A Document Centric Approach for User Requirements in BIVEE* Ali Anil Sinaci1, Matteo Piersantelli2, Cristina Cristalli2, Fernando Gigante3, Gokce B. Laleci1, R. Volkan Basar1 1 SRDC Software Research & Development and Consultancy Ltd. ODTU Teknokent Silikon Blok No:14, 06800 Ankara, Turkey {anil,gokce,volkan}@srdc.com.tr 2 Loccioni Group – General Impianti srl Via Monteschiavo 3, 60030 Moie di Maiolati, Ancona, Italy {m.piersantelli,c.cristalli}@loccioni.com 3 Aidima - Instituto Tecnologico del Mueble, Madera, Embalaje y Afines C/ Benjamin Franklin, 13 Parque Tecnologico 46980 Paterna (Valencia), Spain fgigante@aidima.es Abstract. The BIVEE project addresses the challenge of innovation manage- ment in Virtual Enterprise Environments. BIVEE aims to formalize the processes and models for improvement and innovation management in virtual enterprises by developing a conceptual framework and corresponding ICT plat- form. In this paper, we present a document centric approach towards the identi- fication and formalization of the documents exchanged between the main actors during the innovation processes in virtual enterprises. The results will be lead- ing to the user requirements (esp. data requirements) such that BIVEE platform will provide the necessary software tools for the semantic management of the innovation/improvement documents. Keywords: BIVEE, User Requirements, Document Centric Approach, Virtual Enterprise 1 Introduction Business Innovation is an important and a key issue for today’s enterprises. Apart from the innovation activities within a single enterprise, it is more important to deal with the Business Innovation in Virtual Enterprise Environments in which several different enterprises (mostly SMEs) are collaborating to respond new business oppor- tunities. The degree of importance has been declared by European Commission through Europe 2020 strategy1 and the Innovation Union2. * The research leading to these results has received funding from European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no ICT-285746, BIVEE (Business Innovation and Virtual Enterprise Environment) Project. 1 European Commission – Europe 2020, http://ec.europa.eu/europe2020/index_en.htm Business Innovation and Virtual Enterprise Environment - BIVEE 3 is an R&D project co-financed by European Commission FP7 program. “BIVEE aims at building a distributed, collaborative, knowledge-intensive framework, where innovative busi- ness models, novel management methods, and emerging ICT solutions will be inte- grated to the benefit of interoperable virtual enterprises.”3 The goal is to improve the competitiveness of European enterprises (SMEs in particular) by increasing their innovation capabilities in the virtual enterprise environments. Innovation is a complex issue and BIVEE intends to divide this complexity by ad- dressing two different, but highly interconnected parts. The BIVEE project names these parts as “spaces” and discusses “Improvement” and “Business Innovation” ac- tivities separately in these spaces. An improvement can be defined as a small set of activities which can directly be applied to the production processes. Improvement activities are modeled within the Value Production Space (VPS) which can be per- ceived as a digital virtual realization aimed at modeling and representing a complex, distributed reality of a virtual enterprise, with its operations, in a way that is easy and intuitive to be presented to and managed by a large variety of stakeholders, and in particular business people. For VPS, BIVEE intends to explore and propose innova- tive management methods, new business models and practices for the “improvement” concept. On the other hand, innovation processes are inherently different than the production related processes and BIVEE tries to model and formalize the business innovation processes within the Business Innovation Space (BIS). Instead of processing raw materials into products or elementary services into complex services, the BIS targets to create new processes and alliances based on the previous expe- riences. Detailed information can be found in [4]. In this work, we present our document centric approach and intermediate results for the requirements analysis of the BIVEE project. We start with the descriptions and AS-IS structures of the two end-user enterprises in the BIVEE project. We analyze their innovation/improvement activities, identify the key actors and steps, formalize each step and extract “documents”. Having analyzed the AS-IS status, we continue with the identification of the internal processes which can be mapped to VPS and BIS separately. Afterwards, with the document centric approach, we try to identify the key documents exchanged between the actors of virtual enterprises during their improve- ment and innovation processes. Indeed, this is the data requirements for the BIVEE platform. We start with the data and then elicit the functional, interface and non- functional requirements accordingly. We analyze the structure and content of