A Service Science Perspective on Business Modeling

Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, 2008

Service oriented architectures are becoming increasingly important as enablers of exchange, coordination, and cooperation between organizations and individuals. Engineering and management of services raise a number of issues concerning the analysis, design, integration, bundling, and maintenance of services. These issues are notoriously difficult to resolve due to the abstractness of services as compared to other kinds of resources. In this paper, we analyze the concept of service based on a number of definitions from the literature and propose a conceptual service model based on the REA ontology. The model relates the service notion to the resource concept and shows how the abstractions offered by services can be represented using an encapsulation relationship. The use of the proposed service model is illustrated by means of an application on marketing oriented representation and design of services.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2011

Service Science is a new interdisciplinary approach to the study, design, implementation, and innovation of service systems. However due to the variety in service research, there is no consensus yet about the theoretical foundation of this domain. In this paper we clarify the service systems worldview proposed by Service Science researchers Spohrer and Kwan by investigating its foundational concepts from the perspective of established service theories and frameworks. By mapping the proposed service system concepts on the selected service theories and frameworks, we investigate their theoretical foundations, examine their proposed definitions and possible conflicting interpretations, discover their likely relationships and general structure, and identify a number of issues that need further discussion and elaboration. This analysis is visualised in a multi-view conceptual model (in the form of a UML class diagram) which we regard as a first step towards an explicitly and formally defined service system ontology.

2006

To create an understanding of enterprises and the ways they do business, a starting point could be to identify the main actors and the values transferred between them. Business models are created in order to make clear who the business actors are in a business case and to make their relations explicit. The relations are formulated in terms of values exchanged between the actors. The purpose of the work reported in this paper is to create a better understanding of business models by identifying basic notions used in such models. It does so by constructing a common ontology based on three established business model ontologies: e 3 -value, REA, and BMO. By means of a careful analysis of these ontologies a conceptual schema is created that defines the common concepts. An example is worked out that explains how the common ontology should be understood and used.

2014 IEEE 18th International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference, 2014

ArchiMate is a widely-adopted enterprise architecture language based on the "service orientation" paradigm. Al though its support for service orientation has had great impact in the representation of (service-oriented) enterprise architectures in the last 10 years, the representation of services in ArchiMate is not without problems. In particular, the predominance of the perspective of service as "unit of functionality" hides some important social aspects inherent to service relations and makes some of the models that the language produces ambiguous. In order to address some of these issues, in this paper we discuss an ontological analysis of service modeling fragments of ArchiMate's Business layer. This analysis is based on UFO-S , a reference ontology that characterizes the notion of service by applying the concepts of commitments and claims and harmonizing several views of services from a broad perspective. We contribute to: (i) providing real-world semantics to service modeling fragments in ArchiMate based on the notion of service commitments/claims; and (ii) offering recommendations in the form of modeling patterns to ensure expressiveness and to clarify the semantics of service elements.

Information Systems and e-Business Management, 2008

Information technology has changed the way, how companies perform business, how they develop services and interact with customers as well as other companies. This is accompanied by an ongoing virtualization of the economy, think of the ''value'' of companies like Google, ebay, or Skype. Their value is based on information and their ''user network'', not on the physical infrastructure or products. In this context, paralleled by the growth of the so-called service industry (or sector), one can observe an ''informatisation'' of work, value chains, products as well as services. The term ''service'' point at a close interaction of supplier and customer with the simultaneity of production and consumption. It refers to an exchange between supplier and consumer for the provision of (intangible) assets. The all-embracing utilization of IT following its principles of transparency enables new forms of networked organization, referring to the concept of smart business networks. The focus is on flexible service design, implementation and delivery, putting the customer at the center. The underlying issue is to link strategy, business models, business processes and implementation (utilizing service oriented architectures) for flexible design, implementation and adaptation. To fully exploit its potential, research in this domain must focus on these factors, and on the applicability of the corresponding technologies. It is important to note that the term service has to be seen from different points of view, from management science, information systems and computer science. These different views also refer to the important distinction between service, e-service and

Future Internet–FIS 2008, 2009

2006

Abstract. Ontologies are viewed as increasingly important tools for structuring domains of interests. In this paper we propose a reference ontology of business models using concepts from three established business model ontologies; the REA, BMO, and e3-value. The basic concepts in the reference ontology concern actors, resources, and the transfer of resources between actors.

Handbook of Research on Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering

Traditional organizational structures evolve towards online business using modern IT – such as cloud computing, semantic standards, and process- and service-oriented architectures. On the technology level, Web services are dominantly used for modeling the interaction points of complex Web applications. So far, development of Web services has matured on the technical perspective considering for example the development of standards for message exchanges and service coordination. However, business concepts, such as economic assets exchanged in transactions between cooperating actors, cannot be easily traced in final Web service specifications. As a consequence, business and IT models become difficult to keep aligned. To address this issue, the authors propose an MDD approach to elicit business services and further software services using REA business model as the starting point. The proposal focuses on a value-explorative elicitation of business services at the top level and model tran...