=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1497/dc1
|storemode=property
|title=A Context Modelling Method to Enhance Business Service Flexibility in Organisations
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1497/PoEM2015_DCPaper1.pdf
|volume=Vol-1497
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/ifip8-1/Koc15a
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==A Context Modelling Method to Enhance Business Service Flexibility in Organisations==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1497/PoEM2015_DCPaper1.pdf
A Context Modelling Method to Enhance Business
Service Flexibility in Organisations
Hasan Koç
University of Rostock, Institute of Computer Science, 18051 Rostock, Germany
hasan.koc@uni-rostock.de
Abstract. The change of the global business environment implies unforeseen
requirements that the enterprises did not take into account during system de-
sign. Based on such rapid changes and uncertainties in the future that are not
predictable, organizations need to be flexible, not only in terms of their organi-
zational structures but also regarding the Information Technology (IT). One
challenge is the adaptation and evolution of software systems in changing situa-
tions, which is reflected by the criticism of poor flexibility. This work proposes
a context modelling method based on enterprise capabilities and Information
System (IS) Design, which is a model-based solution approach and aims to im-
prove the flexibility of digital services provided in changing environments.
Keywords: Context Modelling, Capability Modelling, Method Engineering
1 Introduction
We are living in an economy which is characterised by the rapid change. The techno-
logical advances and the increasing globalization of the economy require in many
areas high adaptability of enterprises. Based on such rapid changes and uncertainties
in the future that are not predictable, organisations need to be flexible, not only in
terms of their organizational structures but also regarding the Information Technology
(IT). The change of the global business environment implies unforeseen requirements
that the enterprises did not take into account during system design. Necessarily, this
poses new problems for Information System (IS) Development, such as the adaptation
and evolution of software systems in various situations, which is reflected by the crit-
icism of poor flexibility [1], [2] as well as increased operative costs based on the
manual configuration of the systems. Since it is not possible to propose a one-size-
fits-all solution, the investigation has been limited to the service organisations due to
following reasons:
• Changes in the role of operant resources caused a shift from Goods Dominant Log-
ic to Service Dominant Logic (SDL) [3]. The growth of the service economy
caused by this paradigm shift impacts the business processes of the organizations
and makes it even more important for enterprises to adopt themselves to changes.
S. España J. Ralyté, P. Soffer, J. Zdravkovic and Ó. Pastor (Eds.):
PoEM 2015 Short and Doctoral Consortium Papers, pp. 91-98, 2015.
92 H. Koç
• Organizations face the need to adapt their business services according to various
situations. In this regard EU-FP7 research project Capability as a Service (CaaS)
aims to facilitate a shift towards a capability delivery paradigm. In order to ascer-
tain cross-industry applicability of the new paradigm, the CaaS project follows a
use case driven approach. The use cases analysed in CaaS are related to the enter-
prises offering (digital) services that needs to be designed flexible [4].
The need for manual configuration of business services can be reduced by model-
based design of the service application context. The observations from the industrial
use cases in CaaS showed that organizations possess necessary knowledge on applica-
tion contexts of the digital services influenced by various drivers, yet a methodologi-
cal support on how to capture and model such application context is missing. Thus,
the main research goal followed in the thesis is to improve the flexibility of business
services provided in changing environments by developing a context modelling meth-
od based on enterprise capabilities. The method uses enterprise models as a starting
point for the development processes. The approach aims designing business services
adjusted to their application context and aligned with enterprise goals, which we call
capability. First, Section 2 describes the research approach followed in the thesis.
Then Section 3 addresses the problem investigation phase, gathers evidence from
industry and theoretical work, which are then used to derive requirements to the de-
sign artefact. Section 4 introduces the context modelling method and finally Section 5
reports the current state of the work.
