Identifying and Assessing Opportunities for the Introduction of Web Services through Business Process Modelling

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Diploma Thesis from the year 2003 in the subject Computer Science - Commercial Information Technology, grade: 1,0 (A), University Karlsruhe (TH) (AIFB& Research Centre Computer Science (FZI)), language: English, abstract: [...]Thus, many organisations are still struggling to assess the real impact of WSand the accompanying opportunities and threats. Without an appropriatebusiness alignment, WS might be perceived as a purely technical solution notdelivering significant business benefits. This constitutes a potential risk factorin the light of recent views on IT benefits and current IT spending practiceand could eventually hamper a wide adoption.The complete thesis tries to mitigate this issue. It gives a concise descriptionof the underlying ideas and constituting elements of WS and also describestheir relationship to other IT concepts. The expected impact and benefits ofWS applications are outlined and the stumbling blocks and risks associatedwith WS are described. Comprehensive classification schemes are proposedfor both the benefits and issues. Predicted future WS adoption stages andtheir characteristics are outlined. The actual state of WS adoption is alsodetermined and described by presenting recent survey results and theoutcome of an own WS review. WS implementations are described andcategorised according to identified major business drivers for WS application.Based on this comprehensive characterisation of WS, the focus of the thesisis then put on developing a methodology for the assessment of WS throughBusiness Process Modelling (BPM). A structured framework is proposed forselecting the most appropriate processes for WS applications. Following this,information domains and types are identified that need to be contained in aBusiness Process Model to support systematic WS assessments andfacilitate WS deployment. This critical information is then mapped to its representation in a Business Process Model with appropriate BPMtechniques offered by the ARIS Toolset, a widely used toolset for BPM. Theconceptual possibilities are finally illustrated through an example in eprocurement.The proposed methodology facilitates a business-oriented view on WS.Containing several checklists and adaptable scoring tables it allowsexecutives and analysts to systematically identify WS opportunities and ITvendors to position their solutions.The thesis concludes with a discussion of the discovered limited functionalityof the modelling toolset and provides an outlook for further research in thearea of using BPM to support Web Service applications for improvingbusiness processes.

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