Service-oriented Enterprise Research Articles

Spotlight on Service: Integrating Workforce Management With Employee Engagement to Optimize Customer Satisfaction and Profitability

Labor scheduling, monitoring of productivity management, and customer and stakeholder satisfaction have traditionally been handled in various parts of an operation. Thanks to improved methods and state-of-the-art technology, business owners and operators can now integrate employee time management with customer satisfaction, incorporating a measure of workforce engagement that affects both the hard and soft costs of running a successful service-oriented enterprise. An overview of how cloud-based labor management and time and attendance solutions mesh with feedback solutions to increase performance and drive return on investment underscores the importance of frequent and strategic measurement of customer and employee perceptions.© 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Can a social enterprise sustain operational efficiency and profitability in an open market? The case of Spring Back Recycling

Social enterprises often seek to provide their stakeholders with economic, social, and environmental benefits. We find that developing and sustaining a social enterprise can challenge profitability in a competitive, profit-maximising marketplace. Much of the public and non-profit economic literature questions the ability of a social enterprise, with a primary emphasis on providing a social or environmental good over maximising profit, to sustain a competitive position in a commercial marketplace. For the past five years, we have conceived, developed, and implemented a social entrepreneurial venture with an aim of sustaining profitability. Spring Back Recycling is a service-oriented social enterprise that provides transitional employment, a sustainable source of revenue and earned income, and an operational enterprise that diverts millions of pounds of solid waste. Spring Back's distinctive business model and value proposition have not only achieved sustainable profitability, but have also been able to differentiate the enterprise from traditional, profit-maximising solid waste management firms.

Software Services Delivered from the Cloud

Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS), alongside Radiological Information Systems (RIS) are nowadays widely disseminated, proven useful, hospital information systems components. The “Région Sans Film” (“Filmless Region”) program was launched in 2009 by the French ministry of health in order to help the generalization to all healthcare structures such as hospitals or general physician practices, of PACS, RIS, and archiving of medical images. It is done by means of a mutualized service platform whom building and running has been entrusted to an industrial consortium. This platform implements the latest technologies of medical image processing and of cloud computing. It is built in order to support service-oriented enterprise architecture composed of one main layer of software services. This natively scalable platform is innovative because it is the first one which contains all the materials for the implementation of all services in the cloud. The corresponding SLA are defined in order to be adaptable to the needs of further health structures which could later join the platform by participating in its mutualized purchasing. The goal is not only to share the costs but also to deliver new images sharing services. New business processes/services around sharing of images such as teleradiology or access to the images produced in hospitals to the general practitioners are defined towards the exercise of real filmless radiology.

The Business Model Analysis of Service-Oriented Enterprise

In this paper, we proposed value proposition, value network, resources, services and profit model as business model elements of Service-oriented Enterprise from the perspective of system by combing the related literature about business model elements. Based on this, we put forward four kinds of building ideas: business model based on customer demand, business model based on resource integration, business model based on service content, business model based on profit model and then explained by cases. Finally, the application of environmental of business model was compared. This study is help to guide other service-oriented enterprises to construct business model effectively.

Research on the Relationship between Enterprise Participation and Customer Satisfaction Degree Based on Value Co-Creation

In recent years, most of service-oriented manufacturing enterprises always obtain customer recognition and explore potential customer needs through involving in use and providing services more closely. On the basis of the concept of the introduction of enterprise participation, by reviewing the related literature, enterprise participation was divided into two dimensions--information provider and active participants. This paper mainly focuses on the relationship that enterprise participation in each dimension affects the customer satisfaction degree in each dimension, and builds the concept model of the enterprise participation and the customer satisfaction degree, which provided a new path for enterprises to gain lasting competitive advantages. Finally, we hope that the results will lay the theoretical foundation for China's service-oriented manufacturing enterprise service innovation.

Research on Service Capability Based on Data Mining

The progress and development of the society promotes service industry to grow, and service-oriented enterprises are emerging. However, the lagging service theory makes the development of service economy lack of the corresponding theoretical support. Based on analyzing the sources of corporate profits in service economy era, the paper uses data mining technique to apply customer classification to measurement methods of service capability. The change of service capability not only makes the enterprises position the problem clients accurately and rapidly, but also can timely adjust business strategies, which can increase profits.