the identified documents and try to formalize them to come up with a uni- fied/standardized approach in Business Innovation activities. This work is currently ongoing, and in this paper we present our intermediate results. BIVEE will provide a set of software tools in-line with our methodology for the semantic management of the documents exchanged within the VPS and BIS. 2 European Commission – Innovation Union, http://ec.europa.eu/research/innovation-union/index_en.cfm 3 Business Innovation and Virtual Enterprise Environment (BIVEE), http://www.bivee.eu This paper continues with the related work regarding our document centric ap- proach for business innovation in virtual enterprise environments. Afterwards, we give details about our approach and list the key documents we have identified for the Business Innovation Space and Value Production Space of the virtual enterprises. Lastly, we conclude the paper and present the plans for the future to improve the re- sults, hence the BIVEE project. 2 Related Work A Virtual Enterprise can be defined as the alliance, collaboration between different enterprises. A lot of research has been performed on the management of these al- liances through ICT. There are several standards (e.g. OASIS UBL 4 ) and mature software tools [5] in terms of supply chain management which can be perceived as a document management reality for virtual enterprises. On the other hand, innovation management within the enterprises is a relatively new concept and there are few wide- ly accepted models, approaches and tools for this purpose [4]. The ECOLEAD5 project produced valuable results for the collaborative networks of enterprises, called Virtual Organisations. It mostly focuses on the reference models for collaborative networks rather than the innovation management within these net- works [1] [2] [3]. Furthermore, it does not address any document centric activities regarding the innovation and improvement processes within the virtual organizations. A book written by Paul Trott [8] mostly discusses the models for innovation man- agement within a single enterprise. A virtual enterprise exposes way different charac- teristics for the innovation management than the internals of a single enterprise. Christoph Riedl [6] addresses the importance of Open Innovation and mainly focuses on the semantic management of the ideas. In this paper, we address several different processes within the VPS and BIS. Idea management can be seen as a small part with- in VPS. Recently arising research activities address the models and methods for the man- agement of innovation processes in virtual enterprises (enterprise alliances) [4]. How- ever, this new coming research line has little outputs up to now. Furthermore, consi- dering the formalization of the methods and models, there is no concrete definitions for the exchanged documents during the innovation activities within virtual enterpris- es. For this purpose, the BIVEE project works for the creation of the best models and methods, and our work exposes the novelty in this respect. And, in this paper, we present a document centric approach which we believe succeeded for supply chain management in virtual enterprises (UBL is a CCTS implementation). We briefly de- scribe the CCTS6 methodology in the upcoming chapter. 4 OASIS Universal Business Language – UBL, http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=ubl 5 European Collaborative Networked Organisations Leadership Initiative - ECOLEAD, http://ecolead.vtt.fi/ 6 UN/CEFACT Core Components Technical Specification (CCTS) http://www.unece.org/cefact/codesfortrade/CCTS/CCTS-Version3.pdf 3 Document Centric Approach to User Requirements Innovation should be a continuous activity which runs in parallel with existing core business activities of an enterprise. While some enterprises have independent R&D departments, most of the SMEs adopt ad-hoc methods for improvement and innova- tion purposes. Considering the fuzzy “Innovation” term, the BIVEE project makes a distinction between an “improvement” and “innovation” by dividing the innovation activities into Value Production and Business Innovation spaces within the virtual enterprises. Therefore, in this paper, we follow this convention with the core focus in Business Innovation Space. We adopt the Core Components Technical Specification (CCTS)6 methodology which is produced by UN/CEFACT. The objective of CCTS approach is to identify, capture and maximize the re-use of business information to support and enhance in- formation interoperability. The foundational concept of CCTS is the core component (as its name implies). Core components are semantic building blocks, those can be used to build document models (hence documents) through aggregations and associa- tions. CCTS approach says that core components act as conceptual models that are used to define Business Information Entities (BIEs) through the application of context and qualification. Our document centric approach addresses the information entities (the building