BSM at ACIS 2010

The Business Service Management (BSM) project will be present as ACIS 2010 in Brisbane, Australia, from 30 November till 3 December 2010. On 30 November there is the Service Management, Software and Service Ecosystems workshop and on 2-3 December there is a Service Management and Engineering track during ACIS.

Representation of Strategy Using i*-like Notation

Assessing and achieving alignment between an organization's strategies and its IT/business functions has long been recognized as a critically important question. This paper reports on a project that seeks to overturn established management orthodoxy by establising that strategies can be adequately modeled using conceptual modeling nota- tions and that methodological and tool support can be provided for the task of assessing and achieving alignment between the strategies of an organization and its service offerings. A key element of this enterprise has been the design of SML - the Strategy Modeling Language. This paper presents an interim report from this project that describes how a nota- tion inspired by i* has been used to obtain the diagrammatic modeling component of SML, and how i*-like notions have been used to represent strategy decomposition (required to be able to refine strategies to a level where there is an onotlogical match between the languages used to de- scribe strategies and services). We also comment on how i*-like notions would play a greater role in this project, as a complete model of the en- terprise context is brought to bear on the alignment exercise. We provide a brief illustration, and a description of the toolkit implemented on the Eclipse platform.

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Identification and specification of relationships as the foundation for service bundling

Service bundling can be regarded as an option for service providers to strengthen their competitive advantages, cope with dynamic market conditions and heterogeneous consumer demand. Despite these positive effects, actual guidance for the identification of service bundles and the act of bundling itself can be regarded as a gap. Previous research has resulted in a conceptualization of a service bundling method relying on a structured service description in order to fill this gap. This method addresses the reasoning about the suitability of services to be part of a bundle based on analyzing existing relationships between services captured by a description language. This paper extends the aforementioned research by presenting an initial set of empirically derived relationships between services in existing bundles that can subsequently be utilized to identify potential new bundles. Additionally, a gap analysis points out to what extent prominent ontologies and service description languages accommodate for the identified relationships.

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Service identification through value chain analysis and prioritization

In a resource constrained business world, strategic choices must be made on process improvement and service delivery. There are calls for more agile forms of enterprises and much effort is being directed at moving organizations from a complex landscape of disparate application systems to that of an integrated and flexible enterprise accessing complex systems landscapes through service oriented architecture (SOA). This paper describes the deconstruction of an enterprise into business services using value chain analysis as each element in the value chain can be rendered as a business service in the SOA. These business services are explicitly linked to the attainment of specific organizational strategies and their contribution to the attainment of strategy is assessed and recorded. This contribution is then used to provide a rank order of business service to strategy. This information facilitates executive decision making on which business service to develop into the SOA. The paper describes an application of this Critical Service Identification Methodology (CSIM) to a case study.

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Conceptualizing a bottom-up approach to service bundling

Offering service bundles to the market is a promising option for service providers to strengthen their competitive advantages, cope with dynamic market conditions and deal with heterogeneous consumer demand. Although the expected positive effects of bundling strategies and pricing considerations for bundles are covered well by the available literature, limited guidance can be found regarding the identification of potential bundle candidates and the actual process of bundling. The contribution of this paper is the positioning of bundling based on insights from both business and computer science and the proposition of a structured bundling method, which guides organizations with the composition of bundles in practice.

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Sourcing business and software services

With the advancement of Service-Oriented Architecture in the technical and business domain, the management & engineering of services requires a thorough and systematic understanding of the service lifecycle for both business and software services. However, while service-oriented approaches acknowledge the importance of the service ecosystem, service lifecycle models are typically internally focused, paying limited attention to processes related to offering services to or using services from other actors.

In this paper, we address this need by discussing the relations between a comprehensive service lifecycle approach for service management & engineering and the sourcing & purchasing of services. In particular we pay attention to the similarities and differences between sourcing business and software services, the alignment between service management & engineering and sourcing & purchasing, the role of sourcing in the transformation of an organization towards a service-oriented paradigm, the role of architectural approaches to sourcing in this transformation, and the sourcing of specific services at different levels of granularity.

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Definition of a Description Language for Business Service Decomposition

In the last few years, service-oriented computing has become an emerging research topic in response to the shift from product-oriented economy to service-oriented economy and the move from focusing on software/system development to addressing business-IT alignment. From an IT perspective, there is a proliferation of methods and languages for describing Web services. There has not been as much work in defining languages or ontologies for describing services from business perspectives. In this paper, we analyze the landscape of service representation and discuss the needs of having a description language for business services. By leveraging existing work on describing service capabilities and properties, we define a specific description language that explicitly addresses the decomposition of business services and their non-functional properties. The language is defined both informally (as a list of descriptive concepts) and formally (by means of meta-modeling and declarative modeling).

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ACIS 2010 Track Service Engineering & Management

The

21st Australasian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS2010)

will be held in Brisbane, Australia, from 1-3 December 2010. ACIS is the premier conference in Australasia for Information Systems academics and professionals, covering technical, organisational, business and social issues in the application of Information Technology.

