Lam-Son Lê

Business and IT Alignment with SEAM for Enterprise Architecture

To align an IT system with an organizations needs, it is necessary to understand the organization s position within its environment as well as its internal configuration. In SEAM for enterprise architecture the organization is considered as a hierarchy of systems that span from business down to IT. The alignment process addresses the complete hierarchy. We illustrate the use of SEAM for enterprise architecture with an example in which a new hiring process and an IT system are developed. With this approach it is possible to train new engineers in the design of business and IT alignment. It is also possible to scope projects in a way that integrate both business and IT strategies. This enables the consideration of IT developments in an enterprise-wide context.

SeamCAD: Object-Oriented Modeling Tool for Hierarchical Systems in Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise Architecture (EA) requires modeling enterprises across multiple levels (from markets down to IT systems). Providing tool support for such models is a challenge (e.g. model containment hierarchy, navigation difficulties, problems to relate elements between different diagrams). In this paper, we identify the requirements that a CAD tool needs to satisfy to manage such hierarchical models. We then propose a solution to meet these requirements: SeamCAD - a tool designed to manage hierarchical models. We present the key features of SeamCAD and an overview of the modeling language it uses. The benefit of the proposed solution is tool support for managing enterprise models.

Definition of an Object-Oriented Modeling Language for Enterprise Architecture

In enterprise architecture, the goal is to integrate business resources and IT resources in order to improve an enterprises competitiveness. In an enterprise architecture project, the development team usually constructs a model that represents the enterprise: the enterprise model. In this paper, we present a modeling language for building such enterprise models. Our enterprise models are hierarchical object-oriented representations of the enterprises. This paper presents the foundations of our language (i.e. the Living System Theory and the RM-ODP standard), the definition of the language and ends by presenting an example of an enterprise model developed with our web-based CAD tool.

Enterprise Modeling Using the Foundation Concepts of the RM-ODP ISO/ITU Standard

Enterprise architecture (EA) projects require analyzing and designing across the whole enterprise and its environment. Enterprise architects, therefore, frequently develop enterprise models that span from the markets in which the organization operates down to the implementation of the IT systems that support its operations. In this paper, we present SEAM for EA: a method for defining an enterprise model in which all the systems are systematically represented with the same modeling ontology. We base our modeling ontology on the foundation modeling concepts defined in Part 2 of ISO/ITU Standard “Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing” (RM-ODP). This work has two contributions to enterprise architecture: the SEAM for EA method itself and the use of Part 2 of the RM-ODP standard as a modeling ontology.

Aggregating Service Level Agreements in Services Bundling: A Semiring-Based Approach

Business services arguably play a central role in service-based information systems as they fill in the gap between the technicality of Service-Oriented Architecture and the business aspects captured in Enterprise Architecture. Business services have distinctive features that are not typically observed in Web services, e.g. significant portions of the functionality of business services might be executed in a human-mediated fashion. As such, service level agreement (SLA) should be described as a mixture of human-mediated functionality (e.g., service penalty) and computer-interpretable measurement (e.g., reliability, payment). In this paper, we propose a formal framework for reasoning about the SLAs from the perspective of services bundling – the practice of innovatively organizing business services into a bulkier service offering that creates new values. Specifically, we (a) represent multi-level SLA of a business service in terms of service reliability, payment and penalty using the mathematical structure of semiring; (b) provide formality for aggregating SLAs of the constituent services that make up the service bundling; (c) make multi-level SLAs of a bundled service technically comparable. The main contribution of this work is a machinery for handling a large number of SLAs generated through services bundling, allowing to the service consumers to pick up the right service offering according to their preference.

Re-engineering Enterprises Using Data Warehouse as a Driver and Requirements as an Enabler

Re-engineering is essential for maintaining the competitiveness of enterprises. Enterprise re-engineering involves addressing (emergent) changes, re-organizing, outsourcing, realigning, etc. In this paper, we investigate how to re-engineer enterprises by coupling high-level requirements and the data warehouse, leading to a process re-design that makes the business layer of an enterprise more effective. More specifically, we propose an approach to reasoning about enterprise’s strategy together with data mining rules extracted from the data warehouse of the enterprise in order to make design-time changes to its business processes, primarily by means of eliminating redundant tasks and re-ordering inefficiently-located tasks. As such, the redesign is enabled by high-level strategic elements and driven by the enterprise data warehouse. The rationale behind this realignment is to combine yesterday’s behavioral facts (i.e., mining enterprise’s operational data) with today’s operationalization possibilities (e.g., goals), which results in tomorrow’s business model. We report our work on the enterprise architecture developed for a retailer of low-cost domestic airfare.

Aligning Service Level Agreements with Service-Oriented Enterprise Architecture

High-level enterprise services are considered as wrappers of business processes and ICT capabilities in enterprise architecture. Enterprise services have distinctive features that are not typically observed in Web services, e.g. signicant portions of the functionality of these services might be executed in a human-mediated fashion. As such, a service level agreement should be described as a mixture of human-mediated functionality (e.g., service penalty) and computer-interpretable factors (e.g., reliability, payment). This paper reports our preliminary work in defining a taxonomy for co-relating SLAs with elements of enterprise architecture. It gives insight into the alignment between what the enterprise in questions contractually agrees with its partners (or customers) and what it possesses to be able to fulfill the agreement. We define the service level agreement formally. We adopt the ArchiMate – a widely used language for modeling and analyzing enterprise architectures. We then propose the corelation between items in the agreement with elements in the enterprise architecture. We showcase our work using a real-life case-study in the retailing market of domestic airfare.