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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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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BSM Whitepaper on Business Service Management

I'm very happy to be able to announce the public availabiliy of the first CRC White Paper, which presents our view of a Business Service Management Framework. It includes and extends the high-level view of Business Service Management outlined in earlier posts of this blog.

The paper has been authored by Michael Rosemann, Erwin Fielt, Thomas Kohlborn and Axel Korthaus from Queensland University of Technology, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution‐Noncommercial‐No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License, and is hopefully the first in a long series of upcoming white papers adressing in more detail different aspects of "Smart Services" in general and Business Service Management in particular.

The paper can be downloaded here: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/26620/.

Any comments, remarks, opinions etc. are very welcome! We are very interested in your feedback. (The contact details of the authors can be found at the end of the paper.)

Cheers,
Axel