2 Research Approach
The design process of the developed artefact must be defined rigorously and show
relevancy to the motivated problem. Due to its socio-technical structure, IS Develop-
ment is a wicked problem. Wicked problems do not have a definitive formulation,
they are unique and solutions to them are good or bad and not true or false [5]. There-
fore we apply the Design Science Research (DSR) approach to tackle the problems,
i.e. we follow the DSR guidelines proposed by Hevner [6]. The whole research pro-
cess is conducted design-science oriented and is based on three cycles. Relevance
cycle is assured by the use cases taken from three industrial application scenarios. In
rigour cycle we use the applicable knowledge in the literature by investigating
frameworks, models and methods that might help in solving the problem. Both rele-
vant and rigour cycles are presented in Section 3. Finally, in the design cycle we de-
velop the artefact (the method) based on the inputs from both cycles, observe how the
developed artefact behaves in these scenarios and refine it after the gathered feedback
in the evaluation (see Section 4). In line with the relevance and rigour cycles of DSR,
two main research questions arise when tackling the flexibility issues in IS Design.
• RQ 1: How can the enterprises be supported from a method perspective in improv-
ing flexibility when offering digital services?
─ RQ 1.1 What are the current problems of the organizations offering services in
changing environments? (Section 3.1)
A Context Modelling Method to Enhance Business Service Flexibility in Organisations 93
─ RQ 1.2 Which approaches exist to align business services and IT? (Section 3.3)
─ RQ 1.3 What are the current problems in context modelling support for enter-
prises (Section 3.1)? Which approaches exist to model context (Section 3.3)?
─ RQ 1.4 How should a methodological support for increasing flexibility look
like? (Section 3.2)
• RQ2: Does the method use lead to an improvement in enterprises offering digital
services based on business processes? (Section 5)
3 Problem Investigation
3.1 Theoretical and Practical Relevance
Enterprises offer business services to satisfy customer needs and to support the ex-
change of business value across a network of enterprises [7]. Business services are
perceived as high-level implementation components that operationalize an organiza-
tion’s strategy [8]. Thus the modelling of business services should depend on enter-
prise goals, business context and not only comprise of technical aspects. This ad-
dresses business/IT alignment, which is a serious challenge in today’s enterprises due
to changes in regulations, time-to-market pressures and technological advances. One
way to tackle these challenges is the management and modelling of (IT) capabilities
[9] (see Section 3.3).
Due to the achievements in IT, business services are electronic-oriented and can al-
so be offered digitally, which require the infrastructure of an IT-based Internet for
service creation, request or delivery [10]. Especially in the domain of e-services, ac-
tors exchange information based on IT Systems. We define such business services as
“digital services”. Although digital services are developed for a specific customer
group, they need to be configured in line with the actual application context. The need
stems both from external constraints, such as changes in customer requirements, regu-
lations or service deployment environment and internal constraints, such as priorities
changes, delay constraints and staff schedule [11]. In summary, digital enterprises
need to offer IT-based flexible services to improve their chances of survival [9]. In
order to support theoretical observations from the literature, we also analyzed the
problem from the practical point of view and investigated two organizations offering
digital services within two distinct domains.
• SIV.AG is an independent software vendor for the utilities industry with particu-
lar focus on Germany. The company owns a BSP that provides services for the cus-
tomers running kVASy®, SIV’s industry specific Enterprise Resource Planning
(ERP) platform. The BSP deals with inter-company business processes between part-
ners in the utility market that requires exchange of bulky messages about energy con-
sumption data. Currently, if an exception occurs in validating or processing the mes-
sage, the BSP acts as a clearing center involving the manual interaction of a human
agent, which causes extra costs on the side of the utility as well as operational efforts.
• everis is a multinational consulting firm providing business and strategy solu-
tions, application development, and outsourcing services. The everis use case is based
on the public sector and the main emphasis is put on electronic services provided to
94 H. Koç
municipalities, which are then used by citizens and companies. The company provides
in a SOA platform a service catalogue with up to 200 services in 250 municipalities.
Different factors and actors involved has to be taken into account when offering the
services, such as public administration’s laws, regulations, multinational corporations,
administrative consortia and calendars, as well as various technological tools.
