5. X-mas 2010 edition, version 0.9
Contributors
Ben van Lier (Centric software, Board IIP/psw)
Bas Linders (Software~VOC@ICT~Office, Board IIP/psw)
Eric van Pelt (Agentschapnl, Board IIP/psw)
Arco van Nieuwland (Yuki software, formerly Exact , Board IIP/psw)
Boudewijn van Dongen (TU/Eindhoven, Board IIP/psw)
Erik Jaspers (Planon software, Board IIP/psw)
Hans van Vliet (VU, Board IIP/psw)
Wil van der Aalst (TU/Eindhoven, Board IIP/psw)
Sjaak Brinkkemper (U/Utrecht, Platformchair IIP/productsoftware)
Michiel Kuijper (U/Utrecht, Platformmanager IIP/productsoftware, ed.)
Arnoud Verdwaald (Consultant Management & Organisation)
Bert van Werkhoven (Agentschapnl)
Dirk Groten (Layar software)
Erik Jansen (TU/Delft)
Frits Grotenhuis (IIP/Create, IIP/Brain&Cognition)
Geert-Jan Houben (TU/Delft)
Hans Wortmann (U/Groningen, IIP/Saas)
Henk van der Schuur (U/Utrecht)
Inge van de Weerd (U/Utrecht)
Jaap de Rijk (GX software)
Jaap Kabbedijk (U/Utrecht)
Johan Versendaal (U/Utrecht)
Jos van Hillegersberg (TU/Twente)
Jurriaan Souer (GX software)
Jurrian Meeter (Ministerie van Economie, Landbouw en Innovatie)
Kevin Vlaanderen (U/Utrecht)
Laurens van der Tang (Vitalhealt software)
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Leen Blom (Centric software)
Marcel van de Sandt (Exact software)
Marco Spruit (U/Utrecht)
Mark van den Brand (TU/Eindhoven)
Marko van Eekelen (RU/Nijmegen)
Marijn Plomp (U/Utrecht)
Martijn van Berkum (GX software)
Martijn Kriens (iCrowds, IIP/Saas)
Naser Bakhshi (U/Utrecht)
Patricia Lago (VU)
Paul Klint (CWI)
Ramon Rentmeester (Agentschapnl)
Remco Veltkamp (U/Utrecht)
Remko Helms (U/Utrecht)
Rik Bos (U/Utrecht)
Rogier van de Wetering (U/Utrecht)
Ronald Dähne (Exact software)
Ronald Wanink (Backbase software)
Sandor Spruit (U/Utrecht)
Sandra Verdonk (U/Utrecht)
Slinger Jansen (U/Utrecht)
Toine Hurkmans (Exact software)
Willem Bekkers (Centric software, U/Utrecht)
Willem-Jan van den Heuvel (U/Tilburg)
7. X-mas 2010 edition, version 0.9
Our dream
The productsoftware sector is the ICT engineroom that drives the Dutch
innovation-axis. In our research quest for the next service delivery
infrastructure we aspire to capitalise on our capability as a distribution
country. The Dutch are well-poised to become an important node in the
global networkeconomy. Succesful examples are Greenport, Capital of
Peace, Brainport, Schiphol airport, Rotterdam Harbour, AMS Internet
Exchange1.
As an inspiration we take our forefathers from the sixteenth century.
For instance, the clothmakers guild, so brilliantly depicted by
Rembrandt van Rijn in 1662, by certifying products with a quality
stamp, had a great impact on lowering transaction costs in cloth
trading2. The quality stamp cut short onerous negotiations between
individual sellers and buyers
by creating a trusted hub. By
doing so they became one of
the first accelerators in
interoperability.
In the wake of this image we
envision in 2020 a Dutch hub
for the digital services market
that will cut short onerous negotiations between buyers and sellers of
digital services, quality checked by Dutch software design architects
based on worldclass productsoftware research, known as softportNL.
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Contributors
Our dream
Introduction
Management Summary
Strategic Research Agenda
Netcentric processing
01. Research topic: Refactoring in Reuse
02. Research topic: Functional concepts in Customisation
03. Research topic: Variability
04. Research topic: Multi-tenancy
05. Research topic: Software Operations
06. Research topic: Evolution & Legacy
07. Research topic: Orchestration in Functionality
08. Research topic: Loose Coupling
User-centric complexity reduction
09. Research topic: Close Interfaces as Rational Route/Complexity
10. Research topic: Identity Management in Privacy
11. Research topic: Recommendation technology as Social R/Complex
12. Research topic: Certification in Security
13. Research topic: Data mining for Recommendations
14. Research topic: Process mining for Usability
15. Research topic: Product Virtualisation
16. Research topic: Service Productivation
Generic
17. Research topic: Quality Control in Interoperability
18. Research topic: Software Product Management
19. Research topic : Software Ecosystems
Programme
Organisational Stucture
Roadmap
Affiliated Networks
Resourcing
Impact
Mission
Vision
Strategy
SoftportNL as Optimising Software Potential Strategy Route
Rationale: Productsoftware Research as Design Science Research
User-centric framework
Netcentric framework
References
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VII
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Introduction
This is the Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) of the ICT
Innovationplatform Productsoftware (IIP/psw). Productsoftware is the
deliverable of reuse-based software engineering. Productsoftware is
designed for a market, but runs for a specific customer. The ICT
Innovationplatform Productsoftware is one of 15 ICT
Innovationplatforms acknowledged by ICTRegie, the government
incubator of the Dutch ICT ecosystem. The purpose of the IIP/psw is to
facilitate the knowledge flow between productsoftware researchers,
productsoftware practitioners and productsoftware policymakers in
order to address socio-economical challenges and boost socio-
economical thrusts.
The purpose of the IIP/psw SRA is to provide a focused and shared
conceptual foundation for the discussions about the relationship
between productsoftware policymaking, productsoftware research and
productsoftware business. The contents of the SRA consists of the
loosely coupled results of the interviews and meetings involving more
than 50 researchers, practitioners and policy makers conducted in the
latter half of 2010. The contributors are listed in the beginning of this
document.
The results are described in four consecutive parts: 1) the IIP/psw
Research Agenda, a listing of research topics informed by the coherence
of an IIP/psw framework, 2) the IIP/psw Programme describing our
organisational structure, roadmap, affiliated networks and resourcing
opportunities to achieve our vision, 3) the IIP/psw Impact describing
our mission, vision, and strategy and 4) the IIP/psw Rationale where we
justify the IIP/psw framework as a hinge between Utility and
Knowledge. The first two parts are action-oriented parts, the latter two
provide due diligence.
