Ziv Baida

An ontological approach for eliciting and understanding needs in e-services

The lack of a good understanding of customer needs within e-service initiatives caused severe financial losses in the Norwegian energy sector, resulting in the failure of e-service initiatives offering packages of independent services. One of the causes was a poor elicitation and understanding of the e-services at hand. In this paper, we propose an ontologically founded approach (1) to describe customer needs, and the necessary e-services that satisfy such needs, and (2) to bundle elementary e-services into needs-satisfying e-service bundles. The ontology as well as the associated reasoning mechanisms are codified in RDFS to enable software support for need elicitation and service bundling. A case study from the Norwegian energy sector is used to demonstrate how we put our theory into practice.

Energy Services: A Case Study in Real-World Service Configuration

Current eCommerce is still mainly characterized by the trading of commodity goods. Many industries offer complex compositions of goods based on customers’ specifications. This is facilitated by a component-based description of goods, supported by a variety of product classification schemes, e.g., UNSPSC and eCl@ss. These focus on physical goods – wrongly referred to as products – rather than on services. Services are intangible products, for instance insurances, transportation, network connectivity, events hosting, entertainment or energy supply. Due to major differences between goods and services, product classification schemes cannot support automated service scenarios, such as a customer who wishes to define and buy a set of independent services, possibly supplied by multiple suppliers, via one website. To enable such eCommerce scenarios for services, a service ontology is required that supports a component-based structure of services. Defining a set of services is then reduced to a configuration task, as studied in the knowledge management literature. In this paper we use a case study from the Norwegian energy sector to describe how a component-based ontological description of services facilitates the automated design of a set of services, a so called service bundle.

Preserving Control in Trade Procedure Redesign-The Beer Living Lab

Globalization requires the European Union (EU) to reduce the administrative burdens for companies involved in cross-border trade if the EU is to remain a competitive economic zone. However, increasing efficiency and reducing administrative burden can easily conflict with the growing need for security, safety, health, fraud prevention and control. A key question then is how to ensure that when redesigning procedures for higher efficiency, effectiveness and trade facilitation, the desired control mechanisms are preserved and even improved? The e3-control methodology is being developed to cope with this challenge, however so far it has been implemented in parts only. In this paper we illustrate a holistic application of e3-control in the Beer Living Lab (BeerLL), an EU-funded pilot research project in the beer industry, to address a complex, real-life inter-organizational problem. Based on the application of e3-control in the BeerLL we reflect on: (1) the usefulness of e3-control to address complex interorganizational real-life problems; (2) the process of applying e3-control; (3) the underlying concepts of e3-control; and (4) the use of Living Labs as a setting for evaluating design artefacts.

Finding e-Service Offerings by Computer-Supported Customer Need Reasoning

We outline a rigorous approach that models how companies can electronically offer packages of independent services (service bundles). Its objective is to support prospective Website visitors in defining and buying service bundles that fit their specific needs and demands. The various services in the bundle may be offered by different suppliers. To enable this scenario, it is necessary that software can reason about customer needs and available service offerings. Our approach for tackling this issue is based on recent advances in computer and information science, where information about a domain at hand is conceptualized and formalized using ontologies and subsequently represented in machine-interpretable form. The substantive part from our ontology derives from broadly accepted service management and marketing concepts from business studies literature. In earlier work, we concentrated on the service bundling process itself. In the present chapter, we discuss how to ensure that the created bundles indeed meet customer demands. Experience of Norwegian energy utilities shows that severe financial losses can be caused when companies offer service bundles without a solid foundation for the bundle-creation process and without an in-depth understanding of customer needs and demands. We use a running case example from the Norwegian energy sector to demonstrate how we put theory into practice.

Documenting and Analyzing a Context-Sensitive Design Space

In most requirements engineering and software architecture documents, empha-sis is placed on the chosen alternative. The discarded ones, and the arguments that led to a particular choice, are often not explicitly recorded and documented. This makes it difficult to retrace decisions and explore alternatives. We have developed a representation for capturing quality requirements and associated architectural solution fragments, called the Feature-Solution (FS) graph. We use the knowledge captured in the FS-graph to iteratively compose an architecture. This paper shows that when the knowledge in the FS-graph captures context-sensitive architectural knowledge, such as the concerns of different stakeholders, this representation can also be used to document and reason about architectural trade-offs. The result not only documents feasible architectures, but also the traces of design decisions that led to those architectures, which is a valuable asset during the further implementation and evolution of the system.

e-Business cases assessment: from business value to system feasibility

Innovative e-commerce initiatives present a new way of doing business. Since short time-to-market is a major requirement in e-commerce, and typically multiple parties (enterprises) are involved, multiple stakeholders have to be convinced quickly that the new way of doing business is technically feasible and economically profitable for them. Consequently, a lightweight approach is required for defining, deriving and analysing multi-enterprise relationships, business cases and requirements. The e3-value framework is a multi-viewpoint requirements engineering method that offers such an approach. It is based on analysing e-commerce initiatives through three stakeholder-based viewpoints. To ensure that these viewpoints keep correlated, to facilitate traceability of requirement decisions, and to support trade-off analysis between requirements, we present Feature Solution (FS) graphs as an extension to the e3-value framework. An FS-graph captures architectural knowledge in the form of desired features and solutions that realize these features. By combining the two methods, we ensure viewpoint integration, which makes it possible to conduct a systematic exploration of design alternatives in an e-commerce initiative. A business value driven information systems architecture for implementing an e-commerce system is generated as a by-product of our method.

Towards a methodology for designing e-government control procedures

The EU is currently modernizing customs legislation and practices. Main pillars in the new vision are an intensive use of IT (Customs becomes e-Customs), partnerships between Customs administrations and businesses (G2B), and collaboration between national Customs administrations (G2G). But how to design new customs control procedures? Very little theory exists, and an inspection of current procedures shows that they are vulnerable to fraud, and thus badly designed. Therefore we identify a need for developing theory for the design of government control procedures. Some research has been done on designing inter-organizational controls in B2B transactions. In this paper we argue that with certain modifications control principles used in B2B are also suitable for the Government-to-Business context, and we present a conceptual model for designing government controls in G2B, based on earlier work of Bons. We use a study on customs procedures for the export of agricultural goods from the EU to Russia as a proof of concept.

Music rights clearance business analysis and delivery

Semantic Web Services can be seen as remote Problem Solving Methods offered via the Web through platform and language independent interfaces. They can be seamlessly integrated to achieve more complex functionality by composing pre-existing software components. Despite technical advantages surrounding Semantic Web Services technologies, their perspective overlooks the commercial aspects of services in the real – non-IT – world, and is therefore incomplete and limiting. Real-world services – business activities such as insurances, medical services, ADSL etc – have nowadays an increasing social and economic importance. Important trends are the bundling of services and a growing customer-need orientation. Thus, there is a need for a computational background for describing real-world services and applying knowledge-based technologies for reasoning about them: configuring composite services and analysing them from a business perspective. We have developed ontologies and software tools to fill this gap, and applied them to industrial case studies. We present here a case study from the music industry, going from the analysis of a new business scenario to the development of an application called Xena that coordinates IT infrastructures in order to provide a profitable service that reflects major business principles. As opposed to currently proposed solutions in the Semantic Web Services community, our system is an automated implementation of a real-world service where important business decisions can be traced back.