SERVICE ORIENTED VIRTUAL ORGANIZATIONS: A SERVICE CHANGE MANAGEMENT PERSPECTIVE 1
Waeal J.Obidallah1, 3, Bijan Raahemi1, S.M.Amin Kamali1, Mohammad H.Danesh2
Faculty of Graduate and Post-Doc Studies and Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa 2 Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto 3 Collage of Computer and Information Sciences, Al Imam Mohammed Ibn Saud Islamic University {wobidall, braahemi, skamali}@uottawa.ca,
[email protected]
ABSTRACT This paper presents a change management framework and a supporting methodology based on Service Oriented Architecture to facilitate the process of change by enabling the participants in a Virtual Organization to initiate, asses, collaborate, authorize and implement changes. Our proposed solution consists of (a) a structural framework including two layers, the levels and triggers of change; and (b) a procedural framework that provides methods for efficient handling of changes based on the ITIL V3, Engineering Change Management (ECM) and ECOLEAD best practices and recommendations. We present that employing the proposed framework and methodology to manage changes in Virtual Organizations increases the flexibility, agility, competitive advantage and the value added to their services. Index Terms— Virtual Organization, Service Oriented Architecture, Change Management, Change Collaboration, Collaborative Decision Making. 1. INTRODUCTION The evolution of web technologies and services has transformed the Internet from a mere repository of information and data into a useful and inevitable platform for service provisioning and sharing. It allows businesses from different locations to share information and different resources to increase collaboration to form Collaborative Networked Organizations (CNOs) where they share risk, skills, resources and core competencies to add more competitive advantages to their organizations [1]. The result of this, is the emergence of the virtual organizations (VO), which is a dynamic, temporal consortium of autonomous legally independent organizations that collaborate with each other to achieve certain objectives and meet business needs [2], [3]. The idea of aligning VOs with service oriented architecture (SOA) is potentially one of the best ways to implement and manage dynamic business processes to achieve the concept of a service oriented virtual organization (SOVO) [2]. This will increase the flexibility and agility to improve and change services [4] in the SOVO. Since today’s business environments are very competitive, complex, and rapidly changing; companies and
different organizations are increasingly restructuring, changing, and improving their internal business processes, services, information systems, and partnerships with other companies to leverage and add more value to their businesses [3]. VO participating organizations need to evolve to meet the market and customer demands by changing their own business processes and services. Thus, change processes and procedures are needed to facilitate and manage the process of change between different partners in SOVO environment. In this paper, we present a change management framework that facilitates and improves the process of changes between partners. We identify the levels, triggers and procedures of changes which increase the flexibility and agility in changing shared-services and processes between partners by engaging them all in the process of change. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: In Section 2, we introduce our research motivation. In Section 3, we describe the concepts of Virtual Organization (VO), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Change Management (CM). This is followed by the proposed CM framework in Section 4. The characteristics and benefits of our proposed framework are discussed in Section 5. Finally, we conclude the paper in Section 6. 2. MOTIVATION Combining SOA with VOs presents many advantages in today’s business environments, but VO also introduces new research challenges [2]. VOs are dynamic and continuously changing because of the dynamic environments in which they operate [5]. Industry analysts show that one of the leading causes of downtime and missed SLA is unmanaged change. Furthermore, the Gartner Group stated that enterprises should invest more to improve CM processes, problem management processes and automation tools to address 80 percent of unplanned downtime. This will help organizations to reduce downtime caused by application failures and operator errors [6]. All kinds of changes in SOVO environment are expected to be organized and managed in a way that allows participated partners to evolve and change their own business processes and services. Therefore, a framework that provides processes and
procedures for handling all level of changes will play a central role for the successful deployment, operation and evolution of SOVO. This framework facilitates all kind of changes at different levels. Let’s consider an Automobile Enterprise where the entrepreneur is looking to combine different services including Search, Purchase, Insurance, Finance and Shipment illustrated in Figure 1. Different organizations are providing these services which will be selected, composed and orchestrated to meet the VO goals. The VO will go through its lifecycle phases starting from the creation where a business opportunity is identified, the list of services are selected and orchestrated. The Automobile VO allows users to search for a car, purchase by providing information and makes payments through financial services, having the choice of buying insurance and shipping the purchased car to their location. The entrepreneur can choose the right search, purchase, insurances, financial and shipment services that are provided by different organizations. After the orchestration, all of these organizations will collaborate as partners to achieve the expected value by going through the operation phase of the VO lifecycle.
