Web Services can be seen from two views ? one that it is a purely technological advance and the other that it is a capability that an organisation can deploy to meet a business objective. Much has been said about the first view but not much has been said about the second view. The underlying premise of this research is that in the context of an ever-increasing competitive environment, an organisation needs to take into account these important aspects: What is the business strategy of the organisation, which adopts Web Services? Does the IT align with the business strategy of the organisation? The aim of this research is to capture and describe business-IT problems in the context of strategic requirements and Web Services. As a means to align a Web Services initiative with business strategy, we propose a Requirements Engineering framework to capture the business objectives of an organisation from strategy to implementation. The methodology that we propose provides a roadmap from business strategy, to the strategic objectives to implementation in four dimensions: innovation, customer relationship management, infrastructure management and financials. The proposed framework extends the e-Business Modelling Ontology (eBMO) of Pigneur and Osterwalder by applying Bleistein et al?s Progression of Problems to understand the strategic objectives and the business context. We have presented 2 examples as proof of concept. We have experimented with our methodology on Amazon.com and Dell.com ?cases developed from the literature? as these organisations are aggressively pursuing Web Services as a part of their IT and business strategy. We use the Problem Frames approach to capture the business objectives and the problem context of an organisation deploying Web Services and to create a strategic alignment between the business strategy and the information technology. The approach presented in this thesis is used to understand Amazon and Dell?s strategy and strategic objectives. It was possible to capture strategic objectives and the strategic context through combination of the eBMO and Progression of Problems. It was also possible to trace this to Web Services requirement description through application of Problem Frames. The framework combines with Bleistein et al?s Progression of Problems at the strategic level and applies Problem Frames at the operational level. It takes the problem-oriented view of the whole process, but does not apply Problem Frames throughout, at least not in their original formulation by Jackson.

Web Services can be seen from two views ? one that it is a purely technological advance and the other that it is a capability that an organisation can deploy to meet a business objective. Much has been said about the first view but not much has been said about the second view. The underlying premise of this research is that in the context of an ever-increasing competitive environment, an organisation needs to take into account these important aspects: What is the business strategy of the organisation, which adopts Web Services? Does the IT align with the business strategy of the organisation? The aim of this research is to capture and describe business-IT problems in the context of strategic requirements and Web Services. As a means to align a Web Services initiative with business strategy, we propose a Requirements Engineering framework to capture the business objectives of an organisation from strategy to implementation. The methodology that we propose provides a roadmap from business strategy, to the strategic objectives to implementation in four dimensions: innovation, customer relationship management, infrastructure management and financials. The proposed framework extends the e-Business Modelling Ontology (eBMO) of Pigneur and Osterwalder by applying Bleistein et al?s Progression of Problems to understand the strategic objectives and the business context. We have presented 2 examples as proof of concept. We have experimented with our methodology on Amazon.com and Dell.com ?cases developed from the literature? as these organisations are aggressively pursuing Web Services as a part of their IT and business strategy. We use the Problem Frames approach to capture the business objectives and the problem context of an organisation deploying Web Services and to create a strategic alignment between the business strategy and the information technology. The approach presented in this thesis is used to understand Amazon and Dell?s strategy and strategic objectives. It was possible to capture strategic objectives and the strategic context through combination of the eBMO and Progression of Problems. It was also possible to trace this to Web Services requirement description through application of Problem Frames. The framework combines with Bleistein et al?s Progression of Problems at the strategic level and applies Problem Frames at the operational level. It takes the problem-oriented view of the whole process, but does not apply Problem Frames throughout, at least not in their original formulation by Jackson.

Web Services can be seen from two views ? one that it is a purely technological advance and the other that it is a capability that an organisation can deploy to meet a business objective. Much has been said about the first view but not much has been said about the second view. The underlying premise of this research is that in the context of an ever-increasing competitive environment, an organisation needs to take into account these important aspects: What is the business strategy of the organisation, which adopts Web Services? Does the IT align with the business strategy of the organisation? The aim of this research is to capture and describe business-IT problems in the context of strategic requirements and Web Services. As a means to align a Web Services initiative with business strategy, we propose a Requirements Engineering framework to capture the business objectives of an organisation from strategy to implementation. The methodology that we propose provides a roadmap from business strategy, to the strategic objectives to implementation in four dimensions: innovation, customer relationship management, infrastructure management and financials. The proposed framework extends the e-Business Modelling Ontology (eBMO) of Pigneur and Osterwalder by applying Bleistein et al?s Progression of Problems to understand the strategic objectives and the business context. We have presented 2 examples as proof of concept. We have experimented with our methodology on Amazon.com and Dell.com ?cases developed from the literature? as these organisations are aggressively pursuing Web Services as a part of their IT and business strategy. We use the Problem Frames approach to capture the business objectives and the problem context of an organisation deploying Web Services and to create a strategic alignment between the business strategy and the information technology. The approach presented in this thesis is used to understand Amazon and Dell?s strategy and strategic objectives. It was possible to capture strategic objectives and the strategic context through combination of the eBMO and Progression of Problems. It was also possible to trace this to Web Services requirement description through application of Problem Frames. The framework combines with Bleistein et al?s Progression of Problems at the strategic level and applies Problem Frames at the operational level. It takes the problem-oriented view of the whole process, but does not apply Problem Frames throughout, at least not in their original formulation by Jackson.

Doctor of Philosophy(PhD) / An exciting trend in enterprise computing lies in the integration of applications across an organisation and even between organisations. This allows the provision of services by automated business processes that coordinate business activity among several collaborating organisations. The best successes in this type of integrated distributed system come through use of Web Services and Service-based Architecture, which allow interoperation between applications through open standards based on XML and SOAP. But still, there are unresolved issues when developers seek to build a reliable and robust system. An important goal for the designers of a loosely coupled distributed system is to maintain consistency for each long running business process in the presence of failures and concurrent activities. Our approach to assist the developers in this domain is to guide the developers with the key principles they must consider, and to provide programming models and protocols, which make it easier to detect and avoid consistency faults in service-based system. We start by defining a realistic e-procurement scenario to illustrate the common problems faced by the developers which prevent them from building a reliable and robust system. These problems make it hard to maintain the consistency of the data and state during the execution of a business process in the occurrence of failures and interference from concurrent activities. Through the analysis of the common problems, we identify key principles the developers must consider to avoid producing the common problems. Then based on the key principles, we provide a framework called GAT in the orchestration infrastructure. GAT allows developers to express all the necessary processing to handle deviations including those due to failures and concurrent activities. We discuss the GAT framework in detail with its structure and key features. Using an example taken from part of the e-procurement case study, we illustrate how developers can use the framework to design their business requirements. We also discuss how key features of the new framework help the developers to avoid producing consistency faults. We illustrate how systems based on our framework can be built using today’s proven technology. Finally, we provide a unified isolation mechanism called Promises that is not only applicable to our GAT framework, but also to any applications that run in the service-based world. We discuss the concept, how it works, and how it defines a protocol. We also provide a list of potential implementation techniques. Using some of the implementation techniques we mention, we provide a proof-of-concept prototype system.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Techn. Universiẗat, Diss., 2007--Darmstadt.

Zugl.: München, Techn. Univ., Diss., 2006

Zugl.: Darmstadt, Techn. Universiẗat, Diss., 2007.

Thesis (M.S.)--George Mason University, 2008. / Vita: p. 108. Thesis director: J. Mark Pullen. Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Computer Science. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Aug. 28, 2008). Includes bibliographical references (p. 101-107). Also issued in print.

Stuttgart, Univ., Diplomarbeit, 2006.