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Work as a Service

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Advanced Web Services

Abstract

Improving work within and among enterprises is of pressing importance. In this chapter we take a services-oriented view of both the doing and the coordinating of work by treating work as a service. We discuss how large work engagements can be decomposed into a set of smaller interconnected service requests and conversely how they can be built up. Encapsulation of work into a service request enables its assignment to any qualified work organization. As such, the encapsulation naturally lends itself to ongoing optimization of the overall engagement. A service request contains two distinct parts: coordination information for coordinating work and payload information for doing work. Coordination information deals with business concerns such as risk, cost, schedule, and value co-creation. Contrarily, payload information defines the deliverables and provides what is needed to do the work, such as designs or use-cases. This general two-part decomposition leads to a paradigm of work as a two-way information flow between service systems, rather than as a business process to be implemented. Treating work as information flow allows us to leverage extant web services technology using mainstream service-oriented architectures (SOA). Milestone structures may be used to formalize coordination and establish measurable outcomes. Benefits from the work-as-a-service approach include agility, visibility, responsiveness, and ongoing optimization.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.ibm.com/services/us/gbs/bus/html/gbs-application-assembly-optimization.html

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA

    Daniel V. Oppenheim, Lav R. Varshney & Yi-Min Chee

Authors
  1. Daniel V. Oppenheim
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  2. Lav R. Varshney
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  3. Yi-Min Chee
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lav R. Varshney .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Information Technology, RMIT University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Athman Bouguettaya

  2. Engineering Auto-ID Lab, University of Adelaide School of Computer Science, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

    Quan Z. Sheng

  3. dell'Informazione, Università di Trento Dipto. Ingegneria e Scienza, Povo, Trento, Italy

    Florian Daniel

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Oppenheim, D., Varshney, L., Chee, YM. (2014). Work as a Service. In: Bouguettaya, A., Sheng, Q., Daniel, F. (eds) Advanced Web Services. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7535-4_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7535-4_17

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