blocks) and tries to find the common parts of the identified documents by analyzing the structure and content. This means, each document will be con- structed by aggregation and association of small information entities (“Business In- formation Entity” in CCTS terminology). Our document centric approach starts with the formalization of the improvement and innovation related processes and tries to identify the important documents which are exchanged between the employees of different enterprises regarding the virtual enterprise environment. These are not restricted to the cross-enterprise processes or documents going from one enterprise to another. Inside the same enterprise, the in- formation may follow an important path which should also be formalized in terms of innovation management. This can also be derived from the fact that different depart- ments of the same enterprise can be in an independent role in a virtual enterprise. Fig. 1 presents a schematic representation of our starting point for the document centric approach. We try to intercept the information flow between the important actors of the improvement and innovation related processes. Fig. 1. Document Centric Approach Exchange of the documents can be through e-mails, hardcopy reports, phone calls or the enterprise may be using a document portal or a content management system for these kinds of documents. Our analysis covers all possible communication lines and identifies the exchanged information by employing Dublin Core Metadata Element Set7 which is a vocabulary of fifteen properties for use in resource description. These DC metadata elements (actually a subset of the fifteen elements) and our extensions (applying the BIVEE context) have leaded to our schema for the metadata definition of the documents. Details of the schema can be found in [7]. The BIVEE project introduces the “waves” concept for the Business Innovation Space. According to this formalization, the BIS activities of a virtual enterprise are divided into four waves, namely Creativity, Feasilibility, Prototyping and Engineer- ing. Fig. 2 presents this waves approach, applied to innovation activities of the Re- search for Innovation department of Loccioni group. In this paper, after analyzing the processes of the enterprises, identification of the key documents proceed with a classi- fication according to these four waves. 3.1 Methodology The BIVEE project has two end-user organizations, namely Aidima8 and Loccioni9. Understanding the current business activities and current application landscape of the end-users is the first step to identify the needs of the systems. To start with this first step, we have prepared a questionnaire for the end-user enterprises. 29 hierarchically designed questions have mostly requested information about the innovation activities. We come up with a detailed analysis of these two enterprises. The main objective is to understand the current business domain, business models, production activities, and the way the end-users look to innovation and innovation activities. Like most of the 7 http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/ 8 Aidima - Instituto Tecnologico del Mueble, Madera, Embalaje y Afines, http://www.aidima.es/ 9 Loccioni Group http://www.loccioni.com/ European enterprises, Aidima and Loccioni have their own processes for innovation management. Different kinds of information are transferred among different kinds of actors inside the enterprises. Formalizing the structure and content of the information exchanged among the actors is an important issue regarding the BIVEE objectives. Fig. 2. Innovation Line inside Loccioni Having detailed descriptions about the end-user organizations, we extract the AS- IS status of them in a formalized and document centric way. AS-IS status of the end- user enterprises is analyzed through two main topics: 1. Information Flow Analysis intends to give detailed information about the im- provement and innovation related processes of the enterprise. In this part, process flowcharts and their descriptions are analyzed in a conceptual level. 2. User Specification provides information about the main actors of the activities, their responsibilities and roles within the processes. Conceptual users and their as- sociated roles are analyzed inside a User Specification Table. End-user organizations of the BIVEE project work in different domains, and “in- novation” is addressed in different levels in each enterprise. Aidima seeks more for Value Production Space and Loccioni seeks more for Business Innovation Space. As mentioned above, considering “business innovation” as a whole, BIVEE ad- dresses two different, but tightly interconnected spaces: Value Production Space and Business Innovation Space. In this paper, we try to identify the key documents for each space separately. 