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Management Summary
Many societal information networks float on productsoftware. These
networks are facing big challenges today in all corners of society: how
do we manage mobility, health, safety, education, public services &
sustainability. Users of these networks are dealing with tremendous
data, systems and organisational complexity. The productsoftware
sector can aid and benefit in two ways. Firstly, by preventing further
fragmentation by looking at informationflow across the entire network
instead of looking at each participating partner in isolation. Secondly,
by facilitating integration by organising the software ecosystem that
supports the societal information network. Therefore we are embarking
on a journey of software ecosystem and information network alignment.
Our mission is to simplify user access to societal and economic products
by loosely coupling user-owned data, customer-owned functions and
vendor-owned processing.
To understand the nature of loose coupling we need to investigate what
netcentric processing entails. So far we know that interoperability
between systems, data and organisations is key, but what exactly
influences interoperability and how can we manage it according to
quality terms? To start our investigations we have identified 19
research topics, 8 of which deal with netcentric processing and 8 of
which deal with complexity reduction. The remaining three deal with
quality of service under interoperability, the netcentric software
ecosystem and federated software productmanagement. The latter is
our flagbearing topic. We have a fair understanding what software
productmanagement means in a single organisation, but the linking pin
between netcentric software processing and netcentric organising is
federated software productmanagement. Our vision therefore is to
create a worldclass software productmanagement capability that
enables software businesses to collectively align software ecosystems
with societal information networks.
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To focus our vision we have dreamed up an organisational concept,
softportNL, which will be the sedimentation and inspiration of the
research projects that we will undertake. We hope that reflective
practitioners in software productmanagement will feed on and off this
hub to collectively manage quality in the software infrastructure of
societal information networks. Our strategy is to accrue competence
and capability to this hub by executing nationally and european funded
projects.
To position our research we have defined productsoftware research as
design research. Design research is an emerging science that focuses
on the relationship between acting and artifact. It therefore provides a
hinge between the behavioral and natural sciences. Our second order
mission is to articulate and show the value of design research, and by
doing so enabling it to earn it’s place on scientific policy agendas.
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Strategic Research Agenda
Productsoftware is the deliverable of reuse-based software engineering.
Productsoftware is designed for a market, but runs for a specific
customer3. The current productsoftware landscape is characterised by
five challenges.
The Technical Trend is a shift from designtime to runtime4 in software
engineering. This entails that increasingly more logical modularisation
and layering is injected in productsoftware that enables stalling
commitment to domain decisions to enable creativity for the domain-
intimate user. This also allows for interoperability with productsoftware
from partnering productsoftware-vendors. The current Technical
Challenge is to define the reusable patterns in this pluriform
interaction in order to make them maneagable as a product.
The Informational Trend is an increased medium complexity in user-
value interaction. We define value for the user in terms of Maslov5,
being either a commercial or societal product or service, or access to
informational or social networks. More and more ICT solutions become
available to aid the user in foraging for value6, but the combined effect
of these create a staggering amount of Data & Systems complexity7. The
current Informational Challenge is to simplify medium complexity by
learning from the digital traces users leave behind in their
workarounds.
The Organisational Trend is an increasingly netcentric way of working8
amongst productsoftware-vendors themselves in software ecosystems ,
but also together with software-intensive customers in societal
information networks trying to adopt a user-centric stance. The current
Organisational Challenge is to create Coordination schemes that
loosely couple User-owned Data, Customer-owned Functions and
Vendor-owned processing.
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The visual below illustrates these challenges. As a system these three
challenges their interplay
create tensions around the
question what to focus on.
These three challenges are
used as dimensions in two
frameworks that are used to
understand research
requirements in a coherent
fashion. One framework (Blue-
Green) describes the research requirements from a Utility perspective
defining the impact of the organisational challenge, working in
ecosystems, on the informational challenge, complexity reduction in
user-value interaction. The other framework (Blue-Red) describes the
research requirements from a Knowledge perspective defining the
impact of the organisational challenge, working in ecosystems, on the
technical challenge, the shift from designtime to runtime introducing
Productsoftware
Research
tensions
Productsoftware
Research
Frameworks
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coordinationtime.
The frameworks introduce several layers of analysis through which the
implications of changes in the productsoftware landscape can be
understood. The inner three layers define our scope of control. This is
where we do Research, Development, Innovation and Professiona-
lisation. The outer two layers define our scope of influence. This is our
impact.
The justification of the frameworks is given in the Rationale section. For
now we will postulate the research requirements as they are shown in
the blue boxes of the frameworks in order to provide a comprehensive
list of research topics. The framework structure aids in understanding
the dependencies between adjacent research areas.
In the following sections we will describe 18 - 1 = 17 research topics
concerning Methods, Protocols, Standards & Languages in Software
Engineering with Interoperability as pivotal concept and 2 research
topics concerning Software Product Management and Software
Ecosystems. This is what we define as our Research Scope of Control
addressing the Technical, Informational and Organisational Challenges
mentioned before.
Before we do this we want to bring your attention to our Scope of
Impact, the red and green rings in the productsoftware framework.
These refer to the Economical and Policy Challenges.
The Economical Challenge for productsoftware-vendors is the shift
from an Economy of Scale to an Economy of Scope. Reuse is the
hallmark of an Economy of Scale. The increased connectivity ICT brings
to economy and society makes it possible to scope markets in a much
more granular way than before. The trend in fact is not so much a shift
between Scale and Scope, but an ever more interweaving of Scale and
Scope. This is visible in the rise of Social Media-based commerce that
runs on reuse-based software but use progressive profiling9 as means
for complexity reduction for the user (recommendation technology)
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and creating a shared information image for the software-intensive
societal information network.
The interwoven character of a virtual software product assembled from
functionality owned by different productsoftware-vendors in a software
ecosystem also triggers a shift from Property-based revenue to Usage-
based revenue10. This we refer to as the Policy Challenge. It is not only
a Business Policy challenge but also a Governmental Policy challenge,
because it changes the dynamics of Research, Development, Innovation,
Productivity, Education and Employment. The Policy Challenge is to
stage the transition in Business models, not so much by decreeing
terms on the product but by creating a level playing field for “Tragedy of
the Commons11”-like problems, where first-mover costs are unlikely to
return directly to its investor, but rather return in the collective value
that benefits the informational infrastructure by which users invest in
and benefit from societal challenges and thrusts.