Conference Track on Service Management and Engineering

Submissions
ACIS 2010 calls for original, unpublished research papers (i.e. completed research and research-in-progress) in the areas defined in the conference track descriptions. All submissions must be in English and be made via the ACIS 2010 submission system at http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=acis2010 by 12 July 2010. For more details about submission formats, expectations and the review process, please click here.

Important Dates:
Paper submission deadline:	12 July 2010
Notification of paper acceptance:	17 September 2010
ACIS 2010 Conference:	1-3 December 201

Track Chairs:

Axel Korthaus
Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia
axel.korthaus@qut.edu.au

Tilo Böhmann
International Business School of Service Management Hamburg, Germany
boehmann@iss-hamburg.de

Erwin Fielt
Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia
e.fielt@qut.edu.au

Julien Vayssière
Smart Services CRC, Sydney, Australia
Julien.Vayssiere@smartservicescrc.com.au

Theme
Services dominate developed economies such as the USA, the EU, Australia, and others. This dominant position can not only be ascribed to the sheer size of the services sector in the overall economy, but also to the potential of services for creating economic growth and welfare through considerable opportunities for productivity gains. Moreover, it is not only business where a service perspective has become more prominent, also in IT the service concept has gained ground as is evident in developments like Services Sciences, Management, Engineering and Design (SSMED), IT Service Management, Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), Service Computing and various “XYZas- a-Service” concepts. With business and IT becoming more and more aligned, there is a need for understanding how these two service worlds meet and to be aware of their complementarities and differences.

As the number of services grows and the differences between business and IT services blur, Business Service Management becomes crucial: the explicit management of these services as important business assets that are the focal points for the cost-effective creation of customer value and innovation in organisations. Business Service Management should leverage, integrate and complement the different Service Management approaches. From the IT perspective on Business Service Management, the paradigm of service orientation has been successfully applied on the technical level to design and implement very flexible and adaptable IT infrastructures and architectures for some time now. Service lifecycle management and service enablement approaches that aim towards implementing services as encapsulations of autonomous, valuable software capabilities are of importance in this context. However, this service paradigm recently also extends towards the business level and provides new perspectives to organise a company’s capabilities and to allow for the easy combination of services to create new business opportunities. In this sense, services can be seen as building blocks for organisational and market arrangements in service networks and ecosystems. On the business level, challenges related to the design of appropriate service value management, including service-enabled strategies, service-oriented business models, service portfolio
management, service governance etc. and service relationship management with suppliers and customers need to be met. Also on the business level, information technology represents one of the most important drivers and enablers of service innovation, and the service paradigm provides the opportunity for further advancing the widely postulated business/IT alignment.

Suggested topics
This track aims at accelerating high quality research in the fast developing domain of Service Management and Engineering and the related areas within Service Science (1) and Services Computing (2) from an Information System’s perspective. It seeks, in correspondence with the ACIS 2010 conference theme, contributions that demonstrate how the IS discipline can make a high impact in the academic and practical community by addressing the way organisations face the challenges of the progressing service-oriented economy that increasingly merges business- and IT-related service concepts. It invites conceptual and empirical papers on completed research as well as research-in-progress papers. Possible contributions may include, but are not limited to the following:

Service Management from an IS Perspective

• Service strategy & value management
• Service quality management
• Service innovation management
• Service portfolio & capability management
• Service governance & performance management
• Service compliance & risk management
• Service supply chain management

Service Engineering from an IS Perspective

• Service lifecycle
• New service development
• Service modelling, analysis & design
• Service bundling
• Service standards & descriptions

Special topics on Information Systems and Services

• The position of IS in Service Science, Management and Engineering
• New business models in service ecosystems, e.g. for service aggregation and brokerage
• IS/IT services from a service(-dominant) logic; servitisation of industries
• Implications of value co-creation for IT-based services
• Service business alignment / Aligning Business and IT Service Management
• Business impact of IT service management
• Embedding of IT services in business products and services
• Design and Implementation and effects of automation and self-service technologies for IT services
• Services E-commerce (i.e. electronic offering, trading, and purchasing of services)

Significance of this track and coverage at related outlets
Service management on both the business level and the IT level is a buzzing topic as is apparent in the increasing emphasis on the Service Economy, the promotion of Services Sciences, Management, Engineering and Design (SSMED) by IBM and others, the rise of Service Management in IT (e.g. ITIL v3), the developments in the area of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), and the growing importance of service as a sourcing model for software (e.g. Software-as-a-Service, SaaS). In Australia, services receive considerable attention in the research community, e.g. in the vation, foresight and productivity improvements for the services sector, as well as in the teaching community, e.g. the Services Science Management and Engineering (SSME) Learning and Teaching Project funded by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council. Service management starts to become addressed in a great variety of well-established and newly created, dedicated conferences and journals, such as ECIS, ICIS, AMCIS, ICSOC, APSCC, SCC, the German-language community IS conference (last event with 1200+ attending with conference theme “Business Services: Concepts, Technologies, Applications”) etc. and IBM Systems Journal, Business and Information Systems Engineering (BISE), Information Systems Management, Asian-Pacific Journal of Information Systems, among others. Moreover, the AIS has launched a special interest group for services, covering IT services, IT Service Management, and SSME.

