Colette Rolland

Business Process Lines to Deal with the Variability

Variability proved to be a central concept in different domains, manufacturing, software development etc. in order to develop solutions that can be easily adapted to different organizational settings and different sets of customers at a low price. We argue that families of business process models can facilitate the installation of situated models in different organizations. We propose a representation system called Map to capture variability in process models expressed in an intentional manner through business goals and strategies. The paper presents an intentional view of the business process variability and illustrates it in an excerpt of a real case in the Electricity Supply Industry. The kernel of an organizational level model is also introduced to allow the organizational implementation of each variant.

Method as a Service (MaaS)

Over the last decade, a large number of Method Engineering (ME) approaches have been developed to adapt information system methods (ISM) to specific situations of projects at hand. However, ME has not been yet, widely spread in the professional world. Our belief is that limitations such as the lack of standards, the proposal of proprietary solutions and an excessive emphasis on engineering issues hamper the practical use of existing ME approaches. To overtake these limitations the position of this paper is to view a Method as a Service (MaaS) and to adapt the SOA architecture to make method and their components widely accessible on the Internet. The paper introduces the concept of MaaS and discusses the feasibility of its implementation using service-oriented technologies.