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Research topic: Refactoring in Reuse
Productsoftware is the deliverable
of reuse-based software
engineering. It is design for a
market, but runs for a customer.
A productsoftware-vendor
capitalises on an economy of scale.
By reusing functionality common
for a market into the productbase
he is able to sell developments
investments multiple times12.
The challenge here is to find the
right levels of granularity and
abstraction that strike a balance between component reuse and
variability requirements.
The market demand of netcentrism invites the productsoftware-vendor
to refactor his products into components to facilite loose couplings with
components and platforms of other productsoftware-vendors.
Research is necessary, for
example, to support and automate
the extraction of architectural
assumptions13. See also Servicify
box14.
Refac-‐
toring
Servicifi is a JACQUARD project
that aims to extract a large
numbers of services from
monolithic products and open
source components in the
financial services domain using
a Service Extraction Process.
Partners involved are DBS,
Runbook, Yuki.nl, Yunoo.nl,
42Windmills.com and the
University of Utrecht.
Example
of
Research
into
Refactoring.
servicifi.files.wordpress.com
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Research topic: Functional concepts in Customisation
Productsoftware is the deliverable of
reuse-based software engineering. It
is designed for a market, but runs for
a customer. To allow the customer to
tailor the software to their own needs
the software is parametrised. These
parameters allow the customer to
instantiate generic functionality with
specific functionality.
Parametrisation is now moving in the
direction of functional authoring.
Extensible languages (XML-based)
allow the customer to author domain
rules and data formats in a technology-independent logic. The
underlying technology interprets these rules and formats. Because the
interface to the author is geared towards domain functionality this is
referred to as a functional concept of software organisation. Related
development are model-driven design and business blueprints15.
Parallel to this we see a bottom-up development that incorporates
domain-specificity into a programming language. This is referred to as
domain-specific languages16. A domain-specific language (DSL) is a
programming language or executable specification language that offers,
through appropriate notations and abstractions, expressive power
focused on, and usually restricted to, a particular problem domain.
DSLs have been applied with success in domains as disparate as
financial services,
telecommunication protocols,
hardware design and software
engineering tools.
Func-‐
tional
Concepts
Vitalhealth platform
Vitalhealth Software BV is a
psw-vendor of Health solutions.
The Vitalhealth platform is a
generic code base that allows
customers to tailor
functionality by using a multi-
tier logical layering on op top of
that generic code base. This
cater for the diversity in the
health sector.
Example
of
a
Functional
Concept
requirement,
www.vitalhealthsoftware.nl
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Research topic: Variability
Variability management (VM) is a
fundamental productsoftware
engineering activity that explicitly
represents software artifact
variations for managing
dependencies among variants and
supporting their instantiations
throughout the productsoftware life
cycle17.
Managing variability involves
extremely complex and challenging
tasks, which must be supported by
effective methods, techniques, and tools. Researchers have studied
these challenges and proposed solutions to them for nearly 20 years.
For example, how productsoftware can be made configurable such that
it can support variants of the same process18.
Variability is related to refactoring because the logical organisation of
modules and layers determines the different configurations that are
supported. Variability is related to functional concepts, because
customer-owned functions have to
run on variable vendor-owned
processes.
Varia-‐
bility
The CoSeLoG project aims to
create a cloud infrastructure
for municipalities. Such a cloud
would offer services for
handling various types of
permits, taxes, certificates, and
licenses. Although
municipalities are similar, their
internal processes are typically
different.
Example
of
variability
research.
http://www.win.tue.nl/coselog/wiki/start
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Research topic: Multi-tenancy
Multitenancy entails serving multiple
customers from one container running
a single instance of an application.
Tenancy allows the application to
present itself to the customer as a
service (Saas19), thereby reducing the
Total Cost of Ownership for the
customer. The productsoftware-vendor
is now able to maintain his code base in
a single place. This brings forth the
challenge how to cater for multiple
customisations in a single code base.
This is done by using a dynamic
architecture that gets instantiated as
domain decisions are made.
Deployment is the installation of a runtime version of an application.
Traditionally deployment is done on-premise at the customer. This
introduces dependencies on the on-premise hosting environment. This
is a challenge because the
accountability for performance far
exceeds the scope of control of the
productsoftware-vendor. Online
deployment of the application as a
service addresses this challenge. Online deployment at the provider
(productsoftware-vendor himself or 3rd party partner) is now subject to
the challenge of scaling up and down to demand of multiple customers.
Also when a multitenancy model is used care has to be taken that data
space and processing time is fairly distributed between customers. This
is referred to as the Partitioning problem in deployment20.
Multi-‐
tenancy
Product-as-a-Service project
Exact Software BV and AFAS
BV together with the University
of Utrecht and Groningen as
members of the IIP/psw and
IIP/Saas have embarked on a
project to investigate the
requirements for multi-tenant
architectures that allow
runtime partitions and
variations.
Example
of
Research
into
Multi-tenancy.
www.ictregie.nl:iip-cooperation-challenge.html
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Research topic: Software Operations
Generally, software vendors have
little knowledge of the performance,
usage and feedback of their software
in the field, while software vendors
mark this knowledge as very useful
and valuable. While a small number
of vendors has implemented
functionality that automatically
generates bug or usage reports,
these vendors extract too little
knowledge from the data they
gather, insufficiently apply the
extracted software operation
knowledge to their organization or
present the extracted software
operation knowledge
inadequately21. Research is ongoing
into reducing maintenance effort through software operation
knowledge22.
Software operations is related to orchestration, because the runtime
qualities of autonomous services have to be coordinated according to
quality terms. Software operations is related to evolution, because
operations have to continue during
evolution with minimal disruption
to current services.
Opera-‐
tions
The Dutch Software~VOC
organises a knowledge
workgroup about software
operation. The workgroup
consists of CTOs and other
technicians of Dutch software
vendors, and is initiated to
share experiences and research
results, and to contribute to the
software operation knowledge
research initiative.
