An Approach to Develop Flexible Systems

with Organizational-interoperability Requirements

Diego Fuentealba, Kecheng Liu and Weizi Li

Informatics Research Centre, Henley Business School, University of Reading, RG6 6UD, Whiteknights, Reading, U.K.

1 INTRODUCTION

Flexibility of information systems (IS) have been

studied to improve the adaption in support of the

business agility as the set of capabilities to compete

more effectively and adapt to rapid changes in

market conditions (Glossary of business agility

terms, 2003). However, most of work on IS

flexibility has been limited to systems architecture,

ignoring the analysis of interoperability as a part of

flexibility from the requirements.

This paper reports a PhD project, which

proposes an approach to develop IS with flexibility

features, considering some challenges of flexibility

in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) such as the

lack of interoperability and the agility of their

business.

The motivation of this research are the high

prices of IS in developing countries and the

usefulness of organizational semiotics to support the

analysis of requirements for IS. (Liu, 2005).

2 STAGE OF THE RESEARCH

This paper reports the work of an initial state of a

PhD project, which is the discussion of definitions of

flexibility and interoperability of IS from literature

review.

Flexibility is studied from different point of

views such as flexibility in enterprise, information

systems and software development, analysing this

lacks and applications in the IS. The literature

review has revealed that flexibility of IS affect the

agility of enterprise, because both case have pursued

the capability to adapt to rapid changes.

Additionally, the agility of enterprise is affected by

the integration between internal and external process

of business, so the interoperability of IS is reviewed

to understand how it can affect the adaptability of

the IS

After a literature review, the next step of this

stage is the analysis of flexibility in software design,

IS and enterprise, using a semiotic framework

(Stamper, 1973) to identify the impacts of each

definition between the organization and the IS.

3 OUTLINE OF OBJECTIVES

The aim of this research is to develop an approach to

design flexible information systems to support the

business agility.

In order to achieve this aim, the objectives of this

research are:

1. To propose an assessment model, which

involves the identification of the key features

of a flexible system such as level of abstraction

of flexibility.

2. To propose an approach to analyze and model

business requirements for interoperable and

flexible IS.

3. To propose an approach to analyze and design

information systems with technical components

to achieve flexibility.

4. To evaluate the approach to develop IS based

on a case study to achieve the design of a

system with flexible features.

4 RESEARCH PROBLEM

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are the

majority in Latin America and Europe. They

represent more than 99% of enterprises and around

of 30% of GDP of them. (Economic Commission for

Latin America and the Caribbean , 2013; Kushnir, et

al., 2010).

SMEs of Latin America have showed some

difficulties in their IS to support the expansion and

globalization of their business. According to the

Economic Commission for Latin America and the

Caribbean (ECLAC) (2005) the obstacles related to

the IS are: weakness of information management;

lack access to information relating to markets,

regulation and technical norms; and the high costs

Fuentealba D., Liu K. and Li W..

An Approach to Develop Flexible Systems with Organizational-interoperability Requirements.

 2014 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

and slowness of trade-related procedures. According

the ECLAC, these difficulties are related with the

flexibility lack of Information systems to support the

customization of processes for:

 Achieving of cooperation among SMEs: The

integration of several SMEs can provide a

virtual cluster to offer product or services that

alone cannot satisfy the customers' demands.

For instance, the cooperation needed between

delivery services and retailer companies in

order to offer products and delivery service in

only one web page.

 Accomplishing of international regulations:

Although, SMEs have to follow local

regulations, each country has different norms

to sell the same products.

 Integrating with large companies: Several

SMEs are providers of large companies, and

the lack of integration with their processes can

be translated in a loss of business opportunities.

In Europe, the situation is not different. SMEs do

not have much money to spend in Information and

Communication Technology (ICT) and the low cost

pre-package software has limited the agility for

innovation or business alliances. They need ICT to

support their core business, easy to upgrade and at as

low cost as possible (European Commission, 2006).

The SMEs should ensure flexible production

environment to experiment new business models in

order to respond quickly to changing markets

conditions and improve the innovation support

(European Commission, 2007).

In sum up, the current challenges of flexibility

are:

 Improving of the customization of business

processes to accomplish the requirements of

partners, customers and regulations.

 Encouraging the integration among

enterprises to provide a product or service.

 Reducing of time to add new functionalities

or to update IS

 Improving the adoption of new technologies.

Although, the first problem is how to reach the

flexibility of an information system, there are not a

standard definition of its main features, then the first

questions is 1) How can it be designed a flexible IS?

The second question is related to the context of the

system 2) is it possible to achieve flexibility in

legacy systems?

Additionally, the evolution of a system as a part

of an organization should be defined, because the

reusability, extensibility and interoperability of a

system may help the flexibility for new

functionalities in order to support the organization.

