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A method to support a reflective derivation of business components from conceptual models

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Abstract

To successfully compete in today’s volatile business environments, enterprises need to consolidate, flexibly adapt, and extend their information systems (IS) with new functionality. Component-based development approaches can help solving these challenges as they support the structuring of IS landscapes into business components with a loosely coupled business functionality. However, the structuring process continues to pose research challenges and is not adequately supported yet. Current approaches to support the structuring process typically rely on procedures that cannot be customized to the designer’s situational preferences. Furthermore, they do not allow the designer to identify and reflect emerging conflicts during the structuring. In this paper, we therefore propose a new method that introduces a rational, reflective procedure to systematically derive an optimized structuring according to situational preferences. Using a design science approach, we show (i) how the derivation of business components can be formulated as a customizable multi-criteria decision making problem and (ii) how conceptual models can be used to derive business components with an optimized functional scope. To evaluate the feasibility of the proposed method, we describe its application in a complex case that was taken from a German DAX-30 automobile manufacturer.

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Notes

  1. Note that we will not explicitly discuss approaches to structure IS into software services although service-oriented development can be regarded as a special form of component-based development (Szyperski et al. 2002). While we have examined several approaches to identify services during our analysis of related work, we found that they were generally less mature than those to derive software components. Our findings are in line with recent surveys which also provide explanations for this observation (Birkmeier et al. 2009; Kohlborn et al. 2009).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Augsburg, Universitaetsstr. 16, 86159, Augsburg, Germany

    Dominik Q. Birkmeier & Sven Overhage

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  1. Dominik Q. Birkmeier
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  2. Sven Overhage
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Correspondence to Dominik Q. Birkmeier.

Additional information

Preliminary findings of this research have been discussed in Albani et al. (2008) and Birkmeier and Overhage (2012).

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Birkmeier, D.Q., Overhage, S. A method to support a reflective derivation of business components from conceptual models. Inf Syst E-Bus Manage 11, 403–435 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10257-012-0196-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10257-012-0196-6

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