Example
of
Software
Operations
knowledge
development.
http://hwschuur.nl/phd/sok/index.php/englis
h/software-knowledge-workgroup/
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Research topic: Evolution & Legacy
The challenge in the adoption of new
productsoftware is to allow
customers to make this move in a
staged way with minimal disruption
to operational technical or business
services. This implies that customers
should be able to work with the new
and the old concurrently using the
same information image. This means
that the legacy software should be
encapsulated in logic that caters for
the architecture of the new. This is
what we refer to as software
evolution.
The evolution question is relevant on
different levels of granularity. On the
functional level this pertains to the
move from unstructured to structured information handling (see
example). On the software level this pertains to legacy migration and
encapsulation23, or component updating24 and upgrading25. Software
evolution is a research area related to software maintenance. Instead of
considering a single product an entire sequence of subsequent products
is considered26.
Evolution is related to multi-tenancy because multi-tenancy allows the
code base to maintained and evolved in a single place. Evolution is
related to operations because
operations have to continue with
minimal disruption to current
services.
Evolu-‐
tion
Physicians moving from
unstructured to structured
information
Vitalhealth Software BV offers
administrative solutions for
Physicians. In order to fully
reap the benefit of the
netcentric solution physicians
should used structured
formats. Now they use fully
unstructured information. How
can this be evolved in a staged
way?
Example
of
functional
evolution
www.vitalhealthsoftware.nl
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Research topic: Orchestration in Functionality
Orchestration is the allocation of
functionality to processing resources
and synchronising their collaboration.
In a business network, functionality
from multiple productsoftware-
vendors are syndicated in different
compositions according to coalition
and projects needs. The challenge here
is to find orchestration schemes and
languages27,28. This will also facilitate
Business Process Outsourcing29: “The
next step is for organizations to
leverage expert third parties to handle
not just the applications, but the
processes that the applications
manage as well.” (The accountant behind financial services.)
Orchestration is related to functional concepts, because autonomous
services have to be coordinated from a functional perspective.
Orchestration is related to software operations, because the runtime
qualities of autonomous services have to be coordinated according to
quality terms.
Orches-‐
tration
Dutch bicycle
The current Dutch bicycle is the
deliverable of a complex
orchestration of a network of
bicycle components vendors.
Each vendor, by specialising in
a certain component, can
deliver this component with
high quality and in the most
effective and efficient way
Van Hilligersberg sees this as a
harbinger for things to come in
the software industry.
Example
of
an
Orchestration
scheme
(Van
Hillegersberg,
2005)
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Research topic: Loose Coupling
Loose coupling is enabling the
transactions between functional
entities whilst allowing them to
operate in a relatively autonomous
fashion. Most loose coupling schemes
use the principle of transaction
genericity. Transaction genericity
enables the entities to talk to each
other on a general level carrying
entity-specific logic and content.
Transaction genericity is often
handled by an intermediary entity,
referred to as a broker, orchestrator or
midoffice.
Loose coupling is related to refactoring
because formerly tightly coupled functionality has to be decomposed
into functional autonomous modules that can be loosely coupled. Loose
coupling is related to multi-tenancy because pluriformity of
customisations have to be loosely coupled with generic functionality.
Loose coupling is the core
proposition of SOA (Service
Oriented Architecture) research30.
Loose
Coupling
Municipal Midoffice
To realise e-government
imperatives dutch
municipalities are adopting a
common reference architecture
that introduces a transaction
broker called the midoffice.
Genericity of transactions is
achieved by encapsulation in a
common message format
(STUF: Standaard Uitwisseling
Formaat)
Roovers, Kuipers en Keller
(2007)
Example
of
Loose
Coupling
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Research topic: Close Interfaces as Rational Routes through
Complexity
Close Interfaces are interfaces that are
user-bound instead of system-bound.
The usability discipline started out
looking at interfaces for location-
bound systems. With the rise of mobile
devices location-awareness has now
come into play as a next pruning
parameter in data & systems
complexity. This location-awareness
offers opportunities to connect an on-
board interface with data-augmented
environments.
We see a trend here that view-
controller devices are user-bound and location-aware. The data models
they access are maintained on the net. We expect these data models to
become more environment-bound making using of sensors and
actuators.
The progress of closeness can be seen in the movement from smart
office to smart homes and smart cars. Mobile device fuctionality is
expected to move into apparel and clues of implants and intubations
become available31.
Close interfaces are related to
privacy because interfaces and
identities have to be loosely coupled.
Close interfaces are related to
virtualisation of products, because intertfaces and product data have to
be loosely coupled.
Close
Inter-‐
faces
Layar
Layar software provides
augmented reality solutions. When
looking through the camera of
your mobile phone selected
information overlays appear of the
scene. Information models of the
environment are coupled through
location awareness and compass
functions with image matching.
The next challenge is to capitalise
on sensor-augmented
environments.
Example
of
a
Close
Interface
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Resarch topic: Identity Management in Privacy
Privacy-enhancing identity
management (PIM) offers a means
whereby individuals controls the
nature and amount of personal
information about them that is
disclosed. In particular, to achieve
privacy, individuals can use
pseudonyms and determine the
degree of linkability between different
occurrences of their data through the
secure and authenticated use of
pseudonyms32.
With PIM accountability of an
individual for his or her actions can
be achieved without giving away
personal data. Thus, privacy-
enhancing identity management systems (IMSs) enable users to assert
their right to "informational self-determination" better than before.
Such systems are needed in all computer-mediated communications,
even more so now with the advent of new technologies like mobile
communication, UMTS, or ubiquitous computing33.
PIM is related to close interfaces, because interface and identity have to
be loosely coupled. PIM is related to recommendation technology,
because fragmented user profiles
undermine the effectiveness of
recommendation solutions.
Id-‐mgt
Privacy
Twitter
Twitter software provides
communication services for
lifestyle. It’s big success is due to
flexible access control of identity
footprints. It’s flexibility with
respect to determining the scope
of communication allows users to
move easily from private to public
mode and the other way around.
This is based on correlating
people-centric (followers) and
content-centric (hashtags) slices
of the communication space.
Example
of
Flexible
Identity
Management
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Research topic: Recommendation technology for Social Routes
through Complexity
Whereas usability offers a rational route
through data & systems complexity,
recommendation technology offers a social
route through data & systems complexity.
Recommendation technology uses
collaborative filtering techniques by which
behavioral traces are used to correlate
user profiles with user value. On the basis
of related profiles related value can be
cross-promoted or recommended.
