Today's economy is characterized by rapid change and digitalization. For improving their chances of success, enterprises need to cope with the challenges caused by dynamic markets. This requires a constant adaptation and flexible design of service/ product offerings. Due to the strong paradigm shift towards service economy, the thesis tackles the flexibility problem from the perspective of enterprises offering digital services. Digital services follow a process-oriented paradigm, i.e. there exists an underlying business process that is executed during service delivery. The central question tackled throughout the work is ”from the methodological perspective, how can the design of digital services adaptable to changing requirements of the environment be supported?”. The artefact developed in this thesis is the Digital Enterprise Context Modelling Method (deCOM), which captures the context of a digital service based on the variations in the business processes. The method has been developed following the Design Science Research paradigm and evaluated six times. The results indicate that, although requiring an effort to learn, deCOM is a comprehensible, useful and well-documented method to identify and model the context of a digital service.
The change of the global business environment implies unforeseen requirements
that the enterprises could not take into account during system design. As there is an
intrinsic relationship between an enterprise, its ecosystems, and its Information
Technology (IT) systems to the extent that changes in one affect the others [
One way to reduce this gap is understanding the business context, in which the digital services are provided. Yet, enterprises require a different conceptualization of context awareness than its usual interpretation in IS, i.e. beyond physical context, they need to be aware of their market, legal and social context. In this respect, the thesis proposes a systematic approach to enhance the design, development and analysis of IS components supporting the digital service provision. By analyzing business process variability and enterprise goals, it engineers Digital Enterprise Context Modelling Method (deCOM), a method to develop” context-aware” digital services. 1.1
Why is it a Challenge to Offer Digital Services?
A digital service represents an activity or benefit that one party can give to another (. . . ) through a digital transaction (…) over Internet Protocol [2, pp. 506]. Digital services encompass the IT-based design and provision of usual business services, mainly focusing on the related business processes and enterprise objectives to exchange value. An understanding on different levels is the key for adaptation to changing business scenarios, which is not possible only by analyzing the technical aspects of a service, such as the required technologies, configuration items, supporting applications and infrastructures.
The main characteristic of all types of services is that they are customer centric, i.e.
customers are co-producers of services [
The thesis observes the main problems hindering enterprises to offer flexible services based on the two organizations within two distinct domains, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and e-Government. Which challenges exist in the practice? First of all, provision of the flexible digital services requires constant updates in the underlying business processes. In addition to that, deviations in such process models and in the related processes are expected, which requires additional efforts in the modelling and management of processes. Second, a prerequisite for digital service flexibility is the alignment on various levels, e.g. service design and delivery. Yet, reaching a shared understanding among the different roles participating to digital service engineering is difficult. Third, manual configuration of services to different application scenarios is necessary. Since contextual aspects are not taken into account during service design, IS cannot respond to changing demands at service runtime. Fourth and last, enterprises possess enough knowledge about the drivers causing changes in the service provision, whereas they do not know how to capture this type of contextual knowledge systematically. Adjustments are implemented manually on a code level, tacit knowledge applied during the configuration is hard to be explicated. As a result, it is for many organizations a challenge to offer flexible digital services. 1.2
Although we did not directly find proposals that concern flexibility enhancement in digital services, it is possible to relate different lines of work in the literature to the investigated problem. Among these lines of work, approaches have been identified in the area of Business Process Management (BPM), particularly in process variant management and context-aware business processes. Literature analysis has shown that the solution approaches document the business context within a process model, leading to overcomplicated business process models. As the models include both the contextual information and the procedural view, it is not quite easy to focus on one aspect by separating concerns.
Which proposals exist on context modelling methods in the literature? To answer this question, an extensive and systematic literature review was performed. Briefly, approaches for context modelling perceive context to be of physical nature, the context of an enterprise and its operations lack scholars’ attention. Solutions assume in most cases that the contextual information is known. Although having a procedure for context representation, they fail to show how to elicit contextual information in a systematic way, i.e. they lack important elements, such as notation, tools required to model the context, the prerequisites to use the method etc. 1.3
Solution Approach: deCOM
The main contribution of the thesis is a method for business context modelling. We
define context as any information characterizing (i.e. changing, influencing) the
provision and design of a digital service that fulfils enterprise goals in a changing
environment [
The work follows the Design Science Research (DSR) guidelines [
Systematic Literature Review (SLR) is used to develop new ideas by identifying
the gaps in the research and justify the uniqueness and relevance of context modelling
method. Framework for Evaluation in Design Science Research (FEDS) is used to
assure a rigorous design and evaluation process. Each method version was evaluated
by the FEDS approach. The method evolved based on the gathered feedback from a
total of six evaluation cycles [
Summary The technological advances and the increasing globalization of the economy require in many areas high adaptability of enterprises. In order to improve their chances of success, enterprises need to cope with the challenges caused by today’s dynamic markets. This requires a thorough understanding of change drivers affecting service provision, which is basically their business context.
In order to understand their business context and offer flexible digital services, enterprises require a different conceptualization of context awareness than its usual interpretation in IS. There is a fair number of works in the literature proposing context modelling approaches, yet they fail to show how to elicit contextual information in a systematic way. They lack important elements, e.g. notation, tools required to model the context, the prerequisites to use the method etc., which would enhance their practical applicability. This work closes the gap by introducing deCOM, a method to identify and model the contextual factors influencing the design and delivery of a digital service. By analyzing the variability in business process models, the method documents the business context and aims to improve the flexibility of digital services. The evaluation results indicate that, although requiring an effort to learn, deCOM is a comprehensible, useful and well-documented method to elicit, identify and model the context of a business service.
Further contribution of the thesis is the interpretation and integration of the capability notion to Service Science. The term “capability” is used in this work as an instrument to bridge the gap between the design of digital services and their actual implementation, which necessarily requires a refinement in its traditional understanding.