de optimalidade onde custos marginais de uma empresa são iguais à sua receita marginal. Os resultados da investigação permitem retirar ilações relevantes e aprofundadas para a teoria, assim como para os gestores/practitioners e ensino

Contract specification for compliance checking of business interactions

PhD ThesisIn the business world, contracts are used to regulate business interactions between trading parties. When business transactions are conducted over an electronic channel, electronic forms of contracts are needed; and because of the additional capabilities of an electronic means, their function can be extended to include compliance checking for the interactions of the parties, and enforcement of contractual clauses when needed. A contract is assumed to be a document that stipulates a list of clauses stating rights, obligations and prohibitions, and their associated constraints, that business partners are expected to honour. Compliance checking is taken to mean checking if business operations executed by business partners match with their rights, obligations and prohibitions as stipulated in the contract. We intend enforcement as making sure that business operations match the rights, obligations, and prohibitions of the parties, possibly compensating for deviations from expected behaviour. In traditional business interactions, compliance checking and enforcement are carried out man- ually. With electronic business interactions, such tasks can ideally be automated. This requires a model for the process of checking contract compliance, and an electronic language for the speci ca- tion of the actual contract. The rst main contribution of this thesis is such a model. The EROP model (from Events, Rights, Obligations and Prohibitions), composed of an ontology and an architecture, observes the interactions between the business partners, forms an interpretation of their outcome from a neutral perspective and checks their contractual compliance by matching executed operations with their sets of rights, obligations, and prohibitions, and reacting accordingly to them. Implementations of the EROP ontology and of an experimental prototype of the architecture are also presented. The second main contribution of this thesis is the EROP language, designed to specify contractual compliance, and to regulate execution of business operations through the manipulation of the sets of rights, obligations and prohibitions of the business partners. The EROP language is rule-based and event-driven, and, in a similar fashion to contracts in natural language, contractual clauses are expressed as business rules, conditional statements associating events and conditions to lists of actions altering the rights, obligations and prohibitions of the participants. The practicality of the approach taken with the EROP language is evaluated presenting a larger, complete scenario and a number of smaller ones taken from comparable work. Notes on the translation of the EROP language to one on a lower level of abstraction that relies on the implementation of the EROP ontology are also presented. The Appendix presents a formal grammar for the language.UK EPSRC e-Science Pilot Project: "GOLD (Grid-based Information Models to Support the Rapid Innovation of High Value Added Chemicals)

A feature-based approach to web services e-contract establishment

Orientadores: Maria Beatriz Felgar de Toledo, Itana Maria de Souza GimenesTese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de ComputaçãoResumo: Contratos eletrônicos descrevem processos de negócio interorganizacionais em termos de fornecimento e consumo de serviços eletrônicos (atualmente serviços Web). O estabelecimento de contratos eletrônicos em um determinado domínio de negócios normalmente envolve um conjunto de pontos comuns e pontos de variação bem definidos. Essas propriedades não são completamente exploradas pelas abordagens existentes para o estabelecimento de contratos eletrônicos. Modelos de características têm sido amplamente usados para capturar e gerenciar pontos comuns e variabilidades em famílias de produtos no contexto de linha de produto de software. Esta tese apresenta uma abordagem baseada em modelos de características para ser aplicada no estabelecimento de contratos eletrônicos para serviços Web. Seu objetivo é melhorar a estruturação e o reuso de informação em contratos eletrônicos, incluindo atributos de qualidade de serviço. Características são usadas para representar possíveis elementos de contratos eletrônicos para serviços Web com o objetivo de orientar a criação de instâncias de molde de contrato eletrônico e atuar, portanto, como um gerenciador de espaço de configuração. A abordagem proposta usa as linguagens WS-BPEL e WS-Agreement para especificar, respectivamente, processos de negócio e atributos de qualidade de serviço. Para oferecer apoio automatizado à abordagem proposta, um conjunto de ferramentas, chamado FeatureContract, foi desenvolvido como parte deste trabalho. Para demonstrar aplicabilidade da abordagem, foi realizado um estudo de caso dentro do contexto de sistemas para telecomunicaçõesAbstract: Electronic contracts describe inter-organizational business processes in terms of supply and consumption of electronic services (commonly Web services). The establishment of electronic contracts in a particular business domain usually involves a set of well-defined common and variation points. These properties are not fully exploited by the existing electronic contract establishment approaches. Feature modeling is a software engineering technique that has been widely used for capturing and managing commonalities and variabilities of product families in the context of software product line. This thesis presents a feature-based approach to be applied in the establishment of Web services electronic contracts. The approach aims at improving the structure and reuse of information in electronic contracts, including quality of service attributes. Features are used to represent possible elements in Web services electronic contracts in order to drive contract template instantiation and act, therefore, as a configuration space manager. The proposed approach uses WS-BPEL and WS-Agreement languages to specify business processes and quality of service attributes respectively. To provide automatic support for the proposed approach, a toolkit, named FeatureContract, was developed as part of this work. Aiming at demonstrating the approach applicability, a case study was carried within the telecommunication systems contextDoutoradoSistemas de InformaçãoDoutor em Ciência da Computaçã

ICTs in medium-sized farms in developing countries: a case study in Mexico: conventional banana and organic rice cultivation

This research examines how farmers working medium-sized farms in Mexico have adopted and enacted Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), and how these ICTs have impacted work practices. The effects of ICTs on farmers’ economic relations are explored from a business process perspective using a framework that combines Transaction Cost (TCT) and Social Embeddedness theories. A single case study in Mexico with two embedded units of analysis from different crop sectors, a cluster of banana producers from Tabasco and an organic rice grower from Campeche, provide an in-depth understanding of the adoption of ICTs and their impact. We examine issues of learning and co-operation, and how ICTs have affected production and distribution and the positioning of farmers in the context of their work practices and economic relations. The thesis discusses the ICTs used in the business process cycle of farming and their impact on business development and economic exchange. The research elaborates on and confirms the existence of network forms of organisation that operate in the farmers’ communities and analyses their social embeddedness. The findings show that information technologies bring improvements to the agricultural business process, facilitating not only the collection, collation and analysis of data to support informed decisions, but also innovative farming and business practices through learning and co-operation. We find that ICTs complement and support social relationships, both preexisting (traditional community connections and business links) and novel (virtual contacts and social media) to stimulate business development. The significance of social context is corroborated and should help inform development policy