Different approaches to recommendation
technology exist. Research on scalability is
required34.
Currently recommendation technology is
mainly used for commercial purposes, ie.
cross-promoting products and services to
users that share profile properties. It is
foreseen that recommendation technology can also be used for
didactical purposes during task execution35.
Recommendation technology is related to privacy requirements,
because user data has to be correlated with each other, which requires
consent from the user. Recommendation technology is also related to
service productivation, because it
informs delivery of value in the
product.
Re-‐
commen
dation
GX Blueconic
GX software provides content,
traffic and conversion
solutions. Their latest platform
Blueconic aids customers to
generate traffic from content,
which is then analysed to drive
conversion through
recommendation technology.
For instance, users on the
Voetbal International site could
be identified as being either
Ajax or Feijenoord fans. This
helped prevent to promote a
Feijenoord t-shirt to an Ajax
fan.
GX
Blueconic
as
architectural
solution
to
Recommendation
solutions.
(www.gxsoftware.nl)
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Research topic: Certification in Security
Increased connectivity with critical
infrastructural systems raises the bar for
security. It emphasis the importance of the
connection between the model and the
code36. By maintaining this connection code
can be model-checked to safeguard the
instantiation of security requirements.
Certification of software artifacts offers
organizations more certainty and confidence
about software. Certification of software
helps software sales, acquisition, and can be
used to certify legislative compliance37 or to
achieve acceptable deliverables in
outsourcing38.
Security is related to process and data
mining requirements. In order to apply
mining mechanisms, access to the “in-house”
repositories is required. In methods for
design fast and reliable implementation and realisation of systems
require the availability of components that have proven and certified
properties. To reuse these components it is necessary that they can be
used in different contexts. The development of adaptable software
components that induce predictable networkproperties, both functional
as non-functional, is an important area of research39. Correct
specifications of system- and componentbehavior and of interfaces is of
great importance here.
Certified
Security
Stuxnet is a Windows-specific
computer worm. It is the first
discovered worm that spies on
and reprograms industrial
systems. It was specifically
written to attack Supervisory
Control And Data Acquisition
(SCADA) systems used to
control and monitor industrial
processes. Stuxnet includes the
capability to reprogram the
programmable logic controllers
(PLCs) and hide the changes. It
is also the first known worm to
target critical industrial
infrastructure.
Example
of
where
certified
security
is
necessary
(en.wikipedia.org
org
stuxnet)
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Resarch topic: Data mining for Recommendations
Data mining, a branch of computer
science and artificial intelligence, is the
process of extracting patterns from data.
Data mining is seen as an increasingly
important tool by modern business to
transform data into business intelligence
giving an informational advantage. It is
currently used in a wide range of profiling
practices, such as marketing,
surveillance, fraud detection, and
scientific discovery40.
Both in a consumer market and customer
market data mining is used for
progressive profiling and predictive
analytics41. Well-known examples from
the consumer market our Amazon.com.
In the customer area this is being used by
ERP solutions.
Data mining is related to security
requirements, because data has to be
available for mining, whilst preventing
opportunities for misuse. Data mining is
related to service productivation, because
it can inform the architecture of the
product.
Data
Mining
In september 2010 Apple
introduced iTunes Ping. Ping is
a software-based, music-
oriented social networking and
recommender system service
developed and operated by
Apple. Apple used some of
Facebook’s open programming
interfaces to allow users to find
their Facebook friends on Ping.
But soon after Ping’s
introduction that stopped
working. Allegedly Facebook
blocked Apple because of “site
stability” and “infrastructure”
problems.
When Apple introduced Ping, it
introduced a sink into
Facebook’s network. Facebook,
by allowing Ping to identify
friends of friends, jeopardised
it’s most important asset :
user’s profiles.
Example of the competitive value of consumer data.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/02/apple-
facebook-friction-erupts-over-ping/
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Resarch topic: Process mining for Process Usability
Process mining is a process management
technique, that allow for the analysis of
business processes based on event logs. The
basic idea is to extract knowledge from
event logs recorded by an information
system. Process mining aims at improving
this by providing techniques and tools for
discovering process, control, data,
organizational, and social structures from
event logs42.
To understand how productsoftware is used
in the field research can be done into
process mining of event logs recording the
way people work and used products43.
Process mining is related to security
because data has to be accessible for mining,
but secured against misuse. Process mining
is reated to the virtualisation of products
because it informs how users work around
complexity.
Process
Mining
TU/e research into process
mining
The TU/e has applied process
mining in one of the provincial
offices of the Dutch National
Public Works Department,
responsible for the construction
and maintenance of the road
and water infrastructure. Using
a variety of process mining
techniques, the processing of
invoices sent by the various
subcontractors and suppliers
were analysed from three
different perspectives: (1) the
process perspective, (2) the
organizational perspective, and
(3) the case perspective. This
allowed the organisation to
improve it’s processes.
Example of Process mining (W.M.P. van der
Aalst, H.A. Reijers, A.J.M.M. Weijters, B.F.
van Dongen, A.K. Alves de Medeiros, M. Song,
and H.M.W. Verbeek. Business Process
Mining: An Industrial Application.
Information Systems, 32(5):713-732, 2007.
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Research topic: Product Virtualisation
Product virtualisation is the
augmentation of physical products
with embedded sensors, actuators and
software. Properties that are of
importance to life cycle management
of the product become externalised by
means of sensors and actuators.
Embedded software's principal role is
not information technology, but rather
the interaction with the physical
world. It's written for machines that
are not, first and foremost, computers.
Embedded software is 'built in' to the
electronics in cars, telephones, audio
equipment, robots, appliances, toys,
security systems, pacemakers,
televisions and digital watches, for
example. This software can become
very sophisticated in applications like
airplanes, missiles, process control
systems, and so on44.
Product virtualisation is related to close interfaces because product
data should be viewable and controlleable from any interface of choice.
Product virtualisation is related to process mining, but this can disclose
how users workaround possible
complexity.
Product
Virtualis
ation
eProvenance, a new company
using advanced technologies to
help guarantee the quality of
wines, has unveiled an
'Intelligent Bottle' and wine
temperature tracking system to
provide an e-pedigree from
wine producers through to
store shelves. The eProvenance
system includes three physical
components that RFID-enabled.
