Hans-Georg Fill

Service-oriented technology and management: Perspectives on research and practice for the coming decade

Service-oriented technologies and management have gained attention in the past few years, promising a way to create the basis for agility so that companies can deliver new, more flexible business processes that harness the value of the services approach from a customers perspective. Service-oriented approaches are used for developing software applications and software-as-a-service that can be sourced as virtual hardware resources, including on-demand and utility computing. The driving forces come from the software engineering community and the e-business community. Service-oriented architecture promotes the loose coupling of software components so that interoperability across programming languages and platforms, and dynamic choreography of business processes can be achieved. Nevertheless, one of todays most pervasive and perplexing challenges for senior managers deals with how and when to make a commitment to the new practices. The purpose of this article is to shed light on multiple issues associated with service-oriented technologies and management by examining several interrelated questions: why is it appropriate now to study the related business problems from the point of view of services research? What new conceptual frameworks and theoretical perspectives are appropriate for studying service-oriented technologies and management? What value will a service science and business process modeling offer to the firms that adopt them? And, how can these approaches be implemented so as to address the major challenges that organizations face with technology, information and strategy? We contribute new knowledge in this area by tying the economics and information technology strategy perspectives to the semantic and design science perspectives for a broader audience. Usually the more technical perspective is offered on a standalone basis, and confined to the systems space - even when the discussion is about business processes. This article also offers insights on these issues from the multiple perspectives of industry and academic thought leaders.

On the Conceptualisation of Modelling Methods Using the ADOxx Meta Modelling Platform

In this paper we analyse the conceptualisation of modelling methods. Thereby we understand, how the components of a specific implementation platform support the design of modelling methods. For this purpose we use the ADOxx meta modelling platform and investigate, how four selected functionalities of enterprise information systems for supporting user interaction, process-based optimisation, interfaces to other systems, and complex analyses are realised. We discuss these four functionalities by reverting to excerpts of the visual representation of modelling methods from the areas of requirements engineering, business process management, e-learning, and enterprise architecture management. This permits us to highlight the interdependencies between the modelling language, the modelling procedure, mechanisms and algorithms and the functionalities of the underlying technical platform that have to be taken into account during the conceptualisation.

Formal Aspects of Enterprise Modeling Methods: A Comparison Framework

For the design of work and knowledge systems it is today common to revert to enterprise modeling methods. These methods not only support the representation and analysis of complex interactions between technical services and human actors. The resulting models also provide value through acting as knowledge bases themselves. Thereby, the formalization of modeling methods is essential to unambiguously define their structure, behavior, and semantics, and enable an inter subjective understanding and machine-process ability. In this paper we analyze and compare six common enterprise modeling methods in regard to the formalization of their process-related aspects. From this comparison we derive implications for choosing an appropriate method when designing work and knowledge systems.

Visualisation for Semantic Information Systems

The role of semantic information systems in todays enterprises is manifold: It ranges from the support of day-to-day operations up to the level of strategic management and business decision-making. The use of visualization techniques, therefore, marks an important aspect of these systems. Hans-Georg Fill presents an innovative framework for visualization based on an analysis of current visualization approaches in business informatics. It encompasses the creation of visualizations both from a technical as well as a contextual point of view. The author in particular elaborates the concepts of visual objects, ontological visualization patterns and semantic visualization. These allow for the integration of aspects of service orientation into the visualization process and the semantic-based selections of visualizations for particular tasks.

On the Conceptualization of a Modeling Language for Semantic Model Annotations

In this paper we describe the theoretical foundations, formal considerations, and technical characteristics that were taken into account for the conceptualization of a modeling language for the semantic annotation of visual models. Thereby it is envisaged to give insights into the underlying processes for the development of new visual modeling languages and thus provide input for a future model of the conceptualization process. To illustrate the realization of the approach we revert to the semantic annotation of a business process model using concepts from the web ontology language OWL, which allows us to show the iterations that were conducted to develop the approach. As a first evaluation the approach has been implemented on a meta modeling platform and will be made freely available to the interested community in the course of the SeMFIS project on www.openmodels.at.

Product-Service-System Modelling Method

Regardless of the application domain, both the analysis of existing systems and the creation of new systems benefit extensively from having the system modeled from a conceptual point of view in order to capture its behavioral, structural or semantic characteristics, while abstracting away irrelevant details. Depending on which relevant details are assimilated in the modeling language, modeling tools may support different degrees of domain-specificity. The boundaries of what domain-specific means are as ambiguous as the definition of a domain—it may be a business sector, a paradigm, or a narrow application area. However, some patterns and invariants are recurring across domains and this has led to the emergence of commonly used modeling languages that incorporate such fundamental concepts. This chapter focuses on the metamodeling approach for the hybridization of BPMN, ER, EPC, UML and Petri Nets within a single modeling method identified as FCML, with a proof of concept named Bee-Up implemented in OMiLAB.

Metamodeling: Some Application Areas in Information Systems

Metamodeling is a powerful concept in the area of information systems that can be applied to solve a variety of tasks. The goal of the paper at hand is to provide an insight into these application areas. In order to do so first the basic thoughts behind metamodeling are introduced. Then it will be shown that there are applications in the context of the creation and composition of metamodels that have to be supported by “cross-sectional” aspects like visualization and simulation. Finally, we will describe some of these applications in more detail.

Business-oriented IT management: developing e-business applications with E-BPMS

The characteristic feature of e-business applications is the complexity due to the large number of factors that have to be taken into consideration and aligned with regard to the products and services offered, the business processes used, the organization and the information technology (IT) applied. Both researchers and practitioners state, that the alignment between IT and the competitive strategy of the business is paramount. In this paper, we will discuss the E-BPMS modeling framework that takes into account the requirements of a complex e-business application development and we will describe a case from the insurance sector as a proof of concept.

Formalizing Meta Models with FDMM: The ADOxx Case

This paper contains an extended and improved version of the FDMM formalism presented at ICEIS’2012. FDMM is a formalism to describe how meta models and models are defined in the ADOxx approach as used in the Open Models Initiative. It is based on set theory and first order logic statements. In this way, an exact description of ADOxx meta models and corresponding models can be provided. In the paper at hand we extend the description of the formalism by illustrating how the mathematical statements can be used to support the implementation on the ADOxx platform. For this purpose we show how the FDMM constructs are mapped to statements in the ADOxx Library Language (ALL). As an example of the approach, the formalism and the mapping to ALL are applied to a modeling language from the area of risk management.

Using Semantically Annotated Models for Supporting Business Process Benchmarking

In this paper we describe an approach for using semantic annotations of process models to support business process benchmarking. We show how semantic annotations can support the preparation of process benchmarking data by adding machine-processable semantic information to existing process models without modifying the original modeling language, conduct semantic analyses for the purpose of performance measurement, and obfuscate the information contained in the models for ensuring confidentiality. The approach has been implemented on the ADOxx platform and applied to two use cases for a first evaluation.