A DISTRIBUTED INFORMATION SYSTEM TO COORDINATE AND SUPPORT BUSINESS PROCESS EXECUTION IN A CLUSTER OF FIRMS Danilo Ardagna, Dipartimento Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano,Italy,
[email protected]. Sara Comai, Dipartimento Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano,Italy,
[email protected]. Angelo Corallo, SS ISUFI , University of Lecce, Italy,
[email protected]. Gabriele Giunta, Engineering Ingegneria Informatica, Palermo R&D Lab, Italy,
[email protected]. Luca Iandoli, University fo Naples Federico II, DIEG, Naples (Italy),
[email protected] Nunzio Ingraffia, Engineering Ingegneria Informatica, Palermo R&D Lab, Italy,
[email protected]. ABSTRACT In these years, new business paradigms have been promoted for the digitalization of enterprise processes. Internetworked Enterprise paradigm has allowed companies and organizations to react to the climate of uncertainty by decentralising production and innovation. In the research project DISCoRSO, we have described an effective approach that enables SMEs transition from traditional business to e-business. The proposed solution is based on an organizational framework and a technological framework, in order to guarantee the support of the business strategies and the fulfilment of specific SME needs. INTRODUCTION The fast growth of new Information Communication Technologies, their effects on trade, on economic transactions and on communication systems have promoted the birth and the diffusion of the network society. This implies radical changes in the geography of costs, production and human and social capital, that impact on the traditional business frontiers [1]. The progressive digitalization of the business processes has allowed the gradual emergence of the Internetworking Enterprise (IE) paradigm, as a boundary organization whose processes are transformed and integrated with the ones of its partners. These phenomena allowed companies and organizations to react to the climate of uncertainty by decentralising production and innovation. Shifting activities to the electronic dimension allowed an increase in efficiency and the reduction of coordination costs. Moving toward the electronic dimension represents a unique opportunity for the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) since through e-business it is possible to reduce transaction costs and increase the speed and reliability of transactions, reduce inefficiencies resulting from lack of co-ordination between firms in the value chain, reduce information asymmetries between buyers and suppliers [2]. Furthermore, e-business can produce greater benefits for SMEs than for larger firms. SMEs that usually remain in local and regional market can expand their markets geographically, providing small companies with an opportunity to join and compete in a wide variety of supply chains, including those previously inaccessible because of the use of costly closed EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) networks. However, small organisations are not ready to use Internet extensively as a business tool. With the exception of few companies that lead the edge of the IT revolution, the most of the SMEs are not able to overcome the barriers that prevent them to use e-business technologies [3]. The digitalization process has demonstrated to be not suitable for SMEs, since: - it shows some rigidities in the SMEs context: indeed SMEs are characterized by high organizational flexibility, that calls for high technological flexibility; - it needs complex technological frameworks; - it assumes the presence of specific competences in the SME, able to choose between "off the shelf" solutions and the development of "ad hoc" solutions; - it is too much expensive both from an economic and an organizational point of view. E-business is mainly an organizational fact, defined by Tiwana [4] as the "integration, qualified from the use of Internet, of processes, applications and information systems, that facilitates a fast collaboration, coordination and formation of relations between organizational units and actors inside and outside of the company, exceeding the traditional organizational limits". So, e-business can be seen as the use of Internet in order to improve the coordination from an operative point of view and the relations between the enterprise and the network of actors with which it is potentially correlated from a strategic perspective. This analysis emphasizes the organizational dimension and the environmental conditions in which usually SMEs are obliged to operate but ignores the SME interorganizational dimension that is important for any organization and fundamental for a SME. From this viewpoint, it is interesting to observe how much it is limitative to analyze the adoption of the e-business for a single SME and how much it is necessary to move this analysis toward clusters (geographical concentrations of industries that gain performance advantages through co-location) [5] since most of the SMEs have only a partial visibility on the entire chain in which they are involved and the approach to the e-business can be explained only considering the entire value chain.