This context illustrate new questions 3) How can it

be identified the interoperability in an information

system? 4) Is it possible to achieve interoperability

in legacy systems just adding new functionalities? 5)

How can it be achieve the reusability? 6) How can it

be achieve the extensibility? 7) Could the

extensibility and reusability improve the adaptability

of an information system? These questions should be

responded before proposing a new approach to

achieve these features.

Therefore, it is significant to define the main

features for an interoperable system, focusing in the

extension and reusability in order to achieve

evolvable characteristics to adapt the current system

to the organization and their future functionalities.

5 STATE OF THE ART

This research has been focused on the flexibility and

interoperability of information systems (IS), because

according with some authors presented in this study,

the agility of enterprises comprises the

interoperability between internal processes and the

environment of the organization. In the following,

overviews of these terms are presented to identify

their main features.

5.1 Flexibility in Information Systems

Flexibility in information system is “the ease with

which a system or component can be modified for

use in applications or environments other than those

for which it was specifically designed.” (Institute of

Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 1990).

Currently, this feature has been pursued for

enterprises, because the capability to change for less

time in a lower cost may bring a competitive

advantage. For instance, some authors emphasise

that IS should have the flexibility to integrate the

external information from stakeholders (suppliers,

co-operators and clients) with the inner processes, in

order to provide a competitive advantage and more

flexibility to the enterprises. (Qi and Luo, 2007;

Steven and Alevifard, 2013). Additionally, the

flexibility of IS can minimize the uncertainty from

the changing customer demand, because the

flexibility of IS could support the core processes of

the business and help to track in real time the variety

of products, warehouse space, transportation and

suppliers (Li and Qi, 2008).

The lack of a standard to identify and evaluate

flexibility of IS may be for its dependency from

external factors such as stakeholders, business

AnApproachtoDevelopFlexibleSystemswithOrganizational-interoperabilityRequirements

policies and new technologies. Scherrer-Rathje

(2012) summarizes the common dimensions of

flexibility in IS and proposes taxonomy based on

end-users studies. He defined as key factors the

system connectivity, process integration,

hierarchical integration, user customizability and

consistency. Although, this taxonomy is useful to

understand the several dimensions of flexibility, this

is focused on a theoretical cost and effort to add

more flexibility, but it does not explain how to

achieve these dimensions or calculate the real cost of

flexibility.

On the other hand, flexibility in information

systems can be explained in terms of the ability to

change at a minimum cost, where the cost and time

to provide a new IS functionality to the organization

is named the “penalty of change” (POC). This cost is

inversely proportional to the flexibility of an IS and

can be calculated as the probabilities sum of future

change demands (Furukawa and Minami, 2013).

However, the POC is subjective, because this forgets

other factors such as development and end-user

adaptability. For instance, if the end-user

adaptability is low, it will have a delay to adopt a

new functionality, even if the development team

have the enough flexibility to quickly create a new

functionality. Furukawa (2013) classified the risk to

change in IT adoption, service area, system

structure, fault tolerance and exchangeability,

because he states that planning in a long-term to

reduce the cost to design the system and improve of

skills and experience of the IT department, can

minimize the POC. However, there are not concrete

methods to achieve his strategies.

In the software engineering, the flexibility is

commonly seen as a result of other factors such as

standardization of architecture and software process

(Liu, et al., 2008). Certainly, standards may help the

flexibility, albeit the flexibility should be seen as a

part of the design from the beginning. For instance,

SOA possess standards and composition of services

that can support flexibility (Chen, et al., 2014), but

the lack of consideration of flexibility from the

analysis of requirement may imply a design of a

limited IS (Naab, 2011).

Agile methodologies have been using concepts

from agile manufacturing in the software and

hardware design to customize final products

(Kettunen, 2009). For example, the product-line

architecting can achieve the mass customization of

products with a common platform, which is used

through of development of new products or versions

(Díaz, et al., 2014). Although, agile methodology

pursues the flexibility to change at the minimum

effort possible its software components, it has based

on agile manufacturing of their products, forgetting

the identification of flexibility in the system and the

organization.

Finally, some works have faced flexibility due to

the complexity of the problem and the information

system. The flexibility of user interfaces has been

researched to divide the content between static and

the dynamic in order to change the user's interface,

without an intervention from a programmer

(Bonacin, et al., 2007). An extension of this works is

the management of user interactions as an array of

facts, which makes an action plan to change the

user’s interface after of analysing the norms and the

context identified (Fortuna, et al., 2010). Other

research to face flexibility is the solution proposed

by Li (2010), who analysed the flexibility in the

clinical pathway with a semiotic approach to identify

the context between the agents and their norms of

negotiation. Although, these cases face flexibility

by means of norm analysis, they do not identify

requirements of interoperability and flexibility from

the inception stage.

