Business Service Definition in Enterprise Engineering - A Value-oriented Approach

Abstract

Enterprise Engineering is a means of applying engineering method to Enterprise Architecture, developing and evolving the mapping enterprise strategy to its resources. The potential benefits of service orientation have long been considered a driver for Enterprise Engineering. However, the service development discipline as a whole is still in it early stages. Do-main-specific frameworks and methodologies exist but none effectively deals with the teleological aspects of services, generally dismissed as subjective matter. In this paper, we analyze relevant state of the art in the areas of General Systems Theory, Service Science, Enterprise Engineering, Value Modeling, Enterprise Architecture and Business Modeling. The main shortcomings identified essentially reside in the lack of capability to model the purpose of a given service system in a structured way to guide current and future development efforts, which also implies having flexibly dealing with relativity of enterprise frontier definition. To address these issues, our research is focused on modeling different perspectives of enterprises as service systems, along three perspectives, namely construction, function and contribution. The approach presented in this paper involves 1) distinguishing the three mentioned perspectives and 2) articulating the concepts of each perspective so that an end-to-end, integrated, model is provided. The most distinguishing feature is using the concept of value proposal of a system to express the motivation that drives its development. We propose to follow an engineering approach that is grounded on social actor communication theory, taking into account the social meaning of service provisioning and consumption. Moreover, the mapping of this model to the elements that compose a system should be supported by design. To this end, both e3Value, from Value Modeling, and DEMO, from Enterprise Engineering, are considered and their integration is described.

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