List of Associate Editors

• Prof Gerhard Satzger, Director, Karlsruhe Service Research Institute (KSRI), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
• Prof Marlon Dumas (University of Tartu, Estonia)
• Assoc Prof Harry Bouwman (TU Delft, the Netherlands)
• Assoc Prof Aileen Cater-Steel (University of Southern Queensland, Australia)
• Dr Alistair Barros (SAP Research, Brisbane, Australia)
• Dr Timber Haaker (Novay, the Netherlands)

Potential journal special issue or awards

• Journal special issue
  • We plan to give authors of the best papers in the ACIS 2010 Service Management and Design track the opportunity to submit an extended version of their work to a special issue of The Journal of Strategic Information Systems (JSIS).
• Best Paper in the Track Award
  • We plan to ask the reviewers of paper submissions to suggest candidates for the best paper in the track. Based on this feedback, the winner of this award will be determined. The award for the best (“smartest”) track paper will be an iTunes gift card sponsored by the Smart Services CRC.
• Best Reviewer in the Track Award
  • We plan to ask the authors of paper submissions to suggest candidates for the best reviewer in the track. Based on this feedback, the winner of this award will be determined.

Track chairs

Dr Axel Korthaus is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in QUT’s BPM Group, one of the largest BPM research groups in the world. He received his PhD degree in 2001 from the University of Mannheim, Germany, and brings to bear comprehensive experience as a researcher, lecturer and project manager in areas such as service management and collaborative, component-based software development. Besides managing and conducting research in an ARC Linkage project titled “Service Ecosystems Management for Collaborative Process Improvement”, which involves SAP Research Brisbane and the Queensland Government, Department of Public Works, as partners, Axel is also actively shaping the research conducted in the Smart Services CRC “Business Service Management” project. He is an author/editor of various books, journal articles and conference papers, serves as a regular PC member and speaker at IS- and SE-related conferences, organizes workshops and sessions and has presented his work in 11 countries over the last years.

Prof Tilo Boehmann is a Full Professor of Service Management at the International Business School of Service Management (ISS) in Hamburg, Germany. At ISS, he builds a new Service Management Research Group and the shapes the school’s MBA service management program after holding an appointment as research group leader and assistant professor at the Technische Universität München. His main teaching and research interests are service management and design, with a special interest in IT services and solutions, as well as strategic information management. Tilo has published widely in these areas in international and national journals and conferences. He is very active in the field of service science, management and engineering (SSME), being appointed member of a national service science task force of Germany’s federal ministry of research and education. Tilo holds a Habilitation from Technische Universität München (TUM), a PhD from Hohenheim University (Stuttgart, Germany) and a Master of Science in IS from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Dr Erwin Fielt is currently a senior researcher at the Business Process Management Group
of the Queensland University of Technology. In his research, he focuses on the intersection
between business and IT, where new IT applications have to result in net benefits for individuals and organisations. Erwin Fielt is involved as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Business Service Management project of the Smart Services CRC. Within this project, he is responsible for coordinating the involvement of the different academic and industry partners and he conducts research on Service Management, Service Oriented Business Models, Service Portfolio Management and Service Quality. Erwin Fielt has a PhD from the Delft University of Technology and a MSc from the University of Twente, both in the Netherlands. He has published in different IS journals, conferences and books on services, business models, and electronic business.

Dr Julien Vayssière is Head of Research at the Smart Services CRC, a commercially focused collaborative research initiative, developing innovation, foresight and productivity
improvements for the services sector. Julien holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Nice, France and has been performing research on computer security and distributed software architectures for both industrial and academic organisations.

(1) See, for example, Pinhanez, C. and Kontogiorgis, P. (2008): A Proposal for a Service Science Discipline
Classification System. Presented at the 2008 Frontiers of Service.Washington, DC. October 2 -5, 2008 (Available
at http://www.smith.umd.edu/frontiers2008/pdfs_docs/Pinhanez.pdf)
(2) See, for example, Zhang, L-J. (2008): EIC Editorial: Introduction to the Knowledge Areas of Services Computing.
IEEE Transactions on Services Computing 1(2), 62-71.

Towards a service portfolio management framework

Services in the form of business services or IT-enabled (Web) Services have become a corporate asset of high interest in striving towards the agile organisation. However, while the design and management of a single service is widely studied and well understood, little is known about how a set of services can be managed. This gap motivated this paper, in which we explore the concept of Service Portfolio Management. In particular, we propose a Service Portfolio Management Framework that explicates service portfolio goals, tasks, governance issues, methods and enablers. The Service Portfolio Management Framework is based upon a thorough analysis and consolidation of existing, well-established portfolio management approaches. From an academic point of view, the Service Portfolio Management Framework can be positioned as an extension of portfolio management conceptualisations in the area of service management. Based on the framework, possible directions for future research are provided. From a practical point of view, the Service Portfolio Management Framework provides an organisation with a novel approach to managing its emerging service portfolios.

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