5.2 Interoperability in Information

Systems

The definition of interoperability and their features

are not clear, because there is confusion between

integration and interoperability. The interoperability

can be define as “the ability of two systems to

understand one another and to use functionalities of

one another”, and the integration as "the interaction

between enterprise entities necessary to achieve

domain objectives", then the components cannot be

separated (Chen, et al., 2008). In this context,

interoperability can be seen as self-independent

systems or components, which is integrated among

them. However, enterprise integration may be

interoperable, but it is not mandatory.

Currently, several frameworks have been

proposed for integration and interoperability of

information systems' architectures. However the

majority of works have been on business processes

or technical issues, failing to consider the

organizational dimension. For instance, the

framework for Level of Information System

Interoperability (LISI) proposed by the Department

of Defence of the United States (Architectures

Working Group, 1998) defines five levels of

interoperability, but its list of attributes to identify

each level covers just standards and procedures.

Other example is the ATHENA interoperability

framework (AIF), which considers three

IC3K2014-DoctoralConsortium

components: conceptual integration, application

integration and technical integration (Vernadat,

2010). Although, these components include

guidelines for interoperability issues, they partially

cover the organizational point of view.

On the other hand, some approaches have made

with organizational considerations. The European

Interoperability Framework (EIF) proposed 4 levels

of interoperability: technical, semantic,

organizational and legal. Such as the previous

framework, the first two levels are focused on the

problems to interchange information among systems

and how that this can be interpreted. Its top levels

propose the coordination among inter-organizations,

considering legal aspects to data exchange in the

definition of processes, synchronizations steps and

messages. Additionally, the European Commission

suggests the service orientations to design and

develop systems, due to their components are

modular and loosely coupled (European

Commission, 2010). However, the organizational

aspects of the EIF has been limited to formal

relationships among organizations and users,

neglected the informal aspects. This lack is seen in

the work of Allen (2013), who described the

informational problem in the emergency service

using activity theory. He concluded that the

interoperability problem is the analysis focused on

technological solutions, when the real problem is the

organizational constrain in the interchange of

information. For instance, in an emergency situation,

every organization should access the police

information in order to know if the emergency is in a

risk area.

New approaches have proposed the

interoperability from the organizational semiotic,

where the pragmatic level (associated with

intentions) should be identified, because this allows

the coordination of work across different people.

These interoperability requirements should be

articulated with their context such as stakeholder,

location, constraints and motivations (Liu, et al.,

2014). This work proposes two dimensions to

evaluate the interoperability in an organization by

means the observation of abstract processes, which

include 2 dimensions. The former dimension is

referring to the organizational onion (technical,

formal and informal) and the latter to the taxonomy

of behavioural norms (substantive, communication

and control).

6 METHODOLOGY

Currently, the research of software engineering has

focused in the creation of new methods or objects,

paying attention in artificial aspects instead of

natural aspects. Then the research philosophy should

consider an integrated perspective with the capacity

to understand the organization aspect.

Constructivism philosophy is useful to understand

the subjectivism of organization without define a

rigid structure of methods to research it (Lazaro and

Marcos, 2005).

In order to define the flexibility, it is needed a

theoretical understanding to identify their main

characteristics and predict some particular cases

(Hevner, et al., 2004). The next step is the

identification of requirements, where the flexibility

and interoperability are part of the requirement

analysis. Consequently, it will propose an approach

to analyse and design the requirements with software

development methodologies. Finally, the results will

be evaluated with a case study.

6.1 Organizational Semiotic

In spite of exists several definitions about flexibility,

their meaning is related to the agility of processes in

the enterprise, forgetting to analyse the signs of

flexibility in the organization in order to understand

the current functionality and its potential extensions.

Semiotic can provide the theoretical foundation to

examine the nature and properties of all kinds of

signs and how they are part of the social life (Morris,

1946).

Organizational semiotic is one branch of

semiotic, which observes how the organizational

behaviour can be affected by the communication of

signs and their interpretation. Stamper (1973)

proposes a semiotic framework to study

organizations, which deal with the structures,

meanings and usage of signs. The levels of the

semiotic framework from the lower to the upper

level are: physical world, empirics, syntactics,

semantics, pragmatics and social world. This

framework is useful to understand the differences of

the social consequences of signs, their structure and

how they are transmitted. In the analysis of

flexibility is significant to realize the level of

flexibility in an Information System, because the

formal requirement of an organization may be

different of the real flexibility. For instance, it is

important the understanding of the level of

flexibility of an organization before proposing a

design of a system, because some rigid organizations

AnApproachtoDevelopFlexibleSystemswithOrganizational-interoperabilityRequirements

such as government organizations has policies that

can affect the flexibility of their process and the IS.

