Value-Oriented Design of Service Coordination Processes: Correctness and Trust

The rapid growth of service coordination languages creates a need for methodological support for coordination design. Coordination design differs from workflow design because a coordination process connects different businesses that can each make design decisions independently from the others, and no business is interested in supporting the business processes of others. In multi-business cooperative design, design decisions are only supported by all businesses if they contribute to the profitability of each participating business. So in order to make coordination design decisions supported by all participating businesses, requirements for a coordination process should be derived from the business model that makes the coordination profitable for each participating business. We claim that this business model is essentially a model of intended value exchanges. We model the intended value exchanges of a business model as e3 -value value models and coordination processes as UML activity diagrams. The contribution of the paper is then to propose and discuss a criterion according to which a service coordination process must be correct with respect to a value exchange model. This correctness is necessary to gain business support for the process. Finally, we discuss methodological consequences of this approach for service coordination process design

Understanding business strategies of networked value constellations using goal- and value modeling

In goal-oriented requirements engineering (GORE), one usually proceeds from a goal analysis to a requirements specification, usually of IT systems. In contrast, we consider the use of GORE for the design of IT-enabled value constellations, which are collections of enterprises that jointly satisfy a consumer need using information technology. The requirements analysis needed to do such a crossorganizational design not only consists of a goal analysis, in which the relevant strategic goals of the participating companies are aligned, but also of a value analysis, in which the commercial sustainability of the constellation is explored. In this paper we investigate the relation between strategic goal- and value modeling. We use theories about business strategy such as those by Porter to identify strategic goals of a value constellation, and operationalize these goals using value models. We show how value modeling allows us to find more detailed goals, and to analyze conflicts among goals

Value-Based Business-IT Alignment in Networked Constellations of Enterprises

Business-ICT alignment is the problem of matching ICTservices with the requirements of the business. In businesses of any significant size, business-ICT alignment is a hard problem, which is currently not solved completely. With the advent of networked constellations of enterprises, the problem gets a new dimension, because in such a network, there is not a single point of authority for making decisions about ICT support to solve conflicts in requirements these various enterprises may have. Network constellations exist when different businesses decide to cooperate by means of ICT networks, but they also exist in large corporations, which often consist of nearly independent business units, and thus have no single point of authority anymore. In this position paper we discuss the need for several solution techniques to address the problem of business-ICT alignment in networked constellations. Such techniques include: -RE techniques to describe networked value constellations requesting and offering ICT services as economic value. These techniques should allow reasoning about the matching of business needs with available ICT services in the constellation. - RE techniques to design a networked ICT architecture that supports ICT services required by the business, taking the value offered by those services, and the costs incurred by the architecture, into account. - Models of decision processes about ICT services and their architecture, and maturity models of those processes.The techniques and methods will be developed and validated using case studies and action research

Value-based Design of Collaboration Processes for e-Commerce

Designing cross-organizational e-business applications faces the problem that the collaborating businesses must align their commercial interests without any central decision making authority. The design process must therefore yield a clear view of the commercial value of the collaboration for each economic actor, as well as a clear specification of the activities to be performed by each actor and a specification of information systems to be used by each actor. We present guidelines for designing the value network of the collaboration, which shows the commercial value of the collaboration for each participating actor. We then present guidelines for transforming the value network into process models, which show the feasibility of implementing the value network in the business processes of the actors. Our approach has been developed in different consultancy projects. We illustrate our approach with a consultancy project performed at a company that we will call the Amsterdam Times

Value Framing: A Prelude to Software Problem Framing

Software problem framing is a way to find specifications for software. Software problem frames can be used to structure the environment of a software system (the machine) and specify desired software properties in such a way that we can show that software with these properties will help achieve the required effects in the environment. Actually framing a software problem, i.e. finding suitable problem frames of a given situation, is creative activity for which no guidelines are currently known. In this paper, we propose to use an idea exploration technique called e3-value to find software problem frames. The e3-value methodology is an approach to help business analysists solve the problem of designing a networked enterprise, defined as a set of businesses or business units that make money by performing value exchanges over a computer network. The outcome of e3-value is viewed by business managers as a solution, but it is a problem for software engineers who have to implement this idea. In this paper we illustrate the combination of e3-value with problem framing by means of a small example from real life, and discuss the research questions that come out of this

Goal-Oriented RE for E-Services

Current research in service-oriented computing (SoC) is mainly\ud about technology standards for SoC and the design of software components that\ud implement these standards. In this paper we investigate the problem of\ud requirements engineering (RE) for SoC. We propose a framework for goaloriented\ud RE for e-services that identifies patterns in service provisioning and\ud shows how to compose business models from them. Based on an analysis of 19\ud business models for e-intermediaries we identified 10 intermediation service\ud patterns and their goals, and show how we can compose new business models\ud from those patterns in a goal-oriented way. We represent the service patterns\ud using value models, which are models that show which value exchanges\ud business patterns engage in. We conclude the paper with a discussion of how\ud this approach can be extended to include business process patterns to perform\ud the services, and software components that support these processes

International accessibility and rental levels: a case study for the office-market in the Netherlands

Rental levels of office floor space are determined by aspects of the buildings and aspects of the location. In this contribution we focus on the characteristics of locations using a large database of market-transactions. Accessibility proves to have an important impact on price levels. In particular the most expensive locations must have an excellent international accessibility by Air. Empirical results are presented.