Interoperability is a key property of enterprise applications, which is hard to achieve due to th... more Interoperability is a key property of enterprise applications, which is hard to achieve due to the large number of interoperating components and se- mantic heterogeneity. Platform-based approaches such as service-oriented ar- chitectures address the technical integration of systems. However, a deep inte- gration needs to cover the whole lifecycle of the interoperable system. We pro- pose method engineering as a
The competitiveness and efficiency of an enterprise is dependent on its ability to interact with ... more The competitiveness and efficiency of an enterprise is dependent on its ability to interact with other enterprises and organisations. In this context interoperability is defined as the ability of business processes as well as enterprise software and applications to interact. Interoperability remains a problem and there are numerous issues to be resolved in different situations. We propose method engineering as an approach to organise interoperability knowledge in a method chunk repository. In order to organise the knowledge repository we need an interoperability classification framework associated to it. In this paper we propose a generic architecture for a method chunk repository, elaborate on a classification framework and associate it to some existing bodies of knowledge. We also show how the proposed framework can be applied in a working example.
Interoperability is a key property of enterprise applications, which is hard to achieve due to th... more Interoperability is a key property of enterprise applications, which is hard to achieve due to the large number of interoperating components and semantic heterogeneity. The inherent complexity of interoperability problems implies that there exists no silver bullet to solve them. Rather, the knowledge about how to solve wicked interoperability problems is hidden in the application cases that expose those problems. The paper addresses the question of how to organise and use method knowledge to resolve interoperability problems. We propose the structure of a knowledge-based system that can deliver situation-specific solutions, called method chunks. Situational Method Engineering promotes modularisation and formalisation of method knowledge in the form of reusable method chunks, which can be combined to compose a situation-specific method. The method chunks are stored in a method chunk repository. In order to cater for management and retrieval, we introduce an Interoperability Classification Framework, which is used to classify and tag method chunks and to assess the project situation in which they are to be used. The classification framework incorporates technical as well as business and organisational aspects of interoperability. This is an important feature as interoperability problems typically are multifaceted spanning multiple aspects. We have applied the approach to analyse an industry case from the insurance sector to identify and classify a set of method chunks. r (J. Ralyte´), [email protected] (M.A. Jeusfeld), [email protected] (P. Backlund), [email protected] (H. Ku¨hn), [email protected] (N. Arni-Bloch).
Although the Method Engineering (ME) research community has reached considerable maturity, it has... more Although the Method Engineering (ME) research community has reached considerable maturity, it has not yet been able to agree on the granularity and definition of the configurable parts of methods. This state of affairs is causing unnecessary confusion, especially with an ever increasing number of people contributing to ME research. There are several competing notions around, most significantly 'method fragments' and 'method chunks', but also 'method components' and 'process components' are used in some quarters and have also been widely published. Sometimes these terms are used interchangeably, but there appears to be important semantic and pragmatic differences. If the differences are unimportant, we should be able to come to an agreement on what construct to promote. Alternatively, the different constructs may serve different purposes and there is a need for them to coexist. If this is the case, it should be possible to pinpoint exactly how they are related and which are useful in what contexts. This panel is a step towards finding common ground in this area, which arguably is at the very core of ME.
Two main candidates for the atomic element to be used in situational method engineering (SME) hav... more Two main candidates for the atomic element to be used in situational method engineering (SME) have been proposed: the "method fragment" and the "method chunk". These are examined here in terms of their conceptual integrity and in terms of how they may be used in method construction. Also, parallels are drawn between the two approaches. Secondly, the idea of differentiating an interface from a body has been proposed for method chunks (but not for method fragments). This idea is examined and mappings are constructed between the interface and body concepts of method chunks and the concepts used to describe method fragments. The new ISO/IEC 24744 standard metamodel is used as a conceptual framework to perform these mappings.
Service-oriented paradigm is emerging as a promising solution to handle enterprise information sy... more Service-oriented paradigm is emerging as a promising solution to handle enterprise information systems (IS) complexity, interoperability, and evolution issues. However, the shift from a conventional IS architecture to a service-oriented one is not an easy task. Various approaches have been proposed in the literature and most of them deal with either business strategic service design or a technical level IS transformation and migration. There is a need for approaches forming the link between these two levels and designing the information level transformations. In the paper, the concepts of information service and information services system (ISS) are promoted and three different ways to design information services and ISS are proposed taking into account enterprise legacy IS evolution. The three approaches are illustrated with examples taken from industrial projects and case studies.
Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, 2013
Service-orientation is currently considered as a promising paradigm to deal with the complexity, ... more Service-orientation is currently considered as a promising paradigm to deal with the complexity, interoperability and evolution of enterprise Information Systems (IS), which are the foremost preoccupation in today's enterprises. However, the shift from a conventional IS architecture to a serviceoriented one is not an easy task despite of the various service design approaches proposed in the literature. In this paper we promote the concepts of information service and Information Services System (ISS) and we present three different ways to design an ISS taking into account enterprise legacy IS and/or from scratch. We illustrate the three approaches with examples taken from industrial projects and case studies.
Configuring and applying complex requirements processes in organisations remains a challenging pr... more Configuring and applying complex requirements processes in organisations remains a challenging problem. This paper reports the application of the Map-driven Modular Method Re-engineering approach (MMMR) to a research-based requirements process called RESCUE. RESCUE had evolved in the light of research findings and client requests. The MMMR approach was applied to model the RESCUE process, identify omissions and weaknesses, and to reason about improvements to RESCUE that are currently being implemented. Results have implications for both the scalability and effectiveness of the MMMR approach and for innovative requirements processes such as RESCUE.
... University of Geneva), Yves Pigneur and Thibault Estier (HEC Lausanne), and all the volunteer... more ... University of Geneva), Yves Pigneur and Thibault Estier (HEC Lausanne), and all the volunteers: Marie-France Culebras, Aziz Khadraoui, Laurent ... 165 Yazrina Yahya, Muriati Mukhtar, Norleyza Jailani, Salha Abdullah, Zuraidah Abdullah, and Abdul Razak Hamdan On ...
This book contains the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Exploring S... more This book contains the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Exploring Services Science (IESS) that was held in Geneva, Switzerland, in February 2010. Based on the previous edition and the momentum in this emerging and exciting field, IESS 2011 offered ...
Activities concerned with the design, planning and execution of services are becoming increasingl... more Activities concerned with the design, planning and execution of services are becoming increasingly complex. This is due to the involvement of many different stakeholders, the complexity of the service systems themselves, and the dynamic nature of their organizational and ICT environments. Service knowledge management helps share and reuse relevant knowledge among the different stakeholders, and therefore emerges as a critical factor to perform service activities with required efficiency and quality. Recent advances in knowledge management provide promising opportunities to support individual service activities within a single domain. Yet, sharing knowledge throughout the service life-cycle and across service domains is still very challenging. The source of service knowledge, its usage, update frequency, encoding and associated stakeholders may vary depending upon the service activity and the service domain. Based on a critical analysis of currently proposed frameworks, we argue that a process framework approach is beneficial for service knowledge management. To support our claim, we offer an abstract template and a typical service life-cycle that can be adopted to integrate heterogeneous service knowledge from diverse sources.
International Journal of Information System Modeling and Design, 2013
Increasing popularity of the notion of service in the enterprise business and information systems... more Increasing popularity of the notion of service in the enterprise business and information systems development facilitates the creation of new types of inter-organizational and multidisciplinary collaboration and value co-creation. Simple exchange of services between organizations evolves into the co-creation of transdisciplinary services shared by all involved partners. In this paper we introduce the notion of transdisciplinarity and discuss how to support information services co-creation in this new context. For this purpose, we identify and explore four main principles (communication, collaboration, co-innovation, and agility) to be implemented in the transdisciplinary information services co-creationthe challenges that their implementation entails and the existing approaches and techniques that support their implementation. Finally, we propose a method family approach as a means to create new methods including a large variability of techniques and providing configuration mechanisms. In particular, we demonstrate how to create a method family providing a flexible and agile process model based on the transdisciplinarity principles and allowing to combine techniques and approaches from different disciplines in order to support collaborative creativity, modeling and development of transdisciplinary services.
IEEE 7th International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS), 2013
ABSTRACT Situational Method Engineering (SME) is constantly looking for new ways to facilitate si... more ABSTRACT Situational Method Engineering (SME) is constantly looking for new ways to facilitate situation-specific method construction in practice. We have developed the notion of method family to attain this goal. Our inspiration comes from Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE), which is developing solutions that can be easily adapted to a specific context and by reusing existing knowledge. In this paper, we introduce the process guiding the construction of method families based on the analysis of the methods variability.
