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Top1. Introduction
With the rapid development of modern service industry, crossover services, a new kind of services become increasingly popular, which are viewed as outcomes of modern service industry developed to an advanced stage (Wu et al., 2016). The business scope of crossover services is no longer limited to a single domain, but expands to multiple domains. For example, the largest online payment service, Alipay, has extended its service scope to takeout services, travel services, social services, and digital campus services. Crossover services aim to expand value chains and build a sound business ecosystem, so as to achieve sustainable profits and enhance the core competitiveness of enterprises (Jones et al., 2015). Therefore, crossover service has become a popular trend in the modern service industry, and there has been a dramatic upsurge in crossover convergence, merger and acquisition activities over the past years (Basuil et al., 2017; Li et al., 2016). The dynamic market needs and globalization trend bring great pressure to crossover service providers. To maintain competitive in an uncertain market environment, it is essential to focus on both technology decisions and business values when developing new software services (Aurum et al., 2007).
However, due to the lack of a sound and clear value definition, service providers usually do not fully consider whether each participant involved in the value network can achieve the value they expect, which leads to the failure of some crossover services (Basuil et al., 2017). A sound value proposition defined at the stage of requirements analysis is thus important because it is helpful for each stakeholder to make profits in multi-way collaborations (Akkermans et al., 2003). Particularly in crossover scenarios, customers are reluctant to switch from their original services to the new crossover services, unless they can realize the added values offered by the new services. Therefore, it is important to consider value propositions of stakeholders in designing crossover services. Traditional value propositions are often stated informally by utilizing natural language, which may lead to a lack of common understanding among different stakeholders, who represent different enterprises and vary in focus (Akkermans et al., 2003). Therefore, a formal value modeling framework is needed to identify and characterize the value expectations of stakeholders at the early stage of requirements analysis.
Crossover services usually involve the convergence of different business organizations and different value chains (Yin et al., 2018). The crossover convergence process needs to be considered from both business and technology perspectives. Besides the value proposition analysis, there are many other challenges in the open and dynamic crossover scenarios. On the one hand, new target users in the crossover domains increase the difficulties of capturing their potential requirements or real intentions. On the other hand, service resources from various domains usually heterogeneous, complex and dynamical, which also brings difficulties to the design of crossover service (Wu et al., 2016). Faced with these obstacles, the challenging issues to be addressed in requirements analysis and design of crossover services are: how to describe the value proposition and business goals of stakeholders and how to provide service-based solutions for subsequent development stages.