Nowadays economic subjects of small and medium business (SMB) playing a huge
role in the economic development, . giving up to 40% of the GDP and 80% of
employment in developed countries [
We will take the definition of digital economy unit (digital enterprise) as an
organization creating value and profiting from use of digital technologies as the
instrument of automation of the current activity and realizing transformation old or creation
of essentially new business models on its basis[
The analysis of the digital enterprises [
Large industrial digital solutions, analytical systems and real time decision support
systems, based on big data and the IoT, are costly and excessive for small and
medium entrepreneurship. Currently, the vast majority of SMB uses the digital sphere only
for social media [
In 2016-2017 we analyzed 37 organizations of SMB as in traditional industries (trade, advertising, tourism and leisure, education, manufacturing), and in the digitally-enabled areas (crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, text, video and graphic content creation, web development) to discover the role of social media in the corporate functions realizationf: business and personal communication, decision-making processes, marketing and lead(client) generation, task management, knowledge management, monitoring of various analytical metrics.
As a result the following functions appeared to be strongly (more than 30%) connected to the social media functionality: registration (68%), description of product and service offers (60%), processing of purchase (37%), quality feedback (52%), proposition delivery (39%), product delivery (32%), pre-sale (31%).
However, social networks act only as a platform of communication for organizational subjects. The majority of corporate functions automation is realized as cloudbased or in-house services and applications. Therefore, at the organization of digital SMB or attempt of transition to "digital", entrepreneurs face significant barriers, that we investigated in the research. We identify 3 groups of the barriers - technologic, organizational and legal-based. As a result, the business poorly designed, the output does not meet the needs of the community, or business is critically ineffective.
The legal issues are out of scope of this paper. We are going to propose a model of SMB architecture that is capable to reduce the organizational and technologic barriers to the formation and transformation of SMB unit to the digital form, to increase its survival rate, and grow its operation efficiency in the digital economy. 2
The key to the effective business engineering is the proper selection of the points of
view, that provide us with working managerial and organizational models and
strategy. In other words, to be efficient in SMB design we need to implement enterprise
architecture approach. To reduce the cost of this implementation one can use one of
numerous reference architectures and frameworks The implementation and
interpretation is well described in works of such experts of architecture of the enterprise as J.
Zachman[
In a digital century, activity of SMB during the forming and/or transition to digital space begins to gain the characteristics of an online service: • For customers: • finding the most relevant service quickly, just specifying the set of requirements; • providing re-defined information set as an input, receiving pre-defined configuration of the product in return; • Availability of the service via wide range of channels and at any time. • For digital SMB; • real-time collaboration with other business units to integrate the unique business process to provide a complex system of goods and services, requested by the customer, with manageable quality; • providing "minimum viable product", with iterations, for faster implementation of digital goods.
Taking in account the brief analysis of the popular architectural approaches made in
[
This concept is based on the understanding of business as a set of services,
provided by the business units, with pre-defined business interfaces (channels, information
exchange formats, prices, etc) and the results in a clearly defined format. In addition,
one of the principles is that the existing service cannot predict when customer will
call it. In turn, the customer of service has no idea of its internal organization [
Figure 1 illustrates the suggested architectural model. Each service is presented by digital business unit of small and medium-sized businesses, which provides specific digital product to the end customer through various digital channels. In essence, each service is a certain small business in the digital ecosystem. This approach allows aggregation of various services to provide more complex product to the consumer, by the service cluster structure organization.
One of the key elements of the offered architectural model the digital platform which provides digital space for designing, transformation and an arrangement of the digital businesses, and providing of the integrated workspace for the participants of such activity. The functionality of this platform is defined on the organizational basis described below.
One of the most important architectural features for digital SMB is ability to integrate with various third-party digital services, such as electronic government, state registers, services of smart signature. The key advantage of the proposed architecture for the SMB is the combination of high cohesion and loose coupling principles, inherited from SOA programming as the key for proper organizing if the interactions. To get this advantage participating SMB should agree on the well-specified protocol of Digital ESB as on the business layer as well as on the technological and the organizational ones.
At the realization stage there appears another role - IT supplier – whose main functions are: • Technological realization of the offered architectural model (platform); • Maintenance of the provided solution implementation.
While our focus is not targeted to the business of IT supplier, we take it into the consideration only at the functional level.
Based on the research result and taking into account the ideas from the previous
chapter, we should offer a descriptive means, as complex as it is necessary to provide strict
and clear definition of the business service interface. At the same time, as simple as it
possible, taking into consideration lack of special professional knowledge and skills
of the community members involved in the business service engineering. Digital
nature of the service requires a model of the service providing process to be presented.
One more requirement is the trace of changes between enterprise models, allowing
participants easily manage changes in architecture, and allowing IT supplier to put
logic into the software.
From the EA methodologies presented today, Zachman framework allows keep in
mind all above requirements [
Let us briefly go through Zachman Framework layers in the given context.
Normally, the contextual layer gives description of the main terms of business:
services and products, clients, channels, structural owerview, and strategy of business
[
The layers determine the design and behavior of the individual service. In the context of modeling of the service organization, these layers should be enriched with the following features: • The provided artifacts should be created in digital form on digital platform and, in the final stage, be directly interpreted to generate service application; • Resulting set of architectural artifacts should be a reference for all the services in the given business context. • The modeling instrument should have version tracking feature to provide an opportunity reverse and forward business model switching The described layers define a skeleton of the organization. Therefore, the proper artefacts definition process here is really important and should be supervised and controlled by the platform supplier, but performed by participates of SMB. Technology layer.
This layer is rather traditional, except for the point that the technological layer should be designed once for all SMBs and provide a common set of architectural artifacts. 6
A successful organization adapts to changes in the external economic, social, political
and technological environments quickly. This ability is a consequence of its
architecture, is it conscious or not, the change management process, and the organizational
unit managing architectural changes. The instrumental set is of great help here, which
should be carefully selected, taking into account the discussed requirements. Most of
the basic enterprise architecture methodologies concentrate on the architectural
artefacts [
In contrast, for the digital SMB organization, an agile approach could be
recommended. Purposed for information systems development initially [
The flexible change management model in the architecture of each service based on a dynamic case management, with the chosen simplest architectural meta-model and its implementation in the form of software components, also include strong degree of connectivity, provides members of the digital SMB with sufficient set of tools to make business agile and successful. 7
Our main task was to propose an architectural concept to make a process of SMB digital transformation smoother. Step-by-step walking through the SMB digital transformation we investigated the agile enterprise architecture approach, that helps us meet the requirements and overcome the barriers, found in the research of SMB in pre-transformation stage. The limits of the publication dictate the brief style of this description. The development of models of the architecture of digital enterprises of small and medium-sized entrepreneurship and their transformation into software components, on the other hand, requires from community members a certain level of system thinking, and implementing the digital platform by the qualified IT provider. The last point requires a separate study of the problem of organization activities and, in general, the EA of the IT provider itself. The above conditions and the complexity of the work entail a vector of transformation of the architects of system integrators and vendors of product solutions to the organization of a sustainable service model of business.