The RFID components are
linked with their unique ID
numbers in an encrypted online
database. This combined data
creates an e-pedigree for each
bottle of wine, which includes
authentication data from the
chateau, as well as shipment
data and temperature records.
Example
of
Product
Virtualisation
(www.eProvenance.com)
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Research topic: Service Productivation
Service productivation is the
embedding of routine service tasks in
software products. In many domains
professional service delivery have
canocical elements that can be
translated to wizard-like steps on
decision-support databases. These
software products can be used to help
first-line support staff to gear up
their response time such as in
callcenters. Or they can be used
without any human intermediation
at all via internet websites.
Applications in the housing, tax and
financial domains are good examples.
Service productivation is related to recommendation technology,
because profiles can be used to personalise delivery of the product.
Service productivation is related to data mining, because mining can be
used to inform the underlying
architecture of the product.
Service
Producti
vation
Yunoo.nl is a online personal
finance management
application that helps
consumers and small
businesses keep track of their
spending. Yunoo provides
essential insight into consumer
spending, which has not been
picked up by online tooling
strategies of banks.
Yunoo.nl is a University of
Utrecht’s “ICT-
Entrepreneurship course”
start-up and won the Website of
the Year award in 2010
Example
of
Service
Productivation
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Research topic: Quality Control in Interoperability
Interoperability is defined as deploying
mutual connectivity between two of
more systems and entities to enable
the exchange and sharing of
information in order to produce,
function or act45.
In order for a system or entity to
participate in production, function or
action the participating systems have
to agree on the technology to use, the
semantics (language) and the context
in which they want to (re)use the
shared information.
Interoperability is the linking pin
concept in a networked, medialised
economy and society and is therefore
informed and constrained by all
previous requirements .
In methods for interoperability fast
and reliable implementation and
realisation of systems require the
availability of components that have proven and certified properties. To
reuse these components it is necessary that they can be used in
different contexts. The development of adaptable softwarecomponents
that induce predictable emergent
networkproperties, both functional
as non-functional, is an important
area of research46.
QoS
Interop-‐
erability
QoS
Interop-‐
erability
Centric study into casualty
registration at large calamities
The registration of casualties
during unexepcted and large-
scale disaster and calamities is
a complex affair with many
actors from many different
professional networks . These
networks need efficient and
effective information exchange,
both in the response phase as in
the post-care phase, in order to
provide adequate casualty
handling services.
Registration of casualities
enables the response to
questions of next of kin, the
inventarisation of the need for
care & cure, but also to trace
the subjected for health
research and insurance claims.
Example
of
Need
for
Interoperability
(Van
Lier,
2009b)
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Research Topic : Software Product Management
Software product
management is a
set of managerial
practices around
the deliverables of
reuse based
software
engineering. Van
de Weerd47 defines
four main clusters
of activities:
portfolio management, product planning, release planning and
requirements management. The challenge for software product
management in a netcentric economy is federated management in a
virtual organisation of software ecosystem partners. This implies that
the requirements stemming from the topics described in the previous
sections, currently classified as stemming from the external
stakeholders, need to become defined and manageable.
Software productmanagement is our flagbearing topic. We have a fair
understanding what software productmanagement means in a single
organisation, but the linking pin between netcentric software
processing and netcentric organising is federated software
productmanagement. Our vision
therefore is to create a worldclass
software productmanagement
capability that enables software
businesses to collectively align
software ecosystems with societal
information networks.
Software
Product
Management
Virtual
Organisation
Software
Product
Management
Competencies
Model
(Van
de
Weerd,
2010)
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Research Topic: Software ecosystems
A software ecosystem (SECO) is
defined by Jansen48 as a set of
businesses functioning as a unit and
interacting with a shared market for
software and services, together with
the relationships among them. These
relationships are frequently
underpinned by a common
technological platform or market
and operate through the exchange of information, resources and
artifacts. Some examples of SECOs are the MySQL/PHP SECO, the
Microsoft SECO, and the iPhone SECO.
Jansen49 offers a research agenda for software vendors to focus on
three different perspectives: the software ecosystem level, the software
supply network level, and the software vendor level. Articulating such a
focus allows the vendor to move from best effort to quality-managed
working within an ecosystem in order to provide integrity to the virtual
software product.
The operational dynamics of networked industries have significant
implications for practitioners, from operating managers to technology
architects, and from policy makers to entrepreneurs. Current research
draws heavily from the fields of complexity theory and evolutionary
biology. The shift is in the perception of the network, formerly seen as a
source of inertia, not as a dynamic
factor in innovation, productivity
and firm renewal. Core to this is the
distributed responsibility for the
health of the collective50 by
enabling mutual productivity51.
Software
Ecosystems
Virtual
Software
Product
Software
ecosystem
perspectives
(Jansen,
2009)
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Programme
Organisational Stucture
The IIP/psw is organised
as shown. It consists of a
board and working
groups.
The board hosts
representatives of
industry, science and
policy-making. Their role
is to maintain a link with
their respective backlands and bring in governance from this
perspective, but also to champion the focus we have defined as
reflective practioners and researchers. Current board members are
indicated in the list of contributors.
The working groups are composed in a similar way. Their role is to
develop projects around the research topics we have defined. With these
project proposals we will bid for grants at a national and european level.
Coordinating the working groups and providing the two-way
communication between the governing board and the operational
working groups is the platformmanager. The platformmanager is also
responsible for external communication, of which this SRA is an
example, and organising feedback opportunities. Feedback will be made
possible at social and electronic fora. For the latter we have an
interactive website: www.iipproductsoftware.nl . The main social events
foreseen are listed on the roadmap, being the National Productsoftware
Day and the International Conference of Software Business52. In
addition we will have working group meetings in which projects will be
developed that will build on and inform external communication.
IIP
productsoftware
Organisation
Structure
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Roadmap
The visual below shows our roadmap for the lifecycle the IIP/psw has
been granted. The IIP/psw is actively resourced since mid-2010. In this
time we have explored the productsoftware landscape in order to define
our mission, vision and strategy, the result of which has been laid down
in this SRA.We now have the focus to accrue mass and will start
developing project proposals for national and european grants that will
allow us to become self-productive after the seeding grant has been
depleted.
To increase our chances for bidding we now first need to map out the
grant landscape and find our most favourable niches. A start with this
map has been made and is shown above.
In our quest for mass we will promote our endeavours in our own
community, as indicated at our roadmap, but we will also call on
affiliated networks.