Fig. 1: Roles, Processes and the Technology Stack [12]
The aforementioned enterprises have established development and operating pro-
cesses, technology stacks, and roles which is shown in Fig. 1. The horizontal line
represents the engineering process encompassing the steps for designing, developing
and operating digital services whereas the vertical line, technology stack, addresses all
IT-tools, notations, languages, workflow engines, software development environ-
ments required in the engineering process. The engineering process consists of three
phases. In the conceptual solution phase digital services are developed, in the tech-
nical solution phase the conceptual solution is prepared for execution and finally in
the executed solution phase the solution is deployed. Different roles participate to the
engineering process, i.e. business analyst develops solutions expressed in appropriate
models, solution engineer configures them for deployment in line with the application
context and worker/ operator monitors the deployment.
Both enterprises offer services that have to be adapted to business requirements of
the customer. The requirements are strongly related to the service application context.
Currently these organizations envision reducing operative costs required to adjust the
business services by increasing the flexibility. One prerequisite is aligning the needs
of business and IT as well as reaching a common understanding with participating
roles on different levels. This could be achieved by model-based design of the ser-
vices and their application context, which represents the configurable parts. Although
there is enough knowledge about the service application contexts in the enterprises,
such knowledge is either hard-coded in the systems or preserved in separate docu-
ments. As a result, their configuration is a cost-intensive task, which can be reduced
by a methodological support addressing how to capture and model this knowledge.
3.2 Artefact Requirements
The requirements towards the method to be developed were derived from the indus-
trial use cases presented above by conducting workshops and expert interviews with
A Context Modelling Method to Enhance Business Service Flexibility in Organisations 95
the industrial partners as well as analysing secondary data. The use case requirements
were cross-examined based on industry-wide surveys that illustrated its relevance
towards a wider user base rather than just the project’s industrial partners (see [4],
[13]). First of all, to support different ways of working, the method has to provide an
adaptable development methodology and should not be a monolithic block (REQ1).
Business services should be designed in an understandable way for the stakeholders,
who do not necessarily have a deep IT knowledge. From the flexibility point of view,
this requires adopting model-based design of IS. In particular, based on the developed
models, the method should enhance the communication between different stakehold-
ers such as business analysts, solution engineers and knowledge workers (see Fig. 1)
(REQ2). Due to changes in requirements, the standard processes are altered when
offering services to the customers and variants of these standard processes are mod-
elled/ implemented. Thus, the method should offer guidelines on how to manage pro-
cess variability efficiently (REQ3). Last but not least, the method should document
the steps to model the application context in detail with certain inputs, objectives and
outputs. Moreover, the important concepts that the method user needs to be acquaint-
ed with must be described to have an ontological commitment to the terms and related
notation to model such concepts should be provided (REQ4).
3.3 Related Work
Relevant areas for this paper are capability management and modelling as well as the
approaches in context modelling, which are briefly discussed in this following.
Capability Management. Capability is a widely used term for the alignment of busi-
ness and IT. In line with CaaS project, the capability is defined as “the ability and
capacity to reach a goal in a given context”. Capabilities help to design business ser-
vices and are related to organizational strategies. They are used as fundamental ab-
straction instruments in business service design. Moreover, they support flexible ser-
vice design by taking the business context into consideration [4, 13, 14]. Due to their
roots in strategic management, capabilities are less technical-oriented concepts and
take a business point of view whereas services rather take a technical point of view
and are concerned about the implementation aspects. For business stakeholders, capa-
bilities provide an abstraction from technical concepts [9]. Based on such characteris-
tics, the capability concept is central to context modelling method.
Context Modelling. The state of the art analysis conducted in [15] showed that con-
text modelling and context-based systems are a popular topic in contemporary re-
search and exposed different context definitions and application examples. Most of
the works focus on the conceptualization of context, i.e. what elements context typi-
cally consists of and how to represent context models. An off-the-shelf context mod-
elling method fulfilling the requirements and showing what steps to take as well as
how to identify relevant context elements has not been proposed yet. However, the
proposed approaches can be used as inspiration based on the six parameters provided
by [16], namely constraint, influence, behaviour, nature, structure, and system.
