Modeling business capabilities and context dependent delivery by cloud services

Abstract

Contemporary business environments are changing rapidly, organizations are global, and cloud-based services have become a norm. Enterprises operating in these conditions need to have the capability to deliver their business in a variety of business contexts. Capability delivery thus has to be monitored and adjusted. Current Enterprise Modeling approaches do not address context-dependent capability design and do not explicitly support runtime adjustments. To address this challenge, a capability-driven approach is proposed to model business capabilities by using EM techniques, and to use model-based patterns to describe how software applications can adhere to changes in the execution context. A meta-model for capability design and delivery is presented with the consideration to delivering solutions as cloud services. The proposal is illustrated with an example case from an energy efficiency project. A supporting architecture for the capability development and the delivery in the cloud is also presented. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.