Anatomy of Business Networks: Future Internet Enterprise Systems Accelerating Procurement Interoperability

Large Business Networks impose interoperability challenges on Enterprise Systems in the form of ERP and extended ERP, involving many organizations and people. First, the classic document exchange based system connection approach across company borderlines is time-consuming and costly. Second, today’s enterprise systems lack support of the people dimension with specific focus on enabling semi-structured and unstructured activities as part of the entire end-to-end-process. In this paper we present our research-in-progress of a running design science research project focusing on creating a software artifact that addresses the two challenges of significant integration effort and the lack of semi-structured and unstructured process support. We look at these two challenges specifically in the domain of procurement, where many connections between business partner result in high integration effort and involves a large number of semi-structured and unstructured activities

Design principles for supply network systems

Supply networks crossing organizational boundaries become more and more critical for success in the dynamics of supply relationships. The ability to quickly find, connect and qualify business partners as sources of supply on a regional, national and international basis, and to sustain those relationships crossing intercultural barriers along the completion of business cases, is and will remain a key competitive differentiator in the global economy. Supply networks in particular are characterized by wide inter-organizational settings of connected entities, with the key focus on supply management and procurement in the provision of goods and services. As such, they describe the value generation flow between connected business partners. Supporting supply networks on an individual company level, the primary target of enterprise resource planning systems is to standardize structured data and to streamline business processes within a company. Extending this scope, e-procurement and supplier-relationship management systems focus on supply networks beyond the boundary of a single company. They enable integration across companies by establishing standards for document exchange between different systems. However, these approaches still result in costly, rigid, and complex data and process integration of peer-to-peer nodes in dynamic supply networks. Also, the emergence of e-marketplaces in the early 2000s could not overcome these challenges, and many of the most promising e-marketplace providers and concepts disappeared when the .com-bubble burst – primarily because of the data and process integration complexity that arises when connecting dyadic and many-to-many network relationships on a single platform. Besides this integration challenge, e-procurement and supplier-relationship management systems are targeted on streamlining structured business processes and handling of structured data. Structured data and processes have fixed coded meaning, format and sequence - from start to completion of a business transaction. Structured data is normally stored in database fields, and structured processes follow pre-defined patterns of transactional steps to complete standardized business cases. The coverage of structure data and processes is mostly sufficient where the use case is commonly defined and accepted by the involved business partners, composed mostly of routine steps and not requiring much direct human interaction. To cope with the increasing challenges in the highly collaborative, inter-organizational settings and to leverage Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 capabilities in supply networks, the support of unstructured interactions become more important. Unlike structured data and processes, unstructured interactions like instant messages, feeds, or blogs have no or limited fixed format, are directly derived from human interactions resulting in textual data, and can hardly be computed without any prior transformation. Many of these happen before, during, and after the actual execution of structured business processes, but are rarely supported by the corresponding supply management systems. This is a particular challenge, as Cappuccio (2012) predicts that enterprise data will grow by 650% over the next five years, with 80% of that data being unstructured. In summary, by designing systems providing utility for companies and business professionals in supply networks, the two comprehensive challenges of (1) data and process integration and (2) support of unstructured interactions need to be addressed. Addressing these challenges, the doctoral thesis proposes a design that tightly bundles both structured and unstructured data and process perspectives - following suggestions “[to find] new ways to generate and maintain connections within and between social units, and new social connection-focused IT capabilities” (Oinas-Kukkonen et al. 2010, p. 61). Through not looking at both challenges independently, the overarching research question is: Which design principles instantiated in a software artifact advance supply networks for professionals, by connecting both structured and unstructured data and processes? The answer to this research question consists of aggregated design principles for the design and implementation of supply network systems supporting business professionals in supply management and procurement. Their individual performance in supply networks should increase, and their effort to execute supply network tasks should decrease, assuming that improvements at individual levels will also lead to supply network advances overall. In order to answer the research question, Action Design Research (ADR) is employed, based on the Design Science Research (DSR) paradigm. The design principles of ‘networked business objects (n-BO)’ and ‘social augmentation’ are conceptualized, which are used to derive and implement related design decisions in a software artifact. Finally, testable hypotheses are derived and evaluated towards the utility of both the artifact and the underlying design principles

