Capability-as-a-Service: Towards Context Aware Business Services

Abstract

In industrial areas with a highly competitive environment all enterprise functions are expected to contribute to efficient operations and an economic cost structure. Serviceorientation and cloud computing offer approaches to achieve more efficiency in the use of computing resources and more flexibility with respect to outsourcing strategies. The systematic management of the capabilities of an enterprise, which often are reflected in the business services offered to customers and the technical services associated to them, is emerging into a key activity for achieving efficiency, which would require to move from business process or software as a service (BPaaS, SaaS) to capabilities as a service (CaaS). In order to facilitate capability management, we propose business service design explicitly considering delivery context by an approach that supports modeling both, the service as such and the application context. The main contributions of this paper are (1) an industrial case offering platform, software and business as a service and motivating another abstraction layer, (2) the concept of Capability-as-a-Service including methodical aspects and technology for delivery, and (3) an initial model for capabilities for the industrial case, i.e. a feasibility study.

Modeling Context with an Architecture Viewpoint

“…Applications are expected to run in constantly changing environments in terms of their technical, usage, and socio-economic characteristics [3], and need to address ethical, social, legal, security, and economic concerns [4]. However, software systems are conceptualized and modeled based on functional and non-functional requirements, while the external execution environment, dependencies, and context are unknown, taken for granted, or assumed to be or behave in a certain way, which can lead to unfounded assumptions [5] [6]. As a result, architectural decisions may not be suitable for the designed system and the actual context that it will operate in.…”

“…In spite of numerous studies on context, there is no generic or unifying definition of context. In pervasive computing it refers to the environment of the individual using the application [6][7], in software architecture to the environment of the system [5], and in requirements engineering also to socioeconomic aspects [3][6]. The goal of this work is to provide architects with what they need for their job.…”