96 H. Koç
4 Solution Artefact
Organizations have different ways of working, in a context where the organizations
are in a constant seek of balance work methods should be organized flexible and sup-
port various application scenarios [11]. To fulfil REQ1, a modular approach to meth-
od engineering was applied by dividing the methodology into several method compo-
nents. In doing so, the method user could focus on those parts of the method that are
needed and select the components relevant for a specific tasks. For this purposes, the
method conceptualization framework of Goldkuhl is applied, which allows defining
the important concepts and supports their representation with a notation (REQ4).
Moreover, the framework is extended, i.e. i) the procedures are refined with addition-
al elements such as steps with certain inputs, outputs and tool support and ii) the
terms perspective and framework are replaced by purpose and overview to method
components respectively [14]. The method addresses different aspects of IS Design,
i.e. the method components (MC) 1, 2 and 3 are concerned with early design phase,
where business analysts and knowledge workers are required, whereas the MC 4 and
5 is concerned with the binding and run-time phases, where the solution engineers
play a vital role (REQ2). The context modelling method assumes that the causes of
the variability in enterprise models can create the basis for the method user to identify
the context elements. Thus, the method offers guidelines on how to identify variations
and to elicit context elements from them (REQ3). The concepts shared by the MC are
based on the slightly updated version of the Capability Meta Model proposed in [17].
To represent such concepts, the method adopts the Business Process Model and Nota-
tion (BPMN) as well as the CDT Notation, which has been developed during the
CaaS project. The context modelling method is illustrated in Fig. 2 and the MC are
described very briefly in the following. Detailed discussions on the concepts, notation
and prerequisites to use the method can be found in [14].
MC1: Preparing to Context Modelling. As mentioned earlier, variations and their
causes are used to elicit the context elements influencing the service provision. There-
fore the context modelling method proposes to analyse enterprise models from the
variation point of view. For the time being, the thesis is limited to the analysis of
business process models, i.e. the variations in the goal models, or concept models are
not investigated extensively. If no enterprise models are available or they are not up to
date, then the method user applies MC1. To exemplify, we encountered one use case
where the organisation captured the enterprise knowledge based on the textual de-
scriptions related to specific services. In such cases the method user can perform
MC1. However, if the enterprise models are up to date and used extensively in the
service provision, then the MC1 can be skipped.
MC2: Find Variations. In this MC, the modeller analyses the structures that will
form the context element in the following method components. The MC2 focuses on
identifying possible variations in the business process models. The main motivation
of this MC is that such variations in the business models arise due to the factors, from
which context elements can be extracted.
MC3: Capture Context Element. Focuses on investigating the entities and aspects
of the context by eliciting the factors, which cause variations in the processes and
A Context Modelling Method to Enhance Business Service Flexibility in Organisations 97
which were identified in MC2. By defining the attributes and measurable properties,
the method user defines a context element.
MC4: Design Context. Defines value ranges of the context elements for a certain
capability and collects them in a context set. The capability defined in the earlier ac-
tivities can also be refined in this method component, since the method user now has
a better view of the context, goals and business processes.
Fig. 2. Context Modelling Method
MC5: Prepare for Operational Use. Describes the way of adding part of the specifi-
cations to the context model in order to generate code from the model and make it
implementable.
5 Summary and Outlook
The main research goal of the thesis is to improve the flexibility of business ser-
vices provided in changing environments by explicitly modelling the service applica-
tion context with a method based on enterprise capabilities. Due to its different entry
points, the method can be applied in and adapted to different kinds of situations. The
method, which is in the late phases of its development, aims to support various stake-
holders in an enterprise on different levels such as business analysts, solution engi-
neers and (knowledge) workers /operators. To date, the method evolved based on the
feedback from enterprise modelling experts and application in industrial use cases.
Although a systematic evaluation of the method is missing, there are initial thoughts
on the type of evaluation approach as well as the available resources. The future work
will i) specify the approach to evaluate the method and ii) implement the approach to
engineer the final version of the method.
Acknowledgments. This work has been performed as part of the EU-FP7 funded
project no: 611351 CaaS – Capability as a Service in Digital Enterprises.
98 H. Koç
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