Socio-technical design of service compositions

Abstract

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Nowadays new systems for electronic service delivery are comprised of components. These components may be locally developed, managed and optimized and not intended to be reused in composite applications. By compositing modular components in new systems large, distributed systems can be developed in which services provided by various stakeholders are combined. The creation of service compositions is an ill-posed and ill-structured design problem which must be tackled with great care and should take into account the various stakeholders and their technological systems.In this paper we present a socio-technical design approach for developing service compositions. This approach starts with analyzing both user requirements and analyzing available services. This is in contrast with existing approaches, which are primarily supply-driven, i.e. they take the available services as a starting point. In addition, the individual service components need to be coordinated to create a coherent composition. Therefore, the dependencies among components are analyzed which help to identify feasible and alternative compositions and enable communication and negotiation among stakeholders. We found that the dependencies among systems components are often viewed as simple sequential, connections whereas, they might not be. Moreover, it was found that a method focused on technical design alone, like most current composition approach, will be insufficient and that stakeholder-related social aspects need to be considered. A service compositions approach in organizational networks requires a high degree of stakeholder participation.