The concretes applications of this organizational

semiotic to the Information Field can be seen in the

Methods for Eliciting, Analysing and Specifying

Users’ Requirement (MEASURE) (Liu, 2000), and

the Analysing and Modelling Behaviour of Legacy

System (AMBOLS) for requirement recovery (Liu,

2005), which propose methods such as the Semantic

Analysis Method (SEM) and Norm Analysis Method

(NAM) to develop information systems. These

methods are significant to analyse and design

information system in the requirement stage,

because they can address the identification of

organizational aspects. For instance, SEM is useful

to analyse the agents of the organization and their

possibilities of interaction with the environment and

the system. The figure 1 illustrates an overview of

these methods (left) in each stag (right) of this

research

Figure 1: Methods (left) and stages (right) of this research.

6.2 Assessment Model for Flexible

Systems

Flexibility for information system is a characteristic,

which can be seen from different point of view. For

instance, from a technical perspective, there are

several patterns such as singleton or factory, to

design information system with an extensible and

flexibility features. For that reason, the flexibility

should be defined in different levels to identify the

level of flexibility needed. The semiotic framework

is useful to analyse and describe every definition of

flexibility.

This stage is a descriptive study based on

literature review, considering the interpretation of

flexibility in each part of the framework, in order to

define a guideline to identify flexibility in

organizations and information systems.

6.3 Requirement Analysis for

Flexibility and Interoperability

The second stage is based on AMBOLS (Liu, 2005),

because its three stages (Behaviour Capture,

Dynamic Behaviour Modelling and Requirements

Derivation) are useful to understand the pattern

behaviour of organization and their dynamic

conditions. However, this technique is focused on

legacy systems and their impact in new

functionalities, forgetting the formal analysis of

flexibility, new systems and new technologies. On

the other hand, although AMBOLS consider the

study of IT environment and the interaction between

human and machine, this does not describe the

interoperability of the organizations and their

possible expansions. For that reason, the semiotic

framework of interoperability may help to analyse

this kinds of requirements (Li, et al., 2013), because

this holistic point of view considers the

interoperability in each level of the semiotic

framework. For instance, According to Li (op. cit.),

the analysis of the interoperability from the syntactic

level can identify the non-functional requirement to

propose standard data to interchange the information

in different platforms such as JAVA and .NET.

6.4 Approach to Analyse and Design

Systems with Flexibility

This research considers techniques to analyse and

design system, including flexibility to modify the

business for future changes and new functionalities.

One example is the capability of the Service

Oriented Architecture (SOA) to support the

flexibility and interoperable requirements, because

its main features are (Hirschheim, et al., 2010):

 The functionality exposed (services) is fully

encapsulated, with well-defined rules.

IC3K2014-DoctoralConsortium

 Each service is adhered to a set of standards to

allow interoperability.

 This architecture considers a service registry

with definitions and connection points, in order

to improve a transparent discovery of service

and re-direction.

 The specification and invocations of services

are expressed with a protocol based on XML.

The encapsulation of functionality of each

service may help the flexibility of the system,

because it is possible an orchestration or

composition of service, in order to change or reuse

the functionality of the system. Additionally, the

standards may help to achieve the interoperability of

the current system or legacy systems by means of

their encapsulation of service.

New steps of process to achieve the flexibility of

systems from the analysis and designed should be

proposed in order to achieve it, where the semantic

and norm analysis worked in the previous stage is

crucial. The semantic analysis is useful to analyse

and design the static view of the system and the

norms for the dynamic part. An example of this can

be seen in the research of Bonacin (2004), where he

proposed a heuristic approach to translate an

ontology chart (part of the semantic analysis) into a

class diagram. On the other hand, steps to analysed

and design services such as the proposed by Erl are

considered to compose service in different layers

(Erl, 2005).

6.5 Validation

The result of this research can be evaluated by

means of qualitative information using a case study,

identifying the requirement for legacy or new

systems. Although, an enterprise with agile business

is desirable, it is not mandatory to work with this

methodology to identify requirements.

7 EXPECTED OUTCOMES

The expected outcome of this research is to provide

an approach to design information systems with

features of flexibility and interoperability in order to

support the business agility, decreasing the time and

cost for future developments or maintenance of their

components. The expected partial outcomes are the

following:

 Assessment model of flexibility: Theoretical

model to identify kinds of flexibility in an

information system.

 An approach to analyse and model business

requirement: structured method to identify

requirements, considering the organizational

interoperability and flexibility.

 An approach to analyse and model information

system: Steps and models to design

information systems with features of flexibility

and interoperability.



ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

D. F. acknowledges partial support from CONICYT

(BCH72130542/2012) in this work.

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