A Quality-Driven Methodology for Information Systems Integration

Information systems integration is an essential instrument for organizations to attain advantage in today’s growing and fast changing business and technology landscapes. Integration solutions generate added value by combining the functionality and services of heterogeneous and diverse systems. Existing integration environments tend to rely heavily on technical, platform-dependent skills. Consequently, the solutions that they enable are not optimally aligned with the envisioned business goals of the organization. Furthermore, the gap between the goals and the solutions complicates the task of evaluating the quality of integration solutions. To address these challenges, we propose a quality-driven, model-driven methodology for designing and developing integration solutions. The methodology spans organizational and systems design details, providing a holistic view of the integration solution and its underlying business goals. A multi-view meta-model provides the basis for the integration design. Quality factors that affect various aspects of the integration solution guide and inform the progress of the methodology. An example business case is presented to demonstrate the application of the methodology

Анализ литературного произведения : методология и методика

Business frameworks offer great opportunities of communication between people for working on the enterprise system engineering processes, as well as for eliciting services that the enterprise can offer in collaboration contexts. However, these kinds of frameworks, such as Resource-Event-Agent and Open-edi, recently unified in Open-edi Business Ontology (OeBTO), lack formal representations. This fact considerably limits their use in system development, particularly in model-driven development methods where the efficiency of transformations is of great importance. In this paper we suggest a formalization of OeBTO using OMG’s standard Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR), as a method for creating a service-centric business model. This makes it possible to provide the necessary formal logic foundation to allow automatic processing of the business model and its transformation to a system-level service model. An example from the bank loan business sector is used to argument the application of the method

Model-based Requirements for Integrating Cloud Services

Cloud-based services provide an alternative to the in-house implementation of various types of functionality. Organizations rely on such services to minimize the need for long-term commitments and enhance scalability and ubiquitous access to the services. However, achieving complex tasks that require a combination of services is not well studied, despite the potential added value. This paper investigates the requirements encountered when integrating cloud-based services in the modern organization. The paper proposes a model-driven solution for capturing the requirements for integrating cloud-based services. The model is to be used within the larger context of the organizational design; modeling components used to describe requirements are related to other views of the organization. A prototype tool and an example business case are presented to illustrate how the requirements model can be elicited and designed. The models are capable of being transformed into an integration solution

Integration of Enterprise Modeling and Model Driven Development : A Meta-Model and a Tool Prototype

The use of models for designing and developing Information Systems (IS) has changed in recent years. Models are no longer considered a peripheral documentation medium that is poorly maintained and often neglected. Rather, models are increasingly seen as essential parts of the final product—as central artifacts that drive and guide the development efforts. The knowledge that modelers rely on when designing models is represented as formal models and clearly defined rules for transforming the models. The flexibility, reliability, and effectiveness offered by the formal models and the transformations are making Model Driven Development (MDD) a popular choice for building IS. Models also serve in describing enterprise design, where enterprise-level models capture organizational knowledge and aid in understanding, improving, and growing the enterprise. Enterprise Modeling (EM) offers a structured and unified view of the enterprise, thereby enabling more informed and accurate decisions to be made. Many MDD approaches have been proposed to tackle a wide range of IS-related issues, but little attention is being paid to the source of the knowledge captured by the IS models. EM approaches capture organizational knowledge and provide the necessary input and underlying context for designing IS. However, the results produced by EM approaches need to be manually analyzed by modelers to create the initial MDD model. This interruption of the MDD process represents a gap between enterprise models and MDD models. Limited research has been done to connect EM to MDD in a systematic and structured manner based on the principles of model-driven development. This thesis proposes a unifying meta-model for integrating EM and MDD. The meta-model captures the inherent links that exist between organizational knowledge and IS design. This helps to improve the alignment between organizational goals and the IS that are created to support them. The research presented herein follows the guidelines of the design science research methodology. It starts with a state-of-the-art survey of the current relationship between MDD and prior stages of development. The findings of the survey are used to elicit a set of necessary properties for integrating EM and MDD. The unifying meta-model is then proposed as the basis for an integrated IS development approach that applies the principles of MDD and starts on the enterprise level by considering enterprise models in the development process. The design of the meta-model supports the elicited integration properties. The unifying meta-model is based on the Enterprise Knowledge Development (EKD) approach to EM. A prototype tool is developed to support the unifying meta-model, following a study to choose a suitable implementation environment. The use of the unifying meta-model is demonstrated through the implemented tool platform using an example case study, revealing its advantages and highlighting the potential for improvement and future development

A Quality-Driven Methodology for Information Systems Integration

Information systems integration is an essential instrument for organizations to attain advantage in today’s growing and fast changing business and technology landscapes. Integration solutions generate added value by combining the functionality and services of heterogeneous and diverse systems. Existing integration environments tend to rely heavily on technical, platform-dependent skills. Consequently, the solutions that they enable are not optimally aligned with the envisioned business goals of the organization. Furthermore, the gap between the goals and the solutions complicates the task of evaluating the quality of integration solutions. To address these challenges, we propose a quality-driven, model-driven methodology for designing and developing integration solutions. The methodology spans organizational and systems design details, providing a holistic view of the integration solution and its underlying business goals. A multi-view meta-model provides the basis for the integration design. Quality factors that affect various aspects of the integration solution guide and inform the progress of the methodology. An example business case is presented to demonstrate the application of the methodology

Analyzing the Integration between Requirements and Models in Model Driven Development

In Model Driven Development (MDD), models replace software code as the development artifact. At the same time, requirements represent the information that is elaborated in models. However, despite the tight relationship between models and requirements, only a few MDD approaches provide the necessary methodological guidelines and tool support to explicitly facilitate this relationship. We analyze approaches for integrating requirements with models within MDD and highlight the common characteristics, benefits, and problems. Based on the analysis, we elicit a set of general properties that need to be fulfilled when considering the integration of requirements and models, and we assess the contribution of the considered approaches accordingly

A Comparative Analysis of Enterprise Modeling Approaches for Modeling Business Strategy

Abstract. A gap in the alignment of business and IT lies between strategy and IS, despite the advancements of enterprise modeling. The objective of our study is to compare various enterprise modeling approaches with respect to their ability to capture and represent strategy notions. This includes identifying strategy notions from established business strategy formulations within Strategic Management, which are expressed in the Unified Business Strategy Meta-model. The interdisciplinary nature of the study constitutes a research challenge due to the significant difference on the levels of abstraction between Strategic Management and IS. To the best of our knowledge, no similar effort has been undertaken, therefore, the outcome of this study will provide the enterprise modeling community with a basis to address strategy and IS alignment linking strategic objectives and intentions to information systems

Analysis of Enterprise Modeling Approaches for Modeling Business Strategy

A gap in the alignment of business and IT lies between strategy and IS, despite the advancements of enterprise modeling. The objective of our study is to compare various enterprise modeling approaches with respect to their ability to capture and represent strategy notions. This includes identifying strategy notions from established business strategy formulations within Strategic Manag ement, which are expressed in the Unified Business Strategy Meta - model. The interdisciplinary nature of the study constitutes a research challenge due to the significant difference on the levels of abstraction between Strategic Management and IS. To the best of our knowledge, no similar fort has been undertaken, therefore, the outcome of this study will provide the enterprise modeling community with a basis to address strategy and IS alignment linking strategic objectives and intentions to information systems