The emerging aspect, that relates the inter-organisational structures of SMEs, is the tendency to structure itself as a network of mostly geographic social relations and to base its own mechanisms of coordination on the exchange of tacit knowledge. For instance, Italian industrial clusters are marked by a specialization that privileges an articulated division of work and necessity of cooperation with consequent exchange of mainly tacit and geographically localized knowledge. This explains why the industrial districts are extremely competitive in those sectors in which process and product standardization are limited or absent and it is necessary to face unexpected changes, through a complex network of specialization, transaction and exchange. In the research project DISCoRSO1, we adopt an effective approach that is aimed at enabling SMEs transition from traditional business to e-business based on two key pillars: an organizational framework for transition from business to e-business including a diffusion, a deployment, and a sustaining strategy and a technological framework thought to be enough flexible and ready to use in order to fulfil the specific SME needs. Organizational framework The transition of SMES from traditional business to e-business requires deep organizational and cultural transformation. The acceptance of an ICT platform and its successful implementation depends on four main factors (fig. 1): the firm absorptive capacity, i.e. the level of previous ICT knowledge, skills and confidence, the management attitude toward innovation and ICT in particular, the misalignment between current (“as is”) and “tobe” processes and knowledge flow (“as is”), and the implementation strategy2. In order to facilitate the process of adoption of the platform a methodological approach made up by four steps is proposed: Absorptive capacity ICT Platform
Organization
Process Knowledge and information Flow (to be)
+
Organizational acceptance of ICT
a)
Implementation strategy
PKF (as is) Management acceptance
Perceived benefits
Perceived easiness of use
Beliefs and attitudes
Figure 1: the organizational framework
Social and interorganizational constraints
analysis voice of users to elicit user needs, expectations, beliefs and attitudes, and the presence of specific social and interorganizational constraints b) Misalignment evaluation through business processes analysis and redesign c) assessment of the organization ereadiness to adopt the new platform evaluated in terms of absorptive capacity d) design of a suitable and customized implementation strategy
In each step we will take into account the specific characteristics of SMEs operating into industrial districts. Among the most relevant aspects there are the inter-organizational nature of many processes due to flexible specialization and the trade-off between what knowledge can be shared and which should be protected in performing transactions with partners that in many cases are at the same time also competitors. Technological framework In order to not lose its distinctive capabilities and to guarantee an harmonious development in the global competition, a SME needs technological tools that are able to explicit its routines and its processes, present in the enterprise in a tacit way, without changing their nature or modifying them with too much rigid technological tools. On the other hand, it must count on tools, which are able to guarantee, in the interaction with the e-business partners, the ability to hide or to share processes and routines, with respect to different relation intensity, as normally happens between partners and concurrent in a local cluster. At the same time, the technological framework should guarantee virtual collaborations with partners that are dispersed on global scale and use technology without being obliged to change their own technological system. Finally, the technological systems should enable the business knowledge
1
DISCoRSO (Distributed Information Systems for CooRDinated Service Oriented interoperability) is a research project funded by the Italian Ministry of University (http://www.discorso.eng.it) 2 Because of lack of space, the references related to this part are not included. They are available on request
exchange, to recreate the local geographic environment, in which the SME systems prosper. We can say that, in order to support inter-organizational SME systems, a technological framework should guarantee the ability: - to construct and modify in time, depending from the environmental conditions, the digital components that represent organization’s routines and internal processes, through ad hoc solutions, in order to maximize distinctive capabilities of the organization; - to expose with a level of integration that is dependent on the typology of inter-organizational relationships, the processes and the organizational routines; - to create the same conditions that the social networks, based on geographical proximity, enables in cluster through the use of specific tools of interaction; - to simplify the integration in the global environment, enabling to structure relationships, in a simple way, with companies that use any kind of technology. In our project, the technological framework is represented through a reference architecture (fig. 2), composed by a methodology, a platform and a physical layer. Each internal layer component will be explained in detail in the following paragraphs. THE METHODOLOGY LAYER Knowledge exchange is the basic element for innovation in geographical cluster. As stated before, they base their innovation capabilities on knowledge exchange through social network based interactions. In order to empower knowledge exchange and to foster virtual organizations of SMEs it is necessary to enable simple and powerful mechanism