Towards an Agile E-Commerce Daniela Wolff, Marc Schaaf, Stella Gatziu Grivas School of Business, Institute of Business Information Technology University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland Olten, Switzerland {daniela.wolff, marc.schaaf, stella.gatziugrivas}@fhnw.ch Abstract—Creating an agile e-commerce is still a challenging issue. The alignment between business and IT plays a key role as changing business demands must be implemented immediately. To avoid misunderstandings and to lead to a better business-IT alignment we provide an ontology model, describing enterprise objects and their relations. As business rules guide or influence business behaviour, we use business rules which can be easily created and changed by business people. A system works directly with the ontology and the business rules. So, if changes occur, the business can express their changes and the IT system can react accordingly. As it easier for business people to express their knowledge and needs in a semi-formal way, we present a 3-phase procedure which helps to transform the semi-formal expressed knowledge into the formal representation needed for IT systems. Keywords-context-awareness; rule based; complex event pro- cessing. I. I NTRODUCTION Continuously changing challenges, like shorter product cy- cles, increasing customer expectations, changing regulations, forces today’s enterprises to be more agile [1][20]. Henbury regards agile enterprises as capable of rapid adaptations in response to unexpected and unpredicted changes and events, market opportunities and customer requirements [14]. As e- commerce becomes the preferred way of doing business [10], an enterprise must be able to adapt its e-commerce immedi- ately when changes occur. The adaptation of the e-commerce requires the 1) definition of the business model, i.e., knowledge about users, products and business rules 2) dynamic adaption of the business model according to happenings in the environment (events). The dynamic adaptation of this business model leads to the adaption of the Information Technology (IT) to match new business strategies, goals and needs, the so-called business-IT alignment. 3) personalization, for example the analysis of the user behavior. While the user is navigating through the web site his clickstream is observed and according to his interest and behaviour the web pages are personalized [3]. For the definition of the business model, a common approach is the use of adaptive hypermedia and adaptive Web systems. Adaptive software systems are based on a business model representing user knowledge, goals, interests and other features to distinguish among different users. The challenge for the adaption of the business model is the use of different languages by different actors in the alignment process. For instance, IT managers can read and understand UML but such languages may not provide adequate information for business people [15]. As ontologies promote a common understanding among people [19], we present an ontology describing business ob- jects and rules. This ontology is used as the knowledge base for the e-commerce and web site adaptation. If changes occur, the business user can express his changes in the ontology and the system uses the updated knowledge base. This approach supports enterprises, especially e-commerce, to be more agile and to be able to react to changing environments immediately. This paper is structured as follows. First, we introduce a simplified scenario, which is used in this paper to show our approach. Then we describe the knowledge base. As business users can express their needs better in a semi-formal way we propose a method which enables users to express their needs using a structured template which can easily transformed into the formal representation. Finally, we show the benefit of the model-based approach for the business-IT alignment. II. SCENARIO To explain our approach, we use a simplified scenario of a book store. The book store provides information about books, authors, and search functionality. A customer can register himself and can enter further information. The store distinguishes between the four browsing strategies proposed by [18]: direct buying, search/deliberation, Hedonic browsing and knowledge building. A visitor using the direct buying strategy has a specific product in mind which he wants to buy. His browsing pattern is therefore very focused and targeted. Visitors using the search and deliberation strategy are also focused with a future purchase in mind. Their objective is to acquire relevant information to help make a better choice. The hedonic browsing is dominated by exploratory search behaviour and therefore more sessions are spent viewing the broader product category level pages than product information. The visitor using the knowledge building strategy is acquiring relevant product information potentially useful in the future. They tend to focus more on information pages. The strategy of the book store could for example be to help the users following the direct buying strategy by the providing of relevant information related to the content they have already visited. For instance, if a user searches for a 5 Copyright (c) IARIA, 2012. ISBN: 978-1-61208-240-0 SEMAPRO 2012 : The Sixth International Conference on Advances in Semantic Processing