Figure 1: A Motivating Scenario The VO usually performs changes to its business processes and services from different aspects in the evolution phase. Changes could be triggered due to different reasons. Out of threshold performance level of the VO could be one source of change and a new business strategy could be another. For example, if the performance level of the partner who provides the shipment services does not meet the SLA, the VO will react by replacing that partner with a new service provider who is willing to meet the expected criteria. Finally, once the VO has outlived its value, it will be dissolved and all partnerships will be terminated. During the evolution phase, VO members will face and initiate different kinds of changes in order to meet the markets’ and customers’ demands. Thus VOs such as this Automobile VO should employ a CM mechanism which facilitates the process of changing business processes and services by engaging all partners in the change process in a collaborative and efficient way. 3. BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY 3.1. Virtual Organizations A Collaborative Network (CN) is a network that consists of a variety of entities (e.g. organizations, people, and even
machines) that are largely autonomous, geographically distributed, and heterogeneous in terms of their operating environment, culture, social capital and goals. These entities collaborate to better achieve common or compatible goals and jointly achieve values. The interactions between the entities are supported by computer networks [3], [7]. CNO has emerged as a result of greater awareness on the potential benefits and advantages offered by networking, partnerships and collaborations between different organizations to meet requirements [3], [8]. VOs can be considered to be a very important manifestation within CNOs. A VO is a dynamic, temporal consortium of autonomous legally independent organizations that collaborate with each other in a way to attend a business opportunity and meet specific requirements [9]. VO participating partners share risks, costs, and benefits, coordinate the sharing of skills, resources and competences to achieve their operations and use computer networks to support their interactions [3], [9], [10]. From the outer world point of view, the VO looks and performs its tasks and activities as if it was a single organization even though each VO participating organization is independent by having its own objectives, internal processes and business culture. This fact makes it challenging to manage VO like a single organization [11]. VOs have four phases in their lifecycle as show in Figure 2 [9], [12]. VO management is “the organization, allocation and co-ordination of resources, their activities as well as their inter-organizational dependencies to achieve the objectives of the VO within the required time, costs and quality frame”[13], [14]. Its challenges can be categorized into distribution, dependencies and coordination challenges, performance management challenges, knowledge and information management challenges, risk management challenges, and changes and decision making challenges [11], [15], [16].
Figure 2: VO’s Life-Cycle 3.2. Service Oriented Architecture Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an architectural style where systems consist of service users and service providers [17]. Building business applications using SOA increases the agility and flexibility of business processes, the interoperability between different services and their reusability [18]. SOA provides interoperability between different services through the use of different standards; loose coupling that minimizes dependencies and just requires the awareness between services, and abstraction which hides the logic of service from the outside world using technologies such as XML, reusability which is the ability to
reuse a certain services in different business processes, autonomy which allows services to have control over the logic they encapsulate which is governed by policy and , finally, discoverability where metadata are used to discover a service [18]. SOA is the proper way to create dynamic and collaborative applications that are built for change because it is able to adopt with the dynamic business environment. It also reduces the complexity and rigidity of developing IT or business applications compared to other ways such as clientserver where changes may require rebuilding the whole application again [19]. Organizations who adopt SOA will gain advantages by improving their business agility, maximizing ROI while reducing costs, lead times, risks, and IT complexity and rigidity [19]. 3.3. Change Management Our research is primarily focused on the technical aspect of change management. CM from an IT perspective is "a process whereby changes to a service are formally introduced and approved before deployment into the next testing or production state [19]." It focuses on changes to a service through its whole lifecycle and ensures the prompt and efficient handling of all changes through the use of standardized methods and procedures based on industry best practices [19]. The goal of CM is to support the process of change , enable the traceability of changes, minimize the impact of change and gradually improve the day to day operations [20] ,[21]. Organizations believe that virtual business models such as SOVO have innovations with the potential to respond to complex and dynamic changing business environments, as well as provide benefits and various opportunities that are not found in physical organizations [22]. Business processes and services in SOVOs are subject to changes in order to evolve and improve its operations to meet markets and customer requirements [1], [23]. The process of managing changes becomes more complicated and complex as the number of services or service providers increases dramatically [1]. Managing changes between different partners manually is not practical especially with the growing number of service providers and the improvements in ICTs. A more practical and efficient way is to automate the process of change between different partners allowing a quicker and user transparent way of CM. This will allow a quicker response time for changes and less efforts from the VO manager to track, maintain and coordinate for change [24]. During the operation phase of VOs different kinds of unexpected events take place for different reasons which may cause a problem to maintain the VO’s operations and achieve its objectives [25]. The unexpected events may lead to changes in the VO that require decision making, problem solving, discussion making and collaboration between independent and autonomous partners [9]. A specific change to a service or business process may force a series of changes due to the dependency between services and business processes [26].
