Mashups: An Approach to Overcoming the Business/IT Gap in Service-Oriented Architectures

For quite a long time already, great importance has been attached to the concept of Service-Oriented Architectures for future IT-architectures. However, a major challenge in implementing this concept lies in the gap between the functional department and IT department. Mashups, an architecture also based on services, try to avoid this gap by letting the user himself integrate the services. The following article analyzes similarities and differences between both architecture approaches, and explains to what extent and in which cases Mashups could complement a Service-Oriented Architecture

A Return on Our Experience of Modeling a Service-oriented Organization in a Service Cartography

We present a longitudinal project using action design research, which is a four-year collaboration between two EPFL entities: The research Laboratory for Systemic Modeling (LAMS) and EPFL’s IT department, called the VPSI. During that time the VPSI was going through a transformation into a service-oriented organization. The research project began as an open-ended modeling of some of the VPSI processes. It slowly matured into the design and development of a visualization tool we call service cartography. During this research, we learned that, to successfully apply service-orientation, focusing purely on IT architecture and end-customer value is not enough. Attention must be given to the exchange of internal services between the service organization members and their alignment with the services expected by the external stakeholders. In this paper we present the evolution of (1) our understanding of what services are, and (2) our conceptualization of how the service cartography facilitates the service-oriented thinking

A service-oriented view on business processes and supporting applications

Even if SOA has received much attention, there is still no common definition of what a SOA is or what a SOA should provide for business. In this paper, we have therefore introduced a conceptual model on service orientation that explains the impact of service orientation on business processes and supporting applications. We consider this consolidation as an essential step for establishing methods for a better business IT alignment as well as more systematic and integrated business and software engineering in the context of service-oriented enterprises

Service-Oriented Process Control with Grafchart and the Devices Profile for Web Services

To fulfill increasing requirements within the manufacturing sector, highly flexible and adaptable automation systems are needed. It is desirable to have one integrated approach that stretches from the process planning phase, through the implementation phase and all the way to the phase for execution of the process control logics. One promising approach is to use the concepts of service-oriented architectures within automation, here referred to as SOA-AT. As service technology, DPWS has proved to be the most suitable for realizing service based communication on device level. The paper shows how Grafchart, a graphical language aimed for sequential control applications, can support the development of DPWS applications, and how Grafchart can be used for process modeling and execution in the planning and execution phase. This constitutes a unique framework for the development and execution of SOA applications in accordance with the requirements for automatic control tasks. The paper also presents an industry-related experimental setup in which the SOA-AT concepts are demonstrated through the use of Grafchart