IIP
Productsoftware
roadmap
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Affiliated Networks
Our affiliated networks are:
• Software~VOC
• ICT Office
• IIP/Software as a Service
• IIP/Creatieve Industrie
• IIP/Health Support
• IIP/Intelligente Communicatie
• IIP/Mobiliteit als ICT-systeem (MAIS)
• IIP/ICT Veilig Verbonden (Security & Privacy)
• IIP/ICT in de Bouw
• IIP/Sensor Networks
• IIP/Brain & Cognition
• IIP/Geo
• IIP/Duurzame ICT
• IIP/Roboned
• IIP/Vitale ICT
• IIP/Domotica & Smart Living
• ESA: European Software Association
• ECIS: European Committee for Interoperable Systems
• NESSI: Networked European Software & Services Initiative
• EITO: European Information Technology Observatory
• OFE: OpenForum Europe
• Agentschapnl
• KvK: Chamber of Commerce
• SkillCity
• Software Business Lab, Helsinke University of Technology
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Resourcing
The visual above shows a map of the grant opportunities available to us.
Our mind is set on Call8 of Framework 7 of the European Commission,
but on the way there we will not foresake to seek out other
opportunities. We see three routes:
Route 1. To pool resources with a big group of Small–to-Medium-sized
Enterprises (SMEs). For this we aim to build on our liaison with the
Software~VOC.
Route 2. To coordinate Grant Proposals in managerial innovation with a
big pool of SMEs in the FP7 Capacities programme: Research for the
benefit of SMEs. Also we will look into Innovation Prestatie Contracten
and Fiscalisation-based Instruments.
Route 3. To partner in Grant Proposals with SME & big company
consortia to do fundamental innovation (Preparation for FP7 Call 8 Dec
2011 in the Cooperation Programme)
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Impact
Many societal information networks float on productsoftware. These
networks are facing big challenges today in all corners of society: how
do we manage mobility, health, safety, education, public services &
sustainability. Users of these networks are dealing with tremendous
data, systems and organisational complexity. The productsoftware
sector can aid and benefit in two ways. Firstly, by preventing further
fragmentation by looking at informationflow across the entire network
instead of looking at each participating partner in isolation. Secondly,
by facilitating integration by organising the software ecosystem that
supports the societal information network. Therefore we are embarking
on a journey of software ecosystem and information network alignment.
Therefore our mission is to simplify user access to societal and
economic products by loosely coupling user-owned data, customer-
owned functions and vendor-owned processing.
To understand the nature of loose coupling we need to investigate what
netcentric processing entails. So far we know that interoperability
between systems, data and organisations is key, but what exactly
influences interoperability and how can we manage it according to
quality terms? To start our investigations we have identified 19
research topics, 8 of which deal with netcentric processing and 8 of
which deal with complexity reduction. The remaining three deal with
quality of service under interoperability, the netcentric software
ecosystem and federated software productmanagement. The latter is
our flagbearing topic. We have a fair understanding what software
productmanagement means in a single organisation, but the linking pin
between netcentric software processing and netcentric organising is
federated software productmanagement. Our vision therefore is to
create a worldclass software productmanagement capability that
enables software businesses to collectively align software ecosystems
with societal information networks.
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To focus our vision we have dreamed up an organisational concept,
softportNL, which will be the sedimentation and inspiration of the
research projects that we will undertake. We hope that reflective
practitioners in software productmanagement will feed on and off this
hub to collectively manage quality in the software infrastructure of
societal information networks. Our strategy is to accrue competence
and capability to this hub by executing nationally and european funded
projects.
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Mission
Our mission is derived from the socioeconomical challenges and thrusts
as given by the different Societal Innovation Agendas, in particular
those addressing the relationship with ICT.
The Digital Agenda for Europe53 is one of the seven flagship initiatives
of the Europe 2020 Strategy, set out to define the key enabling role that
the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) will have
to play if Europe wants to succeed in its ambitions for 2020. These
ambitions are high levels of employment, a low carbon economy,
productivity and social cohesion.
The most important challenges are better health care, safer and more
efficient transport solutions, a cleaner environment, new media
opportunities and easier access to public services and cultural content.
Several Dutch Societal Innovation Agenda’s complement these
ambitions. For the Netherlands in particular for instance the ECP-EPN
(Dutch Platform for the Information Society)54 agendises: Productivity
Growth, Healthcosts, Mobility, Digitisation of Public Services,
Improvement of Education.
The VNO-ECW (Union of Employers in the Netherlands)55 advocates the
use of ICT in SME networks and sees the Netherlands as a potential
candidate for becoming the ICT portal of Europe, building on its
prominent position as a distribution hub in logistics (Schiphol,
Rotterdam harbour) and data traffic (Amsterdam Internet Exchange) .
We fully adhere to this agenda and aspire to create a complementary
software productmanagement capability to this. This notion will be
elaborated in the section softportNL.
Our mission is to simplify user access to societal and economic products
by loosely coupling user-owned data, customer-owned functions and
vendor-owned processing.
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The Dutch Innovationplatform has identified ICT as the innovation-axis
of society and economy56. The Dutch ICT branche organisation
ICT~Office has issued the ICT~Manifest 2010-201457 building on that
notion. ICT as innovation-axis should create more prosperity, wellbeing
and ageing with less means, a more sustainable society, an efficient
mobility system, a society in which people feel safe, a well-functioning
health system, watermanagement en – quality, high-quality education
tailored to everybody, coupling between citizens and government,
digital content, Public-private cooperation.
Their concerns laid out for the branche are the following: Sufficient and
well-trained personel; Safety & Trust; Proper Contract Issuing &
Execution; Architectural thinking, Interoperability and Open
Standards, Research and Innovation, Investments in a next generation
infrastructure, New working relationships, working environments and
usage of social media.
Also ICTRegie, the Dutch governmental organisation for ICT, has
written a strategy ICT203058. It propagates the notion of an ICT-
innovation system in which science, innovation, education and
entrepreneuship mutually inform and build on each other. The
IIP/productsoftware is part of this ecosystem together with 14 others
ICT Innovationplatforms. We will develop our programme in close
collaboration with them.
The IPN (Dutch Institute for Informatics Research) has written a
complementary ICT Masterplan59 in which it identifies four main
challenges. How do you manage complexity of data and systems?