Design Science Research in Action - Anatomy of Success Critical Activities for Rigor and Relevance

Design Science Research (DSR) has reached a significant impact on scholar’s research work around the globe in the information systems domain. DSR is an important IS research paradigm for creating descriptive and prescriptive knowledge concerning the artificial construction of today’s reality in the interrelation between the social and the technological sub-system. Various prior research has decisively defined and structured DSR in order to derive rigorously relevant contributions in terms of frameworks and methodologies. This paper contributes to this discourse from a research in action point of view by investigating critical activities within the design science phases and when passing from one to the next DSR cycle. For that purpose we elaborate critical DSR activities and demonstrate their effective execution along four DSR in action examples to provide guidance and best practices for design science projects seeking for rigor and relevance

How Do Procurement Networks Become Social? Design Principles Evaluation in a Heterogeneous Environment of Structured and Unstructured Interactions

Expanding procurement networks involving many countries, organizations and people impose challenges on procurement e-business systems. Firstly, the classic document ex-change based connection approach across company borderlines is still both time con-suming and costly. Secondly, today’s systems provide limited support for people net-working dimensions, combining structured and unstructured activities as part of the entire business process. We argue that the potential for accelerating the intra and inter firm procurement processes by addressing the challenges of integration and heteroge-neous activities is not sufficiently leveraged at present. In this paper, we present the re-sults of our design science research focusing on the evaluation of design principles along a software artifact, towards effects on procurement network performance

Towards collaborative procurement network enterprise systems - A design science research project

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is one of the most discussed topics in the information systems (IS) discipline. While most computer scientists agree that the service-oriented paradigm has clear benefits in terms of technical quality attributes, it has been difficult to justify SOA economically. The few studies that have investigated the strategic and economic aspects of SOA are mostly exploratory and lack a more comprehensive framework for understanding the sources of its economic potential. Based on IS and SOA literature, our work goes further in suggesting the SOA economic potential model, which describes the causal relationships between the SOA's style characteristics and value it can provide on the business side. Using this model, we investigate 164 SOA cases published between 2003 and 2008 to explore the economic rationale for adopting SOA. Our findings suggest that SOA's business benefits are currently mainly driven by operational and information technology infrastructural improvements. However, enterprises also realize strategic benefits from SOA; for example, by electronically integrating with their business partners by means of SOA. We use the results of our study to derive propositions and suggest a research model for future studies on SOA's economic potential

Designing a supply network artifact for data, process, and people integration

E-procurement and supplier-relationship management systems have helped to substantially advance process execution in supply management. However, current supply network systems still face challenges of high data integration efforts, as well as the decoupling of structured data and processes from the growing amount of digitalized unstructured interactions of supply management professionals. Inspired by the room for improvement posed by this challenges, our research proposes a design for a supply network artifact in supplier qualification that addresses these problems by enabling holistic integration of data, processes, and people. The artifact is developed following an action design research approach. Building on a set of meta-requirements derived from literature and practice explorations, we conceptualize two design principles and derive corresponding design decisions that have been implemented in an software artifact. Finally, we formulate testable hypotheses and evaluate the artifact and its design in the context of supplier qualification. Our results show that the proposed design reduces mental effort of supply management professionals and significantly increases efficiency when performing typical supply network tasks such as supplier qualification

Employing method for a method: design and evaluation of the proposed PDEduGame process method using design science research method

Identifying the process of participatory design (PD) approach to cater for students' mutual needs in recognizing their educational game design aspirations for schools and higher education and applying their game knowledge to the educational game prototype setting, is very challenging. Previously, we suggested an effective method for students to develop their educational games based on a particular course. The PD process method is needed to identify the contributions of the design artifact. Since PD is widely used in the design of the game prototype and is also placed in the Information System (IS) field, the typical design science research (DSR) approach is likely the most suitable. This paper discusses the details of how DSR is utilized for the intended purpose. This paper is divided into four parts, i.e., 1) the application of DSR in the IS fields; 2) DSR and the proposed PD process method; 3) the application of the DSR methodology to PD research; and 4) the conclusion, implications, and future research. The findings of the study may contribute to an enhanced understanding of the evaluation of DSR artifacts such as the mentioned PD process and the contribution of a new extended PD process in the game design process, particularly in a developed country such as Malaysia