Research on Resource Allocation Evaluation of Service-Oriented Manufacturing Enterprise Based on DEA

Abstract: Service-oriented manufacturing is a new manufacture mode. In order to solve the problem of resource allocation evaluation of service-oriented manufacturing enterprise, a Data Envelopment Analysis(DEA) mathematical model based on cost-benefit was constructed in this approach. The resource allocation evaluation problem was mapped to the cost-benefit analysis problem by using DEA, considering the characteristics of the service-oriented manufacturing mode, taking enterprise T as the example to analysis self-supporting allocation cost and cost-benefit value of service-oriented manufacturing enterprises to verify the applicability of the model. Finally, according to the recent five years’ situation of enterprise T, the optimization strategy of resource allocation was given.

The RQ-Tech methodology: a new paradigm for conceptualizing strategic enterprise architectures

The purpose of this paper is to report on a new system-theoretic based methodology and corresponding model for Enterprise Architecture development. This model captures the essence of the strategic, conceptual, doctrinal layer of the organization. Reusable Quality Technical Architectures (RQ-Tech) graphically reveals a comprehensive array of enterprise decision alternatives in easily understandable views; all while maintaining the hyperlinks to its provenance in strategic authoritative documentation. The RQ-Tech method has combined the practice of Enterprise Architectures with a modern perspective grounded in Systems Theory and the theory regarding the computer science-oriented Semantic Web. This recombination results in a distinctive methodology for developing models. This new methodology supports the conclusion that system-specific solutions produce islands of technology and can be prevented by employing better enterprise change planning. A review of the literature in three major areas illustrates the overlap common to all three domains. This review provides support for critical thinking concerning how to enrich the Enterprise Architecture practice. The research centered on finding the most significant factors to consider when translating the authoritative text and rich pictures that enterprise managers use to describe the strategic mission and vision of their complex, service-oriented enterprise into user-oriented semantic models. It provides the basis for RQ-Tech as a methodology that enables increased understanding of complex systems through use of Semantic Web standards.

A View-based Approach to Quality of Service Modelling in Service-oriented Enterprise Systems

Service-oriented enterprise architecture and emerging advanced technologies bring up new problems for enterprise systems engineering or, more exactly, for service-oriented enterprise systems (SoESs) engineering. One of the most important issues is the modelling of quality of services (QoS). The QoS is a complex and multi-sided concept. In various contexts and for different aims it may be defined quite differently. In the context of SoES, QoS has also some specifics that in several aspects differ from the systems implementing service-oriented architecture (SOA) in other contexts, for example, in business-to-consumer or utility-service ones. The paper suggests that it is possible to identify several understandings of QoS reflecting the viewpoints of different SoES stakeholders in a similar way as it is carried out for software products. It also proposes a conceptual view-based framework for QoS modelling in web-based SoES and for balancing different viewpoints.

Ontology-based Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm for Deriving Software Services from Business Process Model

Various approaches uses business process models as starting point to derive software services. The first and the important task for developing service-oriented models is service identification. However, the majority of existing methods for service identification are developed manually because, on the one hand, they are based on the competence of the developers and, on the other hand, the business process models do not comprise sufficient knowledge to identify services automatically. The integration of Business Process Modeling (BPM), Model-Driven Development (MDD), and Ontology-based Semantic Annotation (OSA) allows the automation of the SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) services development. Three steps are used for developing an SOA solution: service identification, service specification and finally service realization. In this paper, the authors illustrate a method called MOOSI (Multi-Objective Optimization-based Service Identification) that automatically identifies the architecturally significant elements from an annotated business process model in order to specify service model artifacts. The main goal of this work is to support the automation of the development process of service-oriented enterprise information system. The implementation results of our proposed method are discussed. This result shows that MOOSI can achieve high performance in terms of execution time and important quality in terms of modularization quality of identified services compared with other solution.

