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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