Distributed ledger technology, a method of storing and maintaining the integrity of multiple copies of critical data using a massively redundant network of participating machines, has found a “killer application” in blockchain, a type of distributed ledger. A blockchain consists of sequential blocks that may never be modified or reordered, leaving a public, auditable record that is consistent and highly resistant to tampering and deletion. These qualities make blockchain eminently suitable for its most common use, cryptocurrency, and its occasional variants in the form of cryptocurrency tokens, used to represent ownership or some other right to virtual or physical goods and capabilities. Blockchain also enables smart contracts, discrete bodies of software written to serve both as the memorial and the means of execution of an agreement between parties. Smart contracts can have all the elements of a traditional contract, and as jurisdictions legislate or jurists rule on the fine points of enforceability and the acceptability of smart contracts as traditional contracts, applications in nearly every area of commerce have emerged. Digital lawyers may not need to become software developers, but deepening their understanding of the capabilities and limitations of the technology, developing a keen awareness of the issues at the intersection between code and the law, as well as the law’s readiness in this area, will be of great advantage to them and their clients in this rapidly evolving area at the intersection of technology, commerce and law.
Luciano García‐Bañuelos, Alexander Ponomarev, Marlon Dumas, Ingo Weber
Blockchain technology enables the execution of collaborative business processes involving untrusted parties without requiring a central authority. Specifically, a process model comprising tasks performed by multiple parties can be coordinated via smart contracts operating on the blockchain. The consensus mechanism governing the blockchain thereby guarantees that the process model is followed by each party. However, the cost required for blockchain use is highly dependent on the volume of data recorded and the frequency of data updates by smart contracts. This paper proposes an optimized method for executing business processes on top of commodity blockchain technology. The paper presents a method for compiling a process model into a smart contract that encodes the preconditions for executing each task in the process using a space-optimized data structure. The method is empirically compared to a previously proposed baseline by replaying execution logs, including one from a real-life business process, and measuring resource consumption.
Large-scale organizations, such as Siemens, develop a broad field of products for varying domains. Software constitutes a major innovation and cost factor to their development. Organizational-wide reuse of software across products, even across domains, gives these organizations a competitive advantage. This involves large-scale reuse approaches where software is developed in a decentralized manner by several internal, yet self-contained organizational units -- those units are separate profit centers with own business objectives, organizationally independent with own product management, and have widely autonomous processes and software-engineering life cycles. I define those systems as internal software ecosystems. The intra-organizational, yet decentralized development context increases the amount and complexity of dependencies among both software assets and the responsible organizational units. This significantly impacts collaboration in software engineering. Traditional process-centric coordination mechanisms become increasingly inefficient, calling for a suitable software architecture to enable effective collaboration. However, in order to make informed architecture decisions, applied modes of collaboration and resulting architecture challenges must be understood. As first major contribution in this thesis, I provide strong empirical evidence on collaboration and resulting architecture challenges for two of the largest internal software ecosystems at Siemens -- based on a total of 46 hours of semi-structured interviews with 17 leading software architects from all involved organizational units. I identify three collaboration models on a continuum that ranges from high to low coupling and a classification of architecture challenges together with a qualitative and quantitative exposure of the identified recurring hurdles. My results outline a broad field of real-world challenges that need to be investigated by researchers, and my results support practitioners who follow the collaboration models to make informed architecture decisions based on empirical evidence. Besides taking informed architecture decisions, it is equally important to manage and control adherence to the specified architecture at an ecosystem-wide level. However, feature and schedule pressure regularly require to accept architecture violations by several organizational units, which decreases quality and increases maintenance costs. As main finding of my investigation on collaboration and architecture challenges, I identify the explicit and systematic management of architecture violations as the key challenge for internal software ecosystems, in particular the lack of developer support for resolving violations. As second major contribution within this thesis, I elaborate the TrAViM approach, a framework that comprises seven violation-management capabilities for internal software ecosystems. Their main purpose is developer support for resolving architecture violations, aiming to reduce the developers' effort required to handle them. I develop a prototype that instantiates the approach. Using the prototype, I conduct an in-depth case study on the capabilities' usefulness, involving 9 experts from my study systems. All of them expressed that the capabilities are highly valuable and hold great potential to ease violation management for large-scale software engineering.
Enterprise systems play a central role in the business processes and management of data within an organization. However it is not uncommon for organizations to posses a multitude of autonomous systems. This thesis examines the way organizations can integrate financial data from different autonomous source systems and examines different factors that can have an impact on data integration processes. The empirical findings were gathered through a case study at Sandvik, a large Swedish industrial firm, making use of qualitative research techniques. The findings contribute to create an in-depth understanding of financial data integration processes. The empirical findings show how an organization can accomplish financial data integration without tight coupling of autonomous systems. Moreover the research contributes by describing various organization and technological factors that impact data integration. The findings indicate that a decentralized organizational structure and singular system architecture play an important role in financial data integration processes. Hereby the research helps to further explore the topic integration within enterprise system research and provides context behind the organizational and technological factors that influence financial data integration processes.