Interoperability is a key property of enterprise applications, which is hard to achieve due to th... more Interoperability is a key property of enterprise applications, which is hard to achieve due to the large number of interoperating components and se- mantic heterogeneity. Platform-based approaches such as service-oriented ar- chitectures address the technical integration of systems. However, a deep inte- gration needs to cover the whole lifecycle of the interoperable system. We pro- pose method engineering as a
The competitiveness and efficiency of an enterprise is dependent on its ability to interact with ... more The competitiveness and efficiency of an enterprise is dependent on its ability to interact with other enterprises and organisations. In this context interoperability is defined as the ability of business processes as well as enterprise software and applications to interact. Interoperability remains a problem and there are numerous issues to be resolved in different situations. We propose method engineering as an approach to organise interoperability knowledge in a method chunk repository. In order to organise the knowledge repository we need an interoperability classification framework associated to it. In this paper we propose a generic architecture for a method chunk repository, elaborate on a classification framework and associate it to some existing bodies of knowledge. We also show how the proposed framework can be applied in a working example.
Interoperability is a key property of enterprise applications, which is hard to achieve due to th... more Interoperability is a key property of enterprise applications, which is hard to achieve due to the large number of interoperating components and semantic heterogeneity. The inherent complexity of interoperability problems implies that there exists no silver bullet to solve them. Rather, the knowledge about how to solve wicked interoperability problems is hidden in the application cases that expose those problems. The paper addresses the question of how to organise and use method knowledge to resolve interoperability problems. We propose the structure of a knowledge-based system that can deliver situation-specific solutions, called method chunks. Situational Method Engineering promotes modularisation and formalisation of method knowledge in the form of reusable method chunks, which can be combined to compose a situation-specific method. The method chunks are stored in a method chunk repository. In order to cater for management and retrieval, we introduce an Interoperability Classification Framework, which is used to classify and tag method chunks and to assess the project situation in which they are to be used. The classification framework incorporates technical as well as business and organisational aspects of interoperability. This is an important feature as interoperability problems typically are multifaceted spanning multiple aspects. We have applied the approach to analyse an industry case from the insurance sector to identify and classify a set of method chunks. r (J. Ralyte´), [email protected] (M.A. Jeusfeld), [email protected] (P. Backlund), [email protected] (H. Ku¨hn), [email protected] (N. Arni-Bloch).
Although the Method Engineering (ME) research community has reached considerable maturity, it has... more Although the Method Engineering (ME) research community has reached considerable maturity, it has not yet been able to agree on the granularity and definition of the configurable parts of methods. This state of affairs is causing unnecessary confusion, especially with an ever increasing number of people contributing to ME research. There are several competing notions around, most significantly 'method fragments' and 'method chunks', but also 'method components' and 'process components' are used in some quarters and have also been widely published. Sometimes these terms are used interchangeably, but there appears to be important semantic and pragmatic differences. If the differences are unimportant, we should be able to come to an agreement on what construct to promote. Alternatively, the different constructs may serve different purposes and there is a need for them to coexist. If this is the case, it should be possible to pinpoint exactly how they are related and which are useful in what contexts. This panel is a step towards finding common ground in this area, which arguably is at the very core of ME.
Two main candidates for the atomic element to be used in situational method engineering (SME) hav... more Two main candidates for the atomic element to be used in situational method engineering (SME) have been proposed: the "method fragment" and the "method chunk". These are examined here in terms of their conceptual integrity and in terms of how they may be used in method construction. Also, parallels are drawn between the two approaches. Secondly, the idea of differentiating an interface from a body has been proposed for method chunks (but not for method fragments). This idea is examined and mappings are constructed between the interface and body concepts of method chunks and the concepts used to describe method fragments. The new ISO/IEC 24744 standard metamodel is used as a conceptual framework to perform these mappings.
Service-oriented paradigm is emerging as a promising solution to handle enterprise information sy... more Service-oriented paradigm is emerging as a promising solution to handle enterprise information systems (IS) complexity, interoperability, and evolution issues. However, the shift from a conventional IS architecture to a service-oriented one is not an easy task. Various approaches have been proposed in the literature and most of them deal with either business strategic service design or a technical level IS transformation and migration. There is a need for approaches forming the link between these two levels and designing the information level transformations. In the paper, the concepts of information service and information services system (ISS) are promoted and three different ways to design information services and ISS are proposed taking into account enterprise legacy IS evolution. The three approaches are illustrated with examples taken from industrial projects and case studies.
Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, 2013
Service-orientation is currently considered as a promising paradigm to deal with the complexity, ... more Service-orientation is currently considered as a promising paradigm to deal with the complexity, interoperability and evolution of enterprise Information Systems (IS), which are the foremost preoccupation in today's enterprises. However, the shift from a conventional IS architecture to a serviceoriented one is not an easy task despite of the various service design approaches proposed in the literature. In this paper we promote the concepts of information service and Information Services System (ISS) and we present three different ways to design an ISS taking into account enterprise legacy IS and/or from scratch. We illustrate the three approaches with examples taken from industrial projects and case studies.
Configuring and applying complex requirements processes in organisations remains a challenging pr... more Configuring and applying complex requirements processes in organisations remains a challenging problem. This paper reports the application of the Map-driven Modular Method Re-engineering approach (MMMR) to a research-based requirements process called RESCUE. RESCUE had evolved in the light of research findings and client requests. The MMMR approach was applied to model the RESCUE process, identify omissions and weaknesses, and to reason about improvements to RESCUE that are currently being implemented. Results have implications for both the scalability and effectiveness of the MMMR approach and for innovative requirements processes such as RESCUE.
... University of Geneva), Yves Pigneur and Thibault Estier (HEC Lausanne), and all the volunteer... more ... University of Geneva), Yves Pigneur and Thibault Estier (HEC Lausanne), and all the volunteers: Marie-France Culebras, Aziz Khadraoui, Laurent ... 165 Yazrina Yahya, Muriati Mukhtar, Norleyza Jailani, Salha Abdullah, Zuraidah Abdullah, and Abdul Razak Hamdan On ...
This book contains the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Exploring S... more This book contains the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Exploring Services Science (IESS) that was held in Geneva, Switzerland, in February 2010. Based on the previous edition and the momentum in this emerging and exciting field, IESS 2011 offered ...
Activities concerned with the design, planning and execution of services are becoming increasingl... more Activities concerned with the design, planning and execution of services are becoming increasingly complex. This is due to the involvement of many different stakeholders, the complexity of the service systems themselves, and the dynamic nature of their organizational and ICT environments. Service knowledge management helps share and reuse relevant knowledge among the different stakeholders, and therefore emerges as a critical factor to perform service activities with required efficiency and quality. Recent advances in knowledge management provide promising opportunities to support individual service activities within a single domain. Yet, sharing knowledge throughout the service life-cycle and across service domains is still very challenging. The source of service knowledge, its usage, update frequency, encoding and associated stakeholders may vary depending upon the service activity and the service domain. Based on a critical analysis of currently proposed frameworks, we argue that a process framework approach is beneficial for service knowledge management. To support our claim, we offer an abstract template and a typical service life-cycle that can be adopted to integrate heterogeneous service knowledge from diverse sources.
International Journal of Information System Modeling and Design, 2013
Increasing popularity of the notion of service in the enterprise business and information systems... more Increasing popularity of the notion of service in the enterprise business and information systems development facilitates the creation of new types of inter-organizational and multidisciplinary collaboration and value co-creation. Simple exchange of services between organizations evolves into the co-creation of transdisciplinary services shared by all involved partners. In this paper we introduce the notion of transdisciplinarity and discuss how to support information services co-creation in this new context. For this purpose, we identify and explore four main principles (communication, collaboration, co-innovation, and agility) to be implemented in the transdisciplinary information services co-creationthe challenges that their implementation entails and the existing approaches and techniques that support their implementation. Finally, we propose a method family approach as a means to create new methods including a large variability of techniques and providing configuration mechanisms. In particular, we demonstrate how to create a method family providing a flexible and agile process model based on the transdisciplinarity principles and allowing to combine techniques and approaches from different disciplines in order to support collaborative creativity, modeling and development of transdisciplinary services.
IEEE 7th International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS), 2013
ABSTRACT Situational Method Engineering (SME) is constantly looking for new ways to facilitate si... more ABSTRACT Situational Method Engineering (SME) is constantly looking for new ways to facilitate situation-specific method construction in practice. We have developed the notion of method family to attain this goal. Our inspiration comes from Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE), which is developing solutions that can be easily adapted to a specific context and by reusing existing knowledge. In this paper, we introduce the process guiding the construction of method families based on the analysis of the methods variability.
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Papers by Jolita Ralyté