of explicit knowledge exchange. Such effort has to complement the tacit knowledge exchange in geographical district and support the growth of virtual cluster. The methodology layer supports the specification of such knowledge, of the Web interfaces used by the the partners for interaction, and of the SME processes and routines. Web interfaces are modelled using the Web Interface Modeler, based on high-level specification languages, such as Web Modeling Language (WebML) [14]. WebML is a conceptual model for the visual specification of dataintensive Web applications defined on top of database. It is composed by a data schema, describing the application data domain, and one or more hypertexts expressing the Web front-end of the application. The data model is the standard Entity-Relationship (E-R) model, widely used in general-purpose design tools, whereas, the hypertext model is composed of graph of pages describing the content to be published to the user and the interaction mechanisms, implementing hyperlinks or input submissions by the user. The need to reshape company any time a new partner is founded or a new market opportunity emerges, requires a structured process model that allows fast reconfiguration of internal and external processes. The need to reconfigure software components according to the process redesign requires a process modelling language that could enable direct execution of processes and simple reconfiguration of software tools interaction. Many standard notations have been proposed to express the structure model of business processes. For this purposes, the Extended Process Modeler adopts the Business Process Management Notation (BPMN) standard [13] to model internal and external processes using a high-level abstraction model, in order to minimize reconfiguration cost and time. Moreover, BPMN covers the basic concepts required by the WfMC (Workflow Management Coalition) [6], and is compatible with Web service choreography languages (e.g., BPEL4WS) and standard business process specification languages (e.g., XPDL [7]). The Extended Process Modeler is able to model business processes including activities performed by users (and delivered as Web applications) or by remote services. Moreover BPMN has been extended to support the modelling of runtime and Quality of Service (QoS) constraints, to enable monitoring, and has been endowed with semantics capabilities. Starting from the BPMN specification, the workflow be diagrams can be translated into BPEL or XPDL, to be executed by XPDL/BPEL-based workflow engines, or into draft WebML [14] specifications of the
Web applications implementing them. In our methodology the design of BPMN business processes is supported by a visual design tool. In order to improve the effectiveness of knowledge exchange it is necessary to add a semantic content management system. This system will support knowledge explicitation and discovery empowering the capabilities of cluster organizations to overcome geographical barriers and to reduce knowledge gap. The knowledge sharing platform must integrate even different publishing tools from document repository to blogs and wikies, in order to allow people to exchange knowledge in the more suitable way. The Semantic Information Management System (SIMS) is a technological platform based on semantic descriptions of knowledge elements stored into different information systems. It is designed on top of different and autonomous tools for expliciting knowledge as wiki, blogs, CMS, DMS. SIMS represents a system for knowledge sharing of various existing information sources and introduces an ontological aided browsing of their contents. On one hand, using the SIMS front-end, users are able to find contents independently from their repositories. On the other, the SIMS back-end contains modules to capture metadata information from the different sources, and a tool for the semi-automatic annotation based on UIMA [15]. An ontological user description should filter search results related on preferences, roles, interests and expertises. In DISCoRSO project, SIMS aims to advise domain experts during the business process definition phase, retrieving distributed information, documentation and similar processes. THE PLATFORM AND PHYSICAL LAYERS A fundamental role is taken by the “Service Oriented” approach in which e-business processes, guided by Internetworking technologies, are fully managed by enterprises. While configuring their own knowledge sharing and business process integration strategies, such enterprises can also configure their own technological strategies, by exposing their own processes, services and routines with the most appropriate level of integration to grant the right balance between collaboration and competition. Thus, the e-service based technological platform, shown in Fig. 1 as runtime environment, is quite the right solution for industrial clusters for two main reasons: • it is a platform model suitable to support distribution and differentiation of actors; in fact each company in the cluster is able to offer its own services in multi channel modality by means of integration and dynamic composition of distributed software. Such a feature allows companies to benefit from advantages of e-business technologies that potentially extend the horizon of interactions to international markets and to global competition; • it is a less invasive platform model which allows to expose, on the basis of company’s strategic decisions, details of internal processes, routines and knowledge; such a feature is fundamental to allow the company deciding the level of interaction and implication, the amount of knowledge and the level of integration in the different value chains the company takes part to. The runtime environment is based on an architectural