Volker Hoyer

Market Overview of Enterprise Mashup Tools

A new paradigm, known as Enterprise Mashups, has been gain momentum during the last years. By empowering actual business end-users to create and adapt individual enterprise applications, Enterprise Mashups implicate a shift concerning a collaborative software development and consumption process. Upcoming Mashup tools prove the growing relevance of this paradigm in the industry, both in the consumer and enterprise-oriented market. However, a market overview of the different tools is still missing. In this paper, we introduce a classification of Mashup tools and evaluate selected tools of the different clusters according to the perspectives general information, functionality and usability. Finally, we classify more than 30 tools in the designed classification model and present the observed market trends in context of Enterprise Mashups.

Enterprise Mashups: Design Principles towards the Long Tail of User Needs

A new type of Web-based applications, known as Enterprise Mashups, has been gaining momentum in the last years. Novel design principles are currently about to emerge allowing to cover the long tail of user needs and to provide individual and heterogeneous enterprise applications in a shorter time. In this paper, we introduce the main components of this new paradigm, and discuss the design principles of the architecture (Enterprise Mashup Stack), upcoming intermediaries and mass collaboration, lightweight composition as well as perpetual beta development model.

Patterns for Enterprise Mashups in B2B Collaborations to Foster Lightweight Composition and End User Development

The huge demand for situational and ad-hoc applications desired by the mass of business end users cannot be fully implemented by IT departments. New approaches that allow for End User Development (EUD) are needed to overcome this “long-tail” dilemma. More specifically,most existing approaches insufficiently support EUD for infrequent, situational, and ad-hoc B2B Collaborations.Enterprise Mashup-/ and Lightweight Composition approaches and tools are promising solutions to unleash the huge potential of integrating the mass of users into development. Within the current research project FAST,a Web based Mashup/ Gadget development tool is in development that allows for different options to realizeB2B collaborations via Mashups. In this work, five patterns for the development of Enterprise Mashups are identified, characterized, and evaluated with focus on their adequacy for B2B collaborations.

The Changing Role of IT Departments in Enterprise Mashup Environments

A new paradigm, known as Enterprise Mashups, implicates a shift concerning the service development and consumption process: end users combine and reuse existing Web-based resources within minutes to new applications in order to solve an individual and ad-hoc business problem. In such democratized operational environments, the role of IT departments is changing. They are no longer solely responsible for developing or installing business applications. Instead, end users in the business units compose their own operational environment in a collaborative manner. This paper analyses and discusses challenges and the changing role of IT departments toward service intermediaries by leveraging the St. Gallen Media Reference Model (MRM).

Collaborative e-business process modelling: transforming private EPC to public BPMN business process models

Introducing process orientation to overcome the functional-oriented organizational structure was the main concern within enterprises during the last decade to improve process quality. The next wave of process-oriented enterprises deals with integrating private tasks and processes into cross-organizational business processes characterized by high automation effort and supported by a wide penetration of e-Business technologies. In this work, we propose a concept for transforming internal private processes to publicly visible processes in a semi-automatic way. This transformation will be done by hiding the modelling complexity from the users. Evaluated on the basis of Event-Driven Process Chains (EPC) for private process view and the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) for public process view, this article identifies the challenges both on semantic and syntactic level regarding the integrated mapping between different modelling layers as well as modelling languages.

Generic Business Model Types for Enterprise Mashup Intermediaries

The huge demand for situational and ad-hoc applications desired by the mass of business end users led to a new kind of Web applications, well-known as Enterprise Mashups. Users with no or limited programming skills are empowered to leverage in a collaborative manner existing Mashup components by combining and reusing company internal and external resources within minutes to new value added applications. Thereby, Enterprise Mashup environments interact as intermediaries to match the supply of providers and demand of consumers. By following the design science approach, we propose an interaction phase model artefact based on market transaction phases to structure required intermediary features. By means of five case studies, we demonstrate the application of the designed model and identify three generic business model types for Enterprise Mashups intermediaries (directory, broker, and marketplace). So far, intermediaries following a real marketplace business model don’t exist in context of Enterprise Mashups and require further research for this emerging paradigm.

A core component-based modelling approach for achieving e-business semantics interoperability

The adoption of advanced integration technologies that enable private and public organizations to seamlessly execute their business transactions electronically is still relatively low, especially among governmental bodies and Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). Current solutions often lack a common understanding of the underlying business document semantics and most existing approaches are not able to cope with the huge variety of business document formats, stemming from highly diverse requirements of the different stakeholders. Developed and applied in the course of the EU-funded research project GENESIS, this paper presents a comprehensive core component-based business document modelling approach that builds upon existing standards such as the OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL) and the UN/CEFACT Core Component Technical Specification (CCTS). These standards are extended by introducing the concept of generic business document templates out of which specific documents can be derived according to the actual users needs. Key principle to achieve this flexibility is the integration of business context information that allows for modelling standard-based but at the same time customized business documents. The resulting modelling framework ranges from (tool-supported) graphical data models to the technical representation of the business documents as XML schema documents designed in compliance with the UN/CEFACT XML schema Naming and Design Rules (NDR).

Strategies for Cross-Organizational Service Composition

The automation of cross-organizational business processes bears great potential for companies to extend their market reach, save time, cut costs and respond to customer queries more agilely. However, technological support for the efficient organization of providing and consuming services across corporate boundaries is still not mature enough to allow for a large-scale adoption particularly among small-and medium-sized enterprises. In this article, we propose and evaluate different strategies with regard to architectures supporting the organization of service interconnections: In case of rather standardized and stable business relationships and interactions, a central service orchestration architecture, a hybrid orchestration approach with hub support and finally a fully decentralized peer-to-peer solution without any central control entity are proposed and compared in detail. In cases where business processes are highly complex, variable and dependent on situational factors, we propose a more implicit, declarative service orchestration methodology which builds upon Event-Driven Architectures (EDAs). For the different architectural strategies, we provide real-world exemplary implementations to prove their applicability and to investigate their strengths and weaknesses.

What Are the Business Benefits of Enterprise Mashups

Enterprise mashups (EMs) are a new technology that enables the automation of situational needs of knowledge workers. EMs imply a new development paradigm based on the peer production philosophy and empower end users to create individual applications without the involvement of the IT department. So far, there is insufficient research on potential benefits of EMs. This paper contributes to fill this gap by designing an EM benefit model. By following the design science approach, the balance scorecard concept is leveraged to identify and structure potential benefits of EMs. By means of a laboratory experiment and a case study, the applicability of the designed benefit model is demonstrated.

The FAST Platform: An Open and Semantically-Enriched Platform for Designing Multi-channel and Enterprise-Class Gadgets

The transfer of the mashup paradigm in corporate environments needs additional capabilities beyond those typically associated with consumer mashups. In this paper, we present the architecture of the FAST platform which allows creating enterprise-class and multi-channel visual building blocks (so called gadgets) in an ad-hoc manner. The design of complex enterprise-class gadgets is supported by an integrated semantic concept which hides the complexity from the actual users. The architectural components of the platform, a technical life cycle model for enterprise mashups, and the FAST gadget ontology are presented. By means of a cross-organizational real-world scenario from the marketing/ promotion event area, we demonstrate the value and potential of the FAST platform.