Advances in Business Transformation Technologies

Abstract

The backbone of the World economy has shifted from agriculture to manufacturing to information. It is now entering a new phase known as an innovation-based economy where economic value will be created in services we provide with information to improve business, government, education, and people's daily workspace. Accordingly, the focus of computing and information technologies is shifting to their applications to help enterprises, governments, and other organizations improve and transform their current practices. This chapter will describe the latest advances in the development of new methods and technologies supporting the service-led economy. First, it will present a model-driven business transformation approach. Business transformation is a key executive management initiative that attempts to align the technology initiatives of an organization closely with its business strategy and vision for a better business performance. The presented approach employs models that map IT (Information Technology) functions and capabilities to business performance, and help articulating the delivered business value of IT solutions and services. Also, it integrates a value model with business models of processes and components to leverage the value model at different levels and phases of business transformation. One of the key requirements for the model-driven business transformation is the capability of representing the semantics of various aspects of the models in a language and enforcing them. Also, efficient engineering of the semantic models that works well with the traditional software engineering mechanisms has become more and more important in business or enterprise IT application development. The second part of this chapter will address these requirements and discuss a novel approach to engineering semantic models, which allows seamlessly supporting existing software engineering models in Unified Modeling Language or other modeling languages in semantic model-based enterprise application development. Finally, this chapter will describe a new approach to business process integration by using Web services. While the Web service technologies facilitate the creation of business process solutions in an efficient, standard way, it is required to automate their discovery and composition to make it useful and scalable. We will present a solution to these problems of the Web service-based business process integration: the discovery of Web services based on the capabilities and properties of published services, and the composition of business processes based on the business requirements of submitted requests.