solution in which an enterprise can execute its own business process, by means of a Workflow Management System (WfMS) reference model implementation. Processes taken into account are typical of Extended ERP functions. The use of Extended ERP is being adopted in various clusters of SMEs [10], and the migration from traditional ERP-systems, might be very useful for companies operating in an international and collaborative business environment. In DISCoRSO project, we design and realize a collaborative business environment, by integrating processes with web services and semantic peer-to-peer functionalities. The main purpose is to create a network of companies that can design their business processes, discover their existing and potential partners, modify and improve their market relationships. The reference model to represent the business processes into technological framework is the XML Process Description Language (XPDL) [7]. This representation language is suitable to manage processes in which interact different actors [8], and different automatic activities, and it is entirely based on WfMC specifications. Moreover, the WfMC Interface (2-3) [9] is used and extended, in order to invoke activities referred to external and dynamically selected web services. Following the “Service Oriented” approach, the e-service based technological platform can execute a complex application, described as abstract business process, in multi-channel environment by means of web service run-time invocation. Using the Service Selector component, the selection can be dynamically executed, identifying the best set of available run-time web services. In case the service invocation fails, a substitute service will be invoked. Service composition has been formalized as a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model. An automated support to negotiation is useful when dealing with mobile or adaptive contexts, in which it is not assured that every time a service has to be invoked, it could be invoked with the same QoS, because of different problems, like failures in the underlying network, dynamic changing of the set of available services and services substitution. When considering web service environments, the problem of negotiation has been addressed only from the point of view of trust negotiation between parties involved in the realization of a business transaction. The scope
of the Service Negotiator is to manage negotiations for setting the QoS parameters values and the price of a service. Negotiation is not required in every invocation, but the user or the process specification made by the designer are allowed to request, prior to the actual invocation and execution of a service, a negotiation to set its QoS and price. During the process of selection and negotiation of services, the e-service based technological platform will be able to run a service monitor to avoid service execution failures and to recovery when they possibly happen. The approach, defined for the monitoring and the recovery, is based on the use of assertions to determine functional and non functional requirements (quality of service) to define the correctness (acceptability) of the application as pre and post conditions on the remote services invocation. This solution arouses from the clean separation between the application definition and the way it is monitored. The designer must be able to modify at runtime pre and post conditions and the control level to maintain without modifying the application. In fact, as the monitoring is an activity with a strong effect on performance, the user must be able to vary at runtime the resource to spend for the control of the application (to detriment of performance) This is possible through appropriate monitoring rules, belonging not to the process but to the user, that are verified by a specific component according to their meta information (for example the priority level). The grounding environment of the Platform Layer consists of the Semantic Peer-to-Peer Network and Grid Physical Resources. The former integrates contents and services semantics, according to a reference ontology, inside a P2P architecture that represents the SMEs as nodes of such network, the latter enables the e-service based platform to include the invocation of grid services (based on OGSA definition) [11]. Moreover, the current grid infrastructures are concerned with scientific problem. For this reason, grid is relevant for computational and data intensive problems, hence the technical infrastructure has to optimize resource allocation to grant load among computers. On the contrary, in business environment, grid has to optimize resource allocation to maximize the quality of service for the end-user [12]. Finally, the Physical Layer is composed by a set of technologies used to implement the layers described above. Our prototypes are built on Java-based technologies, using open-source libraries and software modules. In the same way, our results will be also distributed by means of GPL-like license. CONCLUSIONS In this paper we have proposed an approach to the SMEs transition from traditional business to e-business based on two key pillars: an organizational framework and a technological framework. The results of the experimental work will be available as DISCoRSO project deliverables. Current work is focussed on the definition of multiple case studies to validate the prototype implementation. Our final goal is to setup the whole framework in real enterprise districts in order to obtain positive feedbacks from domain expert users. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks are expressed to CEFRIEL and CETMA consortia. We are grateful to Luciano Baresi for his profitable advice. REFERENCES
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