Mohammad Hossein Danesh

Enterprise Capability Modeling: Concepts, Method, and Application

Strategic alignment among digital services and organizational objectives is crucial for IT, if the enterprise is to use it for competitive advantage. The motivation for the work presented in this paper is based on the need for the design of services that meet the challenges of alignment, agility and sustainability in relation to dynamically changing enterprise requirements. To this end, the paper presents an approach to enterprise modeling that historically has its roots in strategic management and more recently has been considered within the broader spectrum of enterprise architecture, business process management and service-oriented development. We refer to this approach as a capability-centric modeling approach. The paper establishes a framework within which capability modeling would be used in collaboration with other modeling viewpoints and focuses on the specific concepts and techniques that relate to enterprise capability. These concepts and techniques are elaborated upon using a scenario from a leading digital services enterprise.

Dynamic Capabilities for Sustainable Enterprise IT – A Modeling Framework

A key consideration of researchers and practitioners alike in the field of information systems engineering is the co-development of information systems and business structures and processes that are in alignment, that this alignment reflects the challenges presented by the business ecologies and that the developed systems are sustainable through appropriate responses to pressures for their evolution. These challenges inevitably need to be addressed through development schemes that recognize the intertwining of information systems, business strategy and their ecosystems. The paper presents the conceptual modeling foundations of such a scheme providing a detailed exposition of the issues and solutions for sustainable systems in which Capability plays an integrative role using examples from an industrial-size application. The contribution of the paper is on its proposition of conceptual modeling techniques that are applicable to both business strategies and information systems development.

Analyzing IT Flexibility to Enable Dynamic Capabilities

The ability to respond to change is an ongoing concern in information systems engineering. Designing flexible and adaptable information technology (IT) solutions is challenging due to difficulties in identifying and predicting adaptation needs influenced by environmental changes and enterprise competitive positioning. In this paper, we draw upon theories in strategic management, particularly conceptions of dynamic capabilities that deal with sustainable advantage, to identify and represent enterprise requirements. This research enables analysis of enterprise transformation by modeling coupling and alignment between IT and organizational capabilities using the i* framework. Potential inflexibilities and impact of changes are studied with analysis of dependency propagations. A hypothetical case using experiences from SOA and BPM implementations demonstrates use of the proposed modeling constructs.

Service oriented virtual organizations: A service change management perspective

This paper presents a change management framework and a supporting methodology based on Service Oriented Architecture to facilitate the process of change by enabling the participants in a Virtual Organization to initiate, asses, collaborate, authorize and implement changes. Our proposed solution consists of (a) a structural framework including two layers, the levels and triggers of change; and (b) a procedural framework that provides methods for efficient handling of changes based on the ITIL V3, Engineering Change Management (ECM) and ECOLEAD best practices and recommendations. We present that employing the proposed framework and methodology to manage changes in Virtual Organizations increases the flexibility, agility, competitive advantage and the value added to their services.

A distributed service oriented infrastructure for business process management in Virtual Organizations

Virtual Organizations (VO)-a network of independent organizations collaborating to address specific business opportunities-have become popular in todays technology driven business environment business climate. Although many solutions have been proposed over past two decades to support inter-organizational interactions, VOs still face several challenges due to their dynamic and temporal nature that cannot be addressed by the traditional solutions such as ebXML and EDI. In this paper, we propose a distributed architecture for a flexible infrastructure that supports collaborative business process execution, monitoring and management. The infrastructure supports the common topologies of inter-organizational collaboration (e.g. peer-to-peer, star, linear), and responds well to changes due to its loosely coupled components. The proposed infrastructure is based on federating multiple SOA infrastructures with the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) as its core. It is implemented using IBM WebSphere products. We demonstrate that the proposed SOA-based virtual organization facilitates flexibility, rapid process integration and dynamic evolution.

Representing and Analyzing Enterprise Capabilities as Specialized Actors - A BPM Example

The notion of capability is used by practitioners and researchers alike to enable better understanding of business trajectories and the role of IT in achieving them. Building on the origins of the concept from strategic management, this paper lays out the requirements for capturing enterprise-specific and social characteristics of capabilities. The paper proposes adoption of a goal-driven agent-oriented modeling approach to satisfy the requirements. The ability of such an approach to explicate social and technical design alternatives and enable decision making on their tradeoffs is illustrated on a BPM capability.

Towards a Framework for Shaping & Forming Enterprise Capabilities

In this era of rapid change and major technology-enabled transformations, information systems design needs to take into account the specific context of the organizational setting and the strategic direction of the enterprise. To this end, researchers and practitioners have built on the concept of capability to analyze what a business can and should do to manage its strategic trajectories. This paper describes four categories of modeling and analysis requirements to deal with capability formation. The requirements are identified through a review of the origins of the capability concept in the strategic management literature. A set of guidelines is proposed as part of a modeling framework based on the i* language. Enterprise Capabilities are modeled as a specialized type of intentional actor so that their socio-technical characteristics can be specified and analyzed. This approach to modeling capabilities enables reasoning about (1) why a capability is needed, (2) how it is achieved, (3) how it fits within the organizational and social setting of the enterprise, and (4) what relationships are required for its success. The applicability of the guidelines and associated viewpoints are demonstrated on a chatbot example.