Generic Business Model Types for Enterprise Mashup Intermediaries

The huge demand for situational and ad-hoc applications desired by the mass of business end users led to a new kind of Web applications, well-known as Enterprise Mashups. Users with no or limited programming skills are empowered to leverage in a collaborative manner existing Mashup components by combining and reusing company internal and external resources within minutes to new value added applications. Thereby, Enterprise Mashup environments interact as intermediaries to match the supply of providers and demand of consumers. By following the design science approach, we propose an interaction phase model artefact based on market transaction phases to structure required intermediary features. By means of five case studies, we demonstrate the application of the designed model and identify three generic business model types for Enterprise Mashups intermediaries (directory, broker, and marketplace). So far, intermediaries following a real marketplace business model don’t exist in context of Enterprise Mashups and require further research for this emerging paradigm

C. H. Crawford

Toward an on demand service-oriented architecture The success of an on demand e-business requires that business process, application, and information technology (IT) infrastructure integration merge into a comprehensive and cohesive architecture, where business process transformation drives serviceoriented development and on demand enterprise computing. This enabling architecture is often described as a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and is a prerequisite accelerator for on demand solutions. The primary focus of SOA has been on dynamic reconfiguration of services from defined business processes, and on developing business services based on Web services and, more recently, grid services. Current descriptions of SOA are less focused on overall IT infrastructure enablement, both from a business policy perspective and within the context of service-oriented development. In this paper, we extend the current thinking on SOA to include a more comprehensive integration of business process transformation and the enabling technologies of service-oriented development and policy-based IT management. We call this extension on demand SOA. We develop these concepts by using an existing scenario: a financial services sector ‘‘Life Change’ ’ business process scenario, which involves distributed and disjoint transactions as well as stateless high-performance computing (HPC) applications. Over the last 40 years, information technology (IT) architectures and development approaches have dealt with increasing levels of IT complexity and integration challenges. Constrained budgets continue to mandate that legacy systems be reused rather than replaced. Growth by merger and acquisition requires that entire IT organizations be integrated and absorbed. Additionally, easy access to the Web has created the possibility for new business models, which must be evaluated for their potential. At the same time, the traditional needs of IT organizations persist—primarily focused on quick response to new requirements, typically consisting in turn of corporate management pushing for better IT utilization, skills simplification, greater return on investment (ROI), continued integration of historically separate systems, and faster implementation of new ones. The endless varieties of hardware, operating systems, middleware, languages, and dat

Introducing Service-oriented Organizational Structure for Capability Sourcing

At the strategic management level in an organization, participants in the decision making process need to share a common language to facilitate discussions and enhance related decision making. The context of this position paper is about strategic sourcing decision making and the goal is to facilitate it through a well-defined language. Companies need to acquire the right capabilities from the right source, and the right shore, at the right cost to improve their competitive position. In this position paper, capability sourcing is introduced as an organizing process to gain access to best-in-class capabilities for all activities in a company's value chain to ensure long-term competitive advantage. Furthermore, capability sourcing takes place in the service-oriented organizational structure that is introduced as a flexible structure to allocate the resources that shape the firm's competitive advantages. Therefore, the conceptualization of service system is proposed as a well-defined language for modeling, formalizing, representing and visualizing the concepts, constructs, and models in the capability sourcing process to facilitate strategic sourcing decision making

Integrating Risk Representation at Strategic Level for IT Service Governance: A Comprehensive Framework

peer reviewedOrganizations tend to set and pursuit objectives against an environment which faces levels of uncertainty. The effect of these uncertainties on objectives can be positive (opportunity risk) or/and negative (hazard risk). With every decision made by people within a company, risks are created, modified, updated or deleted. Therefore, the way these decisions are made in terms of change management strategy as well as the information they are based on, influence how objectives are achieved and requirements fulfilled. Despite the importance of risk definition and risk taking at all organizational levels, organizations mostly consider risk at the management and operational levels. Risks nevertheless also need to be considered at the strategic (governance) level because they constitute what hampers an organization to achieve its strategy. This paper focuses on risk at the strategic level and for this purpose it enriches the Model Driven IT Governance (MoDrIGo) framework; the enriched framework allows to evaluate the alignment of business IT services with strategic objectives while balancing this alignment/support with the potential risk at governance level. All in all, the framework is applicable in broader governance scenarios. The relevance of MoDrIGo as starting point to build a risk-aware governance framework (compared to other similar methods) is mainly because of its service-orientation and its focus on software development issues. The enhanced framework thus provides a high-level risk overview that helps organizations to successfully perceive, detect and treat risks when pursuing their objectives