The dependency between different business processes and services, in addition to; the complexity and the characteristics of a SOVO makes the process of change more challenging and complicated [1]. Therefore, change management is an important research issue which needs to be investigated to enable VO partners to adapt to the dynamic and changing environment. The CM processes will facilitate change while also reducing user effort which eventually leads to faster VO change adoption. 4. THE PROPOSED CHANGE MANAGEMENT FRAMEWORK Our proposed change management (CM) framework consists of: The structural framework that identifies the levels of changes and the triggers of changes in SOVO; and the procedural framework that identifies the change processes, controls, methods and partners change collaboration. These frameworks are described in more details in the following sub-sections. 4.1. The Structural Framework Changes in SOVO could be triggered for different reasons and in different levels during the operation and evolution phase of the VO. Figure 3 illustrate the level of changes in SOVO. These changes could start from the service layer which is classified as Bottom-Up changes or from the business layer which is classified as Top-down changes. Bottom-Up changes are low-level changes that include changes in services operation and will affect the level of services provided by partners. It may propagate to high-level changes in the business level. An example of that could be upgrading partner service or a bundle of services to fix errors or bugs. In this case, it is a low-level change and it will not propagate to higher levels of change since the upgrading will not affect the way the service functions and operates. In another case, if upgrading the service will affect the way that service works (for example, new required parameters to operate); this will propagate to higher levels change. Top–Down changes are high-level changes in the VO, which include tactical and strategic changes in the Business layer. Business strategic changes require decision making to decide when and what to do regarding a certain problem. Business tactical changes are easier to fix than strategic changes requiring us to choose how to do something rather than what to do. Strategic changes investigate what to do with the resources to build and grow our organization whereas tactic changes are about everyday actions to achieve organizational goals. Top-Down changes will start from strategic business requirements and it will propagate into tactical and lower level changes. Business layer changes affect the VO value network and the collaborative processes between partners. Collaborative processes are high-level business processes which are defined to model the collaboration and integration between various partners [2]. VO Collaborative processes
Figure 3: CM Structural Framework changes will affect the choreography between different partners. The choreography between partners focuses on collaboration and service interaction by specifying each partner’s role, activities and the sequences of service invocation [2]. It also serves as a collaborative agreement between the VO business partners [2]. Changes in the collaborative process level may propagate to change in the value network level (on long-term) and will propagate to low level changes. The value network specifies a set of roles and interactions which will generate a specific kind of business, economic or social good. It serves as a human-centric and role-based network view of any business activity [27]. Changes at this level will affect the configuration and topology of the VO and in some stage may essentially question its feasibility. VO’s configurations changes refer to changes in the consortium of the legally independent organizations, their service contributions, value exchange and Service Level Agreements (SLAs). The value exchange among SOVO partners can be any kind of service, money, product and information [28] which partners have agreed on during VO creation. A change in the VO topology means modifications in the structure that VO partners interact and communicate with each other. A VO topology could be a supply chain, star or peer-to-peer topologies [2]. In the structural framework, changes can be triggers by different reasons. Each level of change has its own key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the performance of SOVO in that level. The SOVO performance management framework [28] identified all the performance measurement criteria and their threshold which eventually will trigger a change at any level. Changes can be triggered by service providers to initiate functional or non-functional changes. Functional changes refer to those that trigger changes on the functionalities of the VO. Non-functional changes refer to those that trigger changes from a partner performance prospective such as partner reputation. Dealing with functional change is usually more challenging and requires some changes in the business level. Functional changes
occur more frequent due to VO dynamic business environment [5]. Changes can be triggered to meet Customers feedback and needs. Furthermore, could be triggered to meet new business strategies. 4.2. The Procedural Framework The proposed procedural framework is derived from ITIL V3, ECM and ECOLEAD best practices and recommendation. Figure 4 shows the framework and its different components including the six layers for change processes and collaboration, change control components, changes actors and related management processes. In the first layer, Initiation, any change can be initiated through communication between the VO coordinator and the change initiator which leads to Request for Change (RFC). The RFC is usually initiated because of a problem that requires a change in one of the levels in VO. In the RFC, the change initiator provides different information which is needed to assess the problem and find a solution. For example, initial solution of the problem could be provided by the initiator. The request should be recorded, reviewed and filtered by the VO coordinator or change manager. If any information is missing it will be returned back to the initiator. The request will be accepted or maybe rejected if further information is needed or a proposal is required. In the second layer, Identification and Assessment, the change manager with Change Advisory Board (CAB) validate classification of the change, measure how long it will be until this change has significant impact on the VO , measure the effect of this change on VO business processes and its SLAs, identify the new Service Acceptance Criteria (SAC) which meets the VO goals and objectives, prioritize this change based on its impact and urgency [29],[20]. Afterward, a Change Authority (CA) should be assigned to handle change authorization and implementation in conjunction with the change manager. All the effected partners in the process of change should be notified to collaborate and facilitate the process of change. In the third layer, Communication and Collaboration, all the affected partners will collaborate to find alternative solutions for the problem keeping in mind the initial solution provided by the initiator. Partners will collaborate to take a decision in this layer by discussing the finding, provide solutions, risk analysis, ways to test and evaluate their solutions before implementing it. The VO coordinator will allow affected partners to vote on the most efficient solution. A solution will be identified based on their voting. In the fourth layer, Planning and Authorization, a change, implantation and remediation plans will be developed. Authorization of a change will be requested from CA or CAB depending on the level of change and its impact on the VO. In this layer, we will have the change window which is the agreed time when the change may be implemented with minimal impact on VO partners, the remediation or back-out plan in case something went wrong during implementation [20].
