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

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 WS and the accompanying opportunities and threats. Without an appropriate business alignment, WS might be perceived as a purely technical solution not delivering significant business benefits. This constitutes a potential risk factor in the light of recent views on IT benefits and current IT spending practice and could eventually hamper a wide adoption. The complete thesis tries to mitigate this issue. It gives a concise description of the underlying ideas and constituting elements of WS and also describes their relationship to other IT concepts. The expected impact and benefits of WS applications are outlined and the stumbling blocks and risks associated with WS are described. Comprehensive classification schemes are proposed for both the benefits and issues. Predicted future WS adoption stages and their characteristics are outlined. The actual state of WS adoption is also determined and described by presenting recent survey results and the outcome of an own WS review. WS implementations are described and categorised according to identified major business drivers for WS application. Based on this comprehensive characterisation of WS, the focus of the thesis is then put on developing a methodology for the assessment of WS through Business Process Modelling (BPM). A structured framework is proposed for selecting the most appropriate processes for WS applications. Following this, information domains and types are identified that need to be contained in a Business Process Model to support systematic WS assessments and facilitate WS deployment. This critical information is then mapped to its representation in a Business Process Model with appropriate BPM techniques offered by the ARIS Toolset, a widely used toolset for BPM. The conceptual 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 allows executives and analysts to systematically identify WS opportunities and IT vendors to position their solutions. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the discovered limited functionality of the modelling toolset and provides an outlook for further research in the area of using BPM to support Web Service applications for improving business processes.