Service-Oriented Manufacturing Agility and Application Based Flexibility

Introduced flexibility index method to study service-oriented manufacturing enterprise agility. Analyzed agility needs and elements of service-oriented manufacturing enterprise: customer participation, manufacturing network, mass customization mode and information integration platform. According to CTRS(Cost, Time, Robustness and Suitability) norm defined elements flexibility index. Results show elements resource utilization factor has a significant effect of agility while the time dimension is weak. Enterprises can shorten manufacturing and R & D time and expand marketing channels to improve the overall agility.

Architecture-level software performance abstractions for online performance prediction

Modern service-oriented enterprise systems have increasingly complex and dynamic loosely-coupled architectures that often exhibit poor performance and resource efficiency and have high operating costs. This is due to the inability to predict at run-time the effect of workload changes on performance-relevant application-level dependencies and adapt the system configuration accordingly. Architecture-level performance models provide a powerful tool for performance prediction, however, current approaches to modeling the context of software components are not suitable for use at run-time. In this paper, we analyze typical online performance prediction scenarios and propose a performance meta-model for (i) expressing and resolving parameter and context dependencies, (ii) modeling service abstractions at different levels of granularity and (iii) modeling the deployment of software components in complex resource landscapes. The presented meta-model is a subset of the Descartes Meta-Model (DMM) for online performance prediction, specifically designed for use in online scenarios. We motivate and validate our approach in the context of realistic and representative online performance prediction scenarios based on the SPECjEnterprise2010 standard benchmark.

Integration of Independent Applications and EAI Systems using Service Oriented Enterprise Bus and Open System Application Development Standards

Businesses today are dependent on custom enterprise software and web applications from independent software developers and software companies. This creates a lot of problems such as integration, interoperability, security, and system maintenance. Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Business-to-Business integration control several key technologies and swift advancement in technology to meet the increasing needs for integration in the enterprise which often results in a lot of challenges due to differences between one proprietary approach and another. This paper seeks to provide an approach of integrating independent applications and EAI systems by using Web services standards and open application development standards in dealing with the challenges faced in integrating applications. This will make it possible for organizations to add a new layer of abstraction that is open, standards-based, and easy to integrate with any new or existing system and also make easy for data discovery as well as building of new concepts from existing data. The combination of Service Oriented Architecture and Web services will be used to provide a rapid integration solution and also publishing services in a manner that new concepts can easily be built from existing services.

Convergence of Interoperability of Cloud Computing, Service Oriented Architecture and Enterprise Architecture

The research identifies the gap that there is a convergence of interoperability of Cloud Computing (CC), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Enterprise Architecture (EA). Furthermore, it outlines the existing non dynamic links between EA and SOA that are currently practiced in the industry and confirmed by scholarly articles; and provides a state of art of the link that could exist in practice between cloud computing and SOA as researched from the published scholarly material. This researched paper also refers to the planned research to test this theory first by developing a logical architectural model of such a feasibility followed by a Proof of Concept

A Model of View-Based Enterprise Business Service Quality Evaluation Framework

The symbiosis between an enterprise architecture and service-oriented architecture results in so-called service-oriented enterprise architecture and brings up new problems for service-oriented enterprise systems engineering. One of the most important is a business service quality definition, specification and evaluation. The paper proposes a formal model of enterprise business service quality evaluation framework to encompass and balance all the viewpoints and perspectives on an enterprise business service quality.

Dynamic enforcement of abstract separation of duty constraints

Separation of Duties (SoD) aims at preventing fraud and errors by distributing tasks and associated authorizations among multiple users. Li and Wang [2008] proposed an algebra (SoDA) for specifying SoD requirements, which is both expressive in the requirements it formalizes and abstract in that it is not bound to a workflow model. In this article, we bridge the gap between the specification of SoD constraints modeled in SoDA and their enforcement in a dynamic, service-oriented enterprise environment. We proceed by generalizing SoDA's semantics to traces, modeling workflow executions that satisfy the respective SoDA terms. We then refine the set of traces induced by a SoDA term to also account for a workflow's control-flow and role-based authorizations. Our formalization, which is based on the process algebra CSP, supports the enforcement of SoD on general workflows and handles changing role assignments during workflow execution, addressing a well-known source of fraud. The resulting CSP model serves as blueprint for a distributed and loosely coupled architecture where SoD enforcement is provisioned as a service. This concept, which we call SoD as a Service, facilitates a separation of concerns between business experts and security professionals. As a result, integration and configuration efforts are minimized and enterprises can quickly adapt to organizational, regulatory, and technological changes. We describe an implementation of SoD as a Service, which combines commercial components such as a workflow engine with newly developed components such as an SoD enforcement monitor. To evaluate our design decisions and to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we present a case study of a drug dispensation workflow deployed in a hospital.