Meaningfully automating sociotechnical business collaboration promises efficiency-, effectiveness-, and quality increases for realizing next-generation decentralized autonomous organizations. For automating business-process aware cross-organizational operations, the development of existing choreography languages is technology driven and focuses less on sociotechnical suitability and expressiveness concepts and properties that recognize the interaction between people in organizations and technology in workplaces. This gap our suitability- and expressiveness exploration fills by means of a cross-organizational collaboration ontology that we map as a proof-of-concept evaluation to the eSourcing Markup Language (eSML). The latter we test in a feasibility case study to meaningfully support the automation of business collaboration. The developed eSourcing ontology and eSML is replicable for exploring strengths and weaknesses of other choreography languages.
This study was about the civil service leadership role to implement civil service reform in Tigray Region. In Ethiopia, civil service leaders are required to contribute towards the development of public sectors. To this regard, the district level decentralization in Ethiopia let civil service leaders to provide high quality public services and to ensure freedom of choice and customer participation since early 1991.The 1990s was the period of change in government from Central Planning to Federal system. It was during this time that the government has tried to restructure the civil service system as a structural adjustment with federal outlook. Not only theoretically but also in practical discipline, civil service leaders have the responsibility to implement effectively government policies and strategies. It was with this intention that, the autonomous Ethiopia civil service institutions in general and that of Tigray region’s in particular were established and the civil service leaders were begun to operate independently the civil service organizations. It is believed that, a successful leadership is the cornerstone of government institutions to implement public policy which intern can have a direct impact on the development performance of a nation. However, some empirical evidence indicates that, the civil service leadership approach is inhibited by many administrative bureaucracies. Therefore, the objective of this journal article was to examine leadership role in implementing civil service reform in Ethiopia: the case of Tigray regional state. To examine the leadership role, the relevant data was collected both from primary and secondary data sources. Finally, the factors that impede the role of leadership to implement the civil service reform were identified and the discussion was concluded that regardless of the institutional framework in-place, the civil service leaders were ineffective and were not played their role effectively as a result of the inadequate appointment of civil service officials and process owners.
Torsten O. Paulussen, Armin Heinzl, Christian Becker
The health sector is a central domain in every economy. It is challenged by progressing costs and funding issues. Hospitals play a major role for the examination and treatment of patients. The sequence how patients are assigned to hospital units determines the quality of treatment, the resource utilization, as well as the patients’ overall treatment time. Thus, efficient scheduling of patients in hospitals is crucial. Current approaches disregard the decentral organization in hospitals and neglect the varying pathway of patients since they often focus on one single unit solely. We propose an agent-based coordination mechanism that overcomes these limitations. Patients and hospital resources are modeled as autonomous software agents which follow their own objectives. This reflects the decentralized structure in hospitals. Agents are coordinated by a distributed mechanism where software agents improve their situation through negotiations which moves towards an overall pareto-optimum. We show promising evaluations based on experiments.
A new approach of coordination of decisions in a multi site system is proposed. It is based this approach on a multi-agent concept and on the principle of distributed network of enterprises. For this purpose, each enterprise is defined as autonomous and performs simultaneously at the local and global levels. The basic component of our approach is a so-called Virtual Enterprise Node (VEN), where the enterprise network is represented as a set of tiers (like in a product breakdown structure). Within the network, each partner constitutes a VEN, which is in contact with several customers and suppliers. Exchanges between the VENs ensure the autonomy of decision, and guarantiee the consistency of information and material flows. Only two complementary VEN agents are necessary: one for external interactions, the Negotiator Agent (NA) and one for the planning of internal decisions, the Planner Agent (PA). If supply problems occur in the network, two other agents are defined: the Tier Negotiator Agent (TNA) working at the tier level only and the Supply Chain Mediator Agent (SCMA) working at the level of the enterprise network. These two agents are only active when the perturbation occurs. Otherwise, the VENs process the flow of information alone. With this new approach, managing enterprise network becomes much more transparent and looks like managing a simple enterprise in the network. The use of a Multi-Agent System (MAS) allows physical distribution of the decisional system, and procures a heterarchical organization structure with a decentralized control that guaranties the autonomy of each entity and the flexibility of the network.
Franco Guidi-Polanco, Claudio Cubillos, Giuseppe Menga
This work presents our agent-based architecture for the development of Global Automation Systems. These systems consist of software applications that manage all the processes in a network of enterprises, in distributed, decentralized and autonomous way. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This paper describes a new approach to design modern information systems that offer an integrated access to the data and knowledge that is available in local applications. By integrating the local data management activities into one transparent information distribution process, modern organizations can offer better support for its workers in the execution and coordination of their work activities. Observing practical applications of decentralized, autonomous and heterogeneous information systems we see deficiencies in currently available approaches to model such information systems. They do not acknowledge the pivotal role that (informal) communicating workers play in the context of an entire organization. The interaction between the members of social and informal groups of employees makes it possible that (in many of today’s information-intensive enterprises) the local structured procedures can be effectively and flexibly integrated into global work processes supporting the business goals. Traditional design techniques concentrate on either the structured local procedures (and its local database applications), the structured global process (and its global business goals), or the informal (less structured) communication between individuals. We suggest to combine an activity-based model (suited to describe the structured parts of the processes) with a goal- or conversation-based model to tie the different elements together. Using an agent architecture we show that it is possible to implement this integrated approach. The different types of cooperating agents support the individual workers by assessing the goal of the activity, the applicability of the standard procedure, and the availability of alternative knowledge and information in order to supply the necessary information.