In the fifth layer, Coordination and Implementation, the VO coordinator will assign implementer to execute the change in conjunction with the release manager. In addition, he will update and notify all VO partners of the change details. This layer need to consult the SOVO process management framework [2], [30] to facilitate the implementation process. In the sixth layer, Evaluation and Closure, after implementing the proposed solutions and executing the changes, we need to evaluate and monitor changes using the PM framework identified in [28] to ensure that risk have been managed and the new modification meet the requirements identified in the implementation plan. PostImplementation Review (PIR) document need to be developed which indicate if the change was successful and identifies the opportunities for improvements [29]. The change manager should identify the lessons learned during the process of change which should be stored along with PIR in SOVO knowledge management (KM) repositories. There are important components that need to be considered to ensure flexible and controlled change processes. The roles and responsibilities of participants in the process of change should be identified, for example; the responsibility matrix (RM) can be used to identify the Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed participants. The CAB will be composed according to the changes being considered to support in the authorization of a change, assessment, assigning CA and prioritization. CAB members should be chosen from different partners who are able to deal with both business and technical prospective of change. The change manager usually is the chair of the CAB. The RFC specification component identifies required information that is needed to include in every submitted change request. Level of authorization component identifies
the different level of authorization linking it to the level and impact of a change. For example, some changes do not require the CAB authorization and the CA may have predefined authority to take actions. The relationship with processes component identifies ways and methods of tracking and tracing changes in the VO business processes and services, identify its impact, cause and effect. The escalations components consist of functional and hierarchic escalations used in case a change was taking long time or difficulty to execute or close a change faced in the process. 5. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE PROPOSED FRAMEWORK The challenges faced to adapt to the dynamic environment could be minimized if the members were able to find ways to allow their service to evolve in a collaborative and efficient manner. The framework provides more agile, quick and predefined CM process that governs and facilitates changes in a collaborative scheme. It addresses the need for collaboration between partners in finding, discussing and selecting solutions for the problem that triggered a change. It provides measurements criteria to the performance management (PM) framework by identifying the commitment of each partner to the VO and the flexibility of the VO. The commitment of a partner includes re-active and active commitment. The re-active commitment describes the contribution and reaction of a partner by providing solutions during the collaborative and communication stage. The active commitment describe the intention of partners to actively collaborate to avoid critical situation before its happen [28]. The flexibility describes the early ability to respond to different kind of changes or external influences and the ability to adapt to new situation [28].
Figure 4: CM Procedural Framework
6. CONCLUSION The number of service providers has increased rapidly over the web, providing several types of services. This has left the Virtual Organizations (VOs) with the challenge to maintain competitiveness in the market. All VO members must constantly monitor the changes in their environment and react to them in order to meet the market and customers’ needs through improved services. VO members rely on the workflow Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) and Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) to integrate their business processes together to create the final value or service to the customer. By having prior knowledge of change and predefined change processes, they can respond quickly and flexibly to market demands to remain profitable and competitive. We proposed a framework that provides a supporting methodology to guide VO participants in the process of change including change control, change collaboration, decision making and change automation. The framework is based on the ITILV3, ECM and ECOLEAD best practices, recommendations and reference models, customized to fit the Service Oriented Virtual Organization (SOVO) environment’s change requirements. Employing the proposed framework and methodology to manage changes in Virtual Organizations increases the flexibility, agility, competitive advantage and the value added to their services. Based on the promising results of this study, we are now working on the implantation of the framework with various VO changes scenarios using the IBM Business Process Manager. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This project is supported by the IBM Center for Business Analytics and Performance at the University of Ottawa, Canada. REFERENCES [1]
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