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

CHOOSE: Towards a metamodel for enterprise architecture in small and medium-sized enterprises

Enterprise architecture (EA) is a coherent whole of principles, methods, and models that are used in the design and realization of an enterprise's organizational structure, business processes, information systems, and infrastructure. Recent research indicates the need for EA in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), important drivers of economy, as they struggle with problems related to a lack of structure and overview of their business. However, existing EA frameworks are perceived as too complex and no EA approach adapted to an SME context exists. Therefore, this paper presents the CHOOSE metamodel for EA in SMEs that is developed and evaluated during action research in a Belgian SME. This metamodel is based on the essentials of EA frameworks and is kept simple to be usable in an SME context. The final CHOOSE metamodel includes only four essential concepts (goal, actor, operation, object), one for each most frequently used EA focus. An extract from the CHOOSE model from the Belgian SME is presented as an example. Finally, the CHOOSE metamodel is evaluated according to the EA essentials and the requirements for EA in an SME context