How do we utilise ICT for societal innovation? How do we employ ICT for
science paradigms in traditional domains? How do we foster enough
well-qualified ICT researchers?
In our opinion the linkage between ICT and the socioeconomical
challenges can be made more concrete by looking at processing in
societal information networks that produce societal and economic
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products. Examples in the Health area are the acute medical care-
network and diabetes-care network. Examples from the Safety area are
the identitity-management network and nuclear-control network.60 Our
challenge is to articulate how productsoftware can contribute to these
challenges and ambitions by investigating the relationship between
software ecosystems and societal information networks.
Productsoftware forms the infrastructure of societal information
networks. Many networks use software on a organisational level.
Couplings between the organisations in the networks are lacking. The
productsoftware sector can aid and benefit in two ways. Firstly, by
preventing further fragmentation by looking at informationflow across
the entire network instead
of looking at each
participating partner in
isolation. Secondly, by
facilitating integration by
organising the software
ecosystem that supports
the societal information
network.
Van Lier advocates a shift in thinking from organisation-centric to
netcentric. The main design problem here is introducing
interoperability on a technical (engineering), semantic (managerial)
and contextual (organisation) level.
Interoperability will allow us loosely couple user-owned data, customer-
owned function and vendor-owned processing.
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Vision
Our vision is derived from the challenge to augment ICT innovations
with appropriate management capabilities. This is flagged in several
Societal Innovation Agenda’s.
In the 2009 report Towards a European software strategy61 an industry
expert group wrote European software SMEs have been successful in
creating ideas and developing products, but they have been rather less
successful in creating businesses to take those products to market. The
main problem is lack of management and marketing skills, resulting in
under‐performance at the crucial commercialisation phases (product
marketing, packaging, customer support services, etc.). Excellent R&D
is no substitute for excellent development strategy, marketing and a
channel policy. Indeed, each stage of a software company’s growth is
critical, from seed to early stage, domestic development and
international expansion. Public policy should target and encourage
companies that invest in the complete innovation chain: idea, concept,
development and localisation, validation‐ pilot, go‐to‐market –
consistent, of course, with international trade rules.
The European Commission in Europe’s Digital Competitiveness Report
201062 reports ICT take-up by European businesses is increasing and
Europe is beginning to see signs of efficiency gains in all sectors.
Nevertheless, the latest academic research also shows that in order to
make the most of the productivity potential of ICT, investment in ICT on
its own is not sufficient. Complementary organisational change, in
particular involving management practices and decentralisation, as
well as skills also matter. US firms have been more successful in
implementing organisational changes, but have also invested more in
Our Vision is to create a worldclass software productmanagement
capability that enables software businesses to collectively align software
ecosystems with societal information networks
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ICT and skills. These factors help explain the differing productivity
experiences of the two regions. And they will contribute to the recovery,
providing opportunities for the smart, sustainable and inclusive growth
the European Union is striving to achieve. The ICT~Manifest 2010-2014
(ICT~Office)63 also signals the importance of a focus on the culture and
management of organisations in addition to innovative applications.
ECP-EPN in its vision document64 nails down the most important issue
in the culture and management of organisations: Standardisation-
initiatives run into the prisoner’s dilemma. Individual actions often
indebts a party more than it returns, where collective actions would be
in the interest of all parties involved. The challenge is to get those
collective actions recognised and organised.
Federated software productmanagement can help us to define those
collective actions and make them manageable.
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Strategy
Henderson & Venkatraman (1993)65 offer a model for thinking about
strategic alignment of a business and it’s ICT. We are projecting this on
Nederland BV. The model juxtaposes strategic fit with Functional and
Technical Integration. Since all four
corners of the model - Business
strategy, ICT Strategy,
Organisation, Technosystem – are
design questions the model argues
that three corners can be explicitly
managed whilst one corner is then
left emergent. This brings to bear
four possible strategic scenarios
when one starts with one of the two strategic corners.
Scenario 1. Executing Nederland BV Strategy: This would entail
enabling the areas in the dutch economy that have been appointed key
areas (sleutelgebieden), starting from their organisation. These are
creative industry, food & flowers, the chemical industry, pension &
social insurance, and high-tech & materials.
Scenario 2. Transformation through Technology: This would entail
enabling the areas in the dutch economy that have been appointed key
areas (sleutelgebieden), transforming their organisation though ICT.
Scenario 3. Utilising IT-potential: This would entail starting from ICT
potential and creating organisations through influencing the Nederland
BV strategy: Agendising software-ready information networks.
Scenario 4. Optimising software potential: This would entail starting
from the ICT potential, creating an integrated technosystem that
societal networks can adopt. Building information innovative networks
on an innovative infrastructure.
We have chosen Route 4 which will we now justify.
Business
ICT
Strategic
Alignment
Model
(Henderson
&
Venkatranan,
1993)
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The VNO-NCW (Union of dutch SMEs)66 write in their socioeconomic
agenda “Optimistic!, chances for sustainable growth and employment”:
Lastly, there is one particular weakness, that strongly determines our
future growth. The Netherlands is lacking an ambitious economic
policy. A policy that recognises and fosters our strengths, builds on
them and continously take them as a keystone. In general we are
talking about Dutch entrepreneurship and in particular about our
logistical function because of our geographic location, our inviting
climate for headoffices of international businesses and for a number of
key areas featuring worldclass Dutch companies. Pivotal to these areas
are the progressive ICT-developments and sustainability of our
economy. In the economic policy of our country the real economy has
been neglected. The Haguean economy is the economy of macrofigures
in the budgets of economical research institutes. The reality as well as
the diversity of the industries behind the macrofigures drop off the
horizon. It is due time to reinstantiate the real economy as the
foundation of our economic policy. The Netherlands needs a modern
industry- and servicespolicy that starts from the strength of
multifacetted entrepreneurship.
The Software~VOC67 has taken
on this challenge and issued a
Survey amongst Dutch software
companies in 2010. The survey
201068 clearly shows our
tremendeous Dutch potential:
The software sector is a fully-
fledged and significant economic
sector in the Netherlands, with a
turnover of 25 billion euros and
gross added value of 17.3 billion euros. The sector contributes to 2.8% of
the Netherlands’ economy (GNP). This added value is at least as high as
most key areas defined by the Innovation Platform as strategic sectors
Distribution
of
software
companies
in
the
Netherlands.
(