3.2 Value Production Space Documents In this space, an enterprise is expected to visualize and follow the production related activities within the virtual enterprise. This corresponds to exchange of information or goods among different enterprises or departments of the enterprises. According to our document centric approach, the goal is to formally identify each document transfer within a virtual enterprise considering the Value Production Space. Before going into the structural details and content of the documents, we analyze the document whether it is related with an “improvement” activity or not based on the definition in [4]. Table 1 lists all identified documents. The descriptions of the documents can be found online10. Planning Sourcing Building Delivery Strategy Report List of Production Protocols Packing Instructions Production Batch Acquired Material Non-conformities Report Delivery Order Estimated Cost & Time Supplier Budget & Claim Manufacturing Order Invoice Go/NoGo Decision Packing Slip Work Order Order Invoice Outsourcing Order Product Data Sheet Quality Control Specs Cost Breakdown Table 1. Identified documents for VPS 3.3 Business Innovation Space Documents While in the value production space we typically transform raw material into finished products (or elementary services into complex services), here we take existing pro- duction processes and organizations and we aim at producing new processes and or- ganizations. But new business models and practices have a risk of becoming obsolete rapidly, therefore it is necessary to enter in the innovation space where it is necessary to put in place the strategies, methodologies, practices, supported by ICT tools which can pro- mote and foster continuous open enterprise innovation. Table 2 lists all identified documents. The descriptions of the documents can be online11. 4 Conclusions and Future Work In this paper, we introduce our document centric approach for the user requirements of the BIVEE project. We start with the identification of the improvement and inno- vation related processes of end-user enterprises. Then we try to identify the key doc- uments and classify according to the “waves” approach in BIS. We share our inter- mediate results; identified documents for VPS and BIS. We continue with the detailed analysis of each document. Selected documents will be decomposed and common parts of the documents will be identified. Formal semantic structure for the selected document will be implemented through ontological annotations and our approach will follow a bottom-up approach: tiny information units will come together to form the 10 Value Production Space Documents https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc? key=0AnUxMImt-28UdEJid0xaV0hhbjZ3UTZ4NWt3eHpXeGc#gid=0 11 Business Innovation Space Documents https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ ccc?key=0AnUxMImt-28UdEdhSC05eU1iQlZZWk9pTjdDNU1RNXc improvement and innovation documents. Future work might include a standardization proposal of these documents as BIVEE approaches to a level of maturity. Creativity Feasibility Prototyping Engineering Business Ecosystem Market Analysis Prototype Requirements Budget Partner Profile Gantt Chart Implementation Roadmap Bill of Materials Research Line Solution Monitoring Sheet Cost Report Proposed Idea Project Validation Gantt Diagram Resources Validated Idea Feasibility Study Final Technical Report Protocols Customer Issue Go/No Go Results Report Commercial Components Requirements (CCR) Technical Solution Project Proposal Prototype Modification RforI Report Candidacy Report Product Data Sheet Marketing Report SWOT Analysis New Product Acceptance Innovation Report Working Report Estimated Budget Internal Order Resources Table 2. Identified Documents for BIS References 1. L. M. Camarinha-Matos and H. Afsarmanesh: On reference models for collaborative net- worked organizations. International Journal of Production Research, Taylor & Francis publisher, 2008. 2. L. M. Camarinha-Matos, H. Afsarmanesh, N.Galeano, and A. Molina: Collaborative net- worked organizations - from concepts to practice in manufacturing enterprises. Journal of Computers and Industrial Engineering, 2008. 3. L. M. Camarinha-Matos and P. Macedo: A conceptual model of value systems in collabor- ative networks. Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing; Special issue: Trust, value system and governance, 2008. 4. J. Eschenbaecher, P. Sitek, H. L. Vega, and R. D. Bernardo: State of the art about the col- lection and discussion of requirements for sytemic business innovation and definition of kpis. Technical report, BIVEE Deliverable D2.1, 2012. 5. T. Fulya, D. Asuman, P. Senan, G. Suat, and A. Erdem: isurf edocreator: e-business docu- ment design and customization environment. In Proceedings of eChallenges, Istanbul, Turkey, October 2009. 6. C. Riedl: Tool-Supported Innovation Management in Service Ecosystems. Gabler, 1 st edi- tion, 2011. 7. A. A. Sinaci, V. Basar, F. Gigante, C. Cristalli, and G. Ward: Analysis of user require- ments. Technical report, BIVEE Deliverable D6.11, 2012. 8. P. Trott: Innovation Management and New Product Development. Financial Times, Pren- tice Hall, 3rd edition, 2005.