Wanda Opprecht

Towards an Ontology-Based Approach for Creating Sustainable Services

This paper introduces our ontology-based approach for developing sustainable services. After studying the current trends in technology and economy, we underline the importance of the services semantics and the role of ontological domain knowledge in creating intelligent services. We propose to put them into the core of the services information kernel, which capitalizes the knowledge indispensable for defining and creating services. To do this, we develop an approach for creating services based on their information kernel that guarantees their functionality, semantic coherence and sustainability. Finally, we discuss the conceptual methodology of its implementation as a cross-pollination space. The paper is concluded with the perspectives of the ongoing work and the priorities of our future research.

Service specification upon multiple existing information systems

This paper presents an approach for the specification of business services upon multiple existing information systems (IS). Indeed, the challenges that a service architect has to face with the IS complexity from one side (due to the intertwinement of the organisational, informational, technological and ontological spaces), the complexity of its evolution from the other, and often multiple existing information systems, require a proper guidance and a methodological framework in order to implement new business services. We thus propose a process model with a referential of analysis (SAM) to support our approach and we discuss it in the context of the e-government services engineering.

Towards a Framework for Enterprise Information System Evolution Steering

Evolution is characteristic to every Information System (IS) because of continuing changes in its environment. It is also a necessary condition for guaranteeing IS fitness to the organizational needs and requirements. Nonetheless, each IS evolution presents several risks towards its sustainability and further changes, and steering IS evolution is indispensable for any organization. In this work we propose a framework that aims to guide the actors responsible for IS evolution steering. The framework allows to reduce the uncertainty, which is inherent in the IS evolution, by providing the information necessary to realise IS evolution activities and to simulate their impact. It is composed of several conceptual models representing different IS dimensions (information, activities, regulation). In this paper we detail the IS Steering Metamodel (IS-SM), which is the main element of our framework.

Defining the Responsibility Space for the Information Systems Evolution Steering

Information System (IS) evolution is today a continuous preoccupation of every modern organization that aims to have a perfect support for its constantly changing business ecosystem. However, the task of IS evolution is not anodyne, it presents several risks towards IS sustainability as well as towards enterprise activity. Taking a decision related to any IS change can be a troublesome responsibility because of the amount of information that has to be processed and the uncertainty of the impact of the change on the enterprise and its IS. To reduce this uncertainty, we have developed a conceptual framework for IS evolution steering. This framework allows to capture the information on how enterprise IS supports its activities and regulations, and then to extract the information relevant for realizing IS evolution activities, simulating their impact, and taking appropriate decisions. This second part of the framework is called the responsibility space of IS evolution steering and is the main subject of this paper.

Reorganizing an Enterprise Thanks to its Information System

Enterprise Information System (IS) is often reduced to a position to solve problems, most often administrative ones, by means of informatics. This paper considers another point of view of IS utility where it creates new opportunities and greatly expands the means to deal with complex change situations. The case studied in this paper is the enterprise reorganization. This exploratory research reveals the role of IS in such a critical situation. It unearths key IS modeling and architecture principles and discovers knowledge and methods of reasoning required to support IS evolution as an underlying way to the enterprise reorganization. It concludes with the emergence of a new research area: the Computer Aided Information Steering.

Innovation and evolution of services: role of initiatives

This paper discusses the role of initiatives in dynamic collaborative processes of services innovation and evolution in the organizational context of an enterprise. The research is based on the current state of the art on modeling initiatives and services and studies phenomena of innovation and evolution for supporting services. Within our approach, we propose definitions for the key concepts related to modeling processes of services innovation and evolution, and define their main characteristics, stakeholders and roles. Furthermore, we introduce our services-oriented approach for initiatives management and show how it could be used for the process of services innovation through knowledge actionalizing. This theoretical founding is then discussed from the implementation viewpoint: we introduce a trans-disciplinary collaboration platform, Cross-Pollination Space, and briefly describe its framework. We conclude with the scope of current work and identify some context limitations of this research and reposition them as perspectives for our future work.

Co-Constructing IS Evolutions with Initiatives

The main challenge for an enterprise Information System (IS) is to be able to evolve in a sustainable way, that is, to be capable to adapt itself to the new environment, to dynamically integrate the ever-changing conditions of this environment, and to be sustainably coherent with the evolving challenges. Another important challenge for an IS is to support the enterprise activities, particularly its transversal businesses and processes and especially the activities that create value for the enterprise. In this context, we consider the idea that initiatives could play a prominent role in the IS evolution process, and that they could be considered as an opportunity for an IS to sustainably evolve, to support the enterprise transversal and value-creating activities and to be part of the IS steering methods. In this paper, we define the notion of initiative and we propose an approach for the collaborative engineering of initiatives based on an interoperability frame of reference.