Modeling and analyzing of an enterprise collaboration network supported by service-oriented manufacturing

Service-oriented manufacturing is a new manufacturing paradigm and it has appeared in large-scale enterprise clusters over the past few years. In this situation, the increasing service demands from production processes have led to more enterprise collaborations. And the more collaborations among different enterprises have led to the generation of a service-oriented enterprise collaboration network. The purpose of this article is to investigate the clustering characteristics of a service-oriented enterprise collaboration network through an integrating analytic hierarchy process and complex network theory. First, the concept of service-oriented manufacturing is introduced and a logical architecture for implementing the modeling and analyzing of a service-oriented enterprise collaboration network is put forward. Then, the authors establish a topology model of a service-oriented enterprise collaboration network and use an analytic hierarchy process method to estimate the network weights among different manufacturing or service enterprises. Next, service-oriented manufacturing blocks are illustrated and an improved genetic algorithm is adopted to find the optimal blocks. To verify the feasibility and rationality of the proposed method, finally, a case study is presented. It is expected that a reasonable decision of cross-enterprise collaborations and layout would be provided in the present study.

A Roadmap towards Service-Oriented Enterprise

In the current economic context, enterprises are struggling to obtain competitive advantages on the market, by exploiting the opportunities offered by information technology. The research in this paper aims to encourage the use of modern approaches in order to increase enterprise agility, through the transition to Service-Oriented Enterprise (SOE). The proposed solution is based on reaching a superior level of maturity of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) within the organization. SOE integrates the latest technologies with service-oriented business processes within an approach which requires the creation of an agile architecture and also major changes at organizational level. Structured in two main parts, the paper first highlights the SOA maturity levels in organization according to several factors, as well as the knowledge of the impact and the changes arising from SOA adoption. In addition, an architectural model for service-oriented enterprise is proposed, based on up-to-date technologies like SOA, Cloud Computing, Business Process Management and Case Management. This model is intended to facilitate the interoperability between business partners as well as the alignment of information technology strategy and business strategy, and ultimately to increase enterprise agility.

A lightweight and extensible Complex Event Processing system for sense and respond applications

Complex Event Processing (CEP) is considered as a promising technology for enabling the evolution of service-oriented enterprise systems towards operational aware systems. CEP effectively supports the implementation of “sense and respond” behaviours, as it enables to extract meaningful events from raw data streams originated by sensing infrastructures, for enterprise processes and applications consumption. This paper proposes a novel CEP engine conceived with ease of use, extensibility, portability, and scalability requirements in mind. More specifically, we propose a Lightweight Stage-based Event Processor (LiSEP) based on a layered architectural design. Thanks to the adoption of Staged Event-Driven Architecture principles, core event processing logic is decoupled from low-level thread management issues. This results in an easy-to-understand and extensible implementation while testing results show performance scalability. We report on the carrying out of a case study on dangerous goods monitoring in maritime transport. The objective of the case study is to develop a Proof of Concept application leveraging on LiSEP capabilities in sensor and RFID events processing for monitoring and alerting purposes.

BSC Application in the Performance Management of Service-Oriented Manufacturing Enterprises

This paper which set service-oriented manufacturing enterprises as the research object use the basic idea of the Balanced Scorecard designing performance evaluation system of service-oriented manufacturing enterprises. According to the organizational vision and strategy, it determined the strategic goal, formed a set of strategy map of service-oriented manufacturing enterprises and provided managers a clear understanding of the basis of enterprises performance current level. It benefited managers understanding the reason of performance level for digging it, and long-term development of enterprises.