Situational Enterprise Services

Introduction

The Service-oriented computing paradigm is transforming traditional enterprise systems from a close, centrally controled system into a dynamic information exchange and flexible business process system. Traditional enterprise applications are defined as software designed to integrate all aspects of a company's operations and processes such as accounting, finance, human resources, inventory control, manufacturing, marketing, sales, and distribution, and resource planning. Advanced enterprise applications provide linkages with customers, business partners, and suppliers (Markus & Tanis, 2000). Normally enterprise applications are complex. There are mission critical applications which are developed and deployed by central IT with long development deployment cycle and dedicated IT budget.

Currently, there is increased pressure to build enterprise applications quickly in order to respond to situational needs of the business. Many of these applications for reflecting situational business needs never get delivered because they are too difficult to write, too costly to implement, and too brittle to customize and maintain once deployed. As a result, many of the needs are addressed by business people who have some knowledge on IT techniques creating often inadequate solutions using tools like Excel, Access and Visual Basic.

With a growing number of services on the Web, these needs can now be satisfied more easily and effectively. These development and deployment services, combined with a “situational” mindset and methodology, can offer significant advantages. Unlike traditional enterprise applications, situational enterprise applications are relatively simple. There are not mission critical for organizations. Lots of them developed at the point of need short development cycle under central IT control with little or no recognized budget.

The situational enterprise applications being addressed will not replace core business applications, such as ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), SCM (Supply Chain Management), CRM (Customer Relationship Management) etc. They address different needs which are built for just a handful of users, situational enterprise applications that are used for only a few weeks or months, or situational applications address a small piece of functionality. For example, within the perimeter ERP applications, departmental operation solutions, such as vacation scheduling, seminar and presentation management, purchase procedure management within a work unit, etc, normally are not included in a organization ERP system. However, they can be desired by department staffs. These are typical situational applications for the department staffs who manage those matters on a daily basis.

Types of situational enterprise applications can be divided into data-oriented applications and process-oriented applications. Enterprise widgets, gadgets, pipes and mash-ups belong to data-oriented applications. Lightweight process-oriented applications are currently under research, the EU project SOA4All (http://www.soa4all.eu/) aims to provide a platform to build process-oriented applications for end users (non-technical users).

The target audience for situational enterprise applications/services is an educated professional (e.g., accountant, HR personnel) with modest computer literacy (and interest) that mostly includes the Web and MS Office. They have basic computer experience like using a wizard to generate something new; interacting with spreadsheets, documents, and forms; and using drag and drop to rearrange items on the screen.

These solutions on demand will help businesses slash expenses and reduce cycle times by more effectively supporting how people work, address challenges and make business decisions. Situational enterprise applications/services will allow also the business to be more innovative and competitive by supporting new processes more effectively, increasing overall productivity, and facilitating new ways for sharing information.

In this chapter, we introduce background information of situational enterprise applications, general description of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web services, and enterprise services in Section 2. The needs and benefits of situational enterprise services describe in Section 3. Design principles of situational enterprise services present in Section 4. Section 5 explains applying issues of situational enterprise services. Conclusions and future research direction are depicted in Section 6.