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A Need for Business Assessment of Semantic Web Services’ Applications in Enterprises Witold Abramowicz, Agata Filipowska, Monika Kaczmarek, and Tomasz Kaczmarek Poznan University of Economics, Department of Information Systems {w.abramowicz,a.filipowska,m.kaczmarek, t.kaczmarek}@kie.ae.poznan.pl

Abstract. Enterprises today face ever increasing pressure to innovate, deliver more value to their customers, decrease costs and shorten product time-tomarket etc. The solution to these problems may be application of the SOA paradigm along with the SWS technology. Most of the on-going projects on SOA and SWS focus mainly on the technical aspects. However, the need appears to assess and quantify the business aspects of application of the SWSbased solutions. This position paper elaborates shortly on the motivation and requirements that need to be met in order to supplement the existing SWS technology stack with a business perspective.

1 Introduction Enterprises today face ever increasing pressure to innovate, deliver more value to their customers, decrease costs and shorten product time-to-market, etc. Their IT models need to support the new requirements of the business environment. Fixed and hard-coded IT applications do not allow adapting quickly to changes, as tight coupling leads to monolithic and brittle distributed applications. Even minor changes in one part of the system may lead to its serious malfunctioning. Moreover, small changes applied in one application often require parallel changes in partners’ applications. The sound solution seems to be the Service Oriented Architecture paradigm focusing on business functions and requirements rather than on the technical layer. SOA encapsulates business functions and makes them available to be used within and between companies. In consequence, it provides the uniform means to offer, discover, interact with and use business capabilities to produce desired effects. Combination of the SOA paradigm with Web services (WS) technology and especially with Semantic Web Services (SWS) has a lot to offer and may bring benefits to various companies what has been confirmed by the current interest of many of them in SOA and SWSbased solutions. Especially appealing is an idea of (semi)automatic dynamic composition of SWSs to implement business processes and in this way ensure the adaptability and flexibility of businesses. However, while IT experts and in some cases business analysts may understand the benefits that may follow the SOA and (S)WSs adoption, the business people need to have some tangible results and metrics that will allow them to assess the real profits, for example the ROI from the A. ter Hofstede, B. Benatallah, and H.-Y. Paik (Eds.): BPM 2007 Workshops, LNCS 4928, pp. 514–516, 2008.

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implementation of this approach. Moreover, there is a lack of assistance and methodology that would guide the companies through the process of implementation of SOA and SWS-based solutions and give them guidelines how such an investment should be evaluated later on and whether it is profitable at all. Moreover, the additional burdens and challenges that the SWS technology puts on the companies need to be considered. Whereas much attention lately in various projects was paid to the SWSs and various SWS-based interactions inter alia their composition (e.g. DIP [1], ASG [2], InfraWebs [3], SUPER [4]]), surprisingly little effort was spent on the profitability and business side of these aspects. The aim of our research is to bridge this gap and enhance the SWS technology stack with business perspective.

2 Motivation and Main Goals of the Research In order to enhance the SWS technology stack with business perspective, the following scientific objectives have to be addressed: 1. Development and validation of the methodology allowing assessment of costs and benefits, in terms of business value, of using SOA solutions and SWS in companies. Enterprises need to know in terms of business value how much they will gain or how much they will loose not introducing certain solutions. The risks connected with the application of the techniques also need to be considered. Moreover, the following questions should be posed: what is the financial benefit of the applications of SOA/semantics-based solutions? what are the risks of following ontological approaches (what requires learning and maintenance)? This should be possible if the following dimensions will be taken into account: costs of traditional solution (for a baseline), initial costs (of implementing composition-based solution), maintenance costs, service utilization costs, predicted incomes etc. As the non-functional parameters will be used, the methodology will also allow for quantification of e.g. reliability, security etc. 2. Development and validation of the method of profitability driven dynamic process composition. When performing dynamic service composition not only functional aspects but also business rules and requirements concerning the non-functional properties of business processes should be taken into account. Therefore, the description of the designed process as well as the information on SWSs should be enriched with additional data that would allow performing business analysis. This encompasses: • Enhancement of current techniques for the (semi)automatic business process composition using services, • Development of methods and tools supporting enterprises in choosing the most suitable service chain to perform business process, with consideration of technical performance and cost-effectiveness (business perspective) of the composition, • Research activities into service composition with regard to the effects/benefits and the costs of business processes’ adaptability, • Evaluation of composition in terms of technical performance and its scalability.

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3. Development and adaptation of techniques to perform data mining on service execution data, business analysis based on user feedback, SLAs as well as quality of result quantification etc. 4. The concept of business re-design and replacement of various process fragments, although being very active research area, still lacks maturity. In order for the SWS composition to fulfill its promise on the adaptiveness to the changing conditions of the environment, the more sophisticated algorithms of replacing services need to be taken into account. Since the business environment is very dynamic, the business processes need to be adapted to its changes. However, their quality should not deteriorate in any aspect. Questions related to the replacement of one service with another, often asked by business analysts (however, almost never by IT people), are as follows: Will such a replacement improve my process? How will it affect the overall non-functional characteristic of my process? Are there any additional costs attached to the replacement? 5. Enhancement of current approaches to business process/SWSs description as well as SLA contracts, etc. 6. Adaptation of existing reasoners to the specific needs of business process composition. 7. Enhancement of SWS foundation by learning from their usage in business process composition.

3 Conclusions and Future Work The business perspective of adoption of SOA and SWS in companies is not fully investigated. The usage of SOA, WS and SWS as well as their compositions, to fulfill certain tasks/business processes in companies, will not gain its momentum unless the business perspective of all aspects is taken into account. Investigating the above mentioned issues may result in establishing of a project that will bring closer the business and IT worlds and allow assessing the SOA and SWS composition in terms of business value. It may lead to the wider adoption and implementation of SOA concepts in companies.

References [1] http://dip.semanticweb.org [2] http://asg-platform.org/ [3] http://www.infrawebs.org

[4] http://www.ip-super.org