International Journal of Systems and Service-Oriented Engineering, 1(4), 27-41, October-December 2010 27
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Keywords: Composition Methods, Organizational Networks, Service Composition, Socio-Technical
Systems, Web Services
INTrODUcTION
Organizations are more and more forced to
collaborate with each other (Chiu, Cheung, &
Zhuang, 2010), share information and reuse
system components to reduce cost. The creation
in organizational networks results in the cre-
ation of flows that are no longer self-contained
within a single organization. The performance
depends more and more on the performance
Demand-Driven Development
of Service compositions in
Organizational Networks
Ralph Feenstra, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Marijn Janssen, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Sietse Overbeek, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
AbSTrAcT
Organizational collaborate more and more in organizational networks to remain competitive. New systems
can be created by assembling a set of elementary services provided by various organizations. Several composi-
tion methods are available, yet these methods are not adopted in practice as they are primarily supply-driven
and cannot deal the complex characteristics of organizational networks. In this paper, the authors present
a service composition development method and a quasi-experiment to evaluate this method by comparing it
with existing ones. The development method is able to deal with incomplete information, to take the demand
as a starting point, to deal with news services that do not exist yet, to include and to evaluate non-functional
requirements, to show various stakeholder views, and to help to create a shared vision. Visualization and
evaluation of alternative compositions and negotiation about the desired results are important functions of
any composition method in organizational networks.
of external partners that are often unknown.
Whereas in the past each organization has
developed applications independently of other
organizations, the current development is to de-
velop components only once and reuse them as
services in the organizational network (Janssen
& Joha, 2008). This has resulted into the trend
of creating new systems as composites of web
services (Liang, Huang, & Chuang, 2007). Web
services technologies promise to create new
business applications by composing existing
services and to publish these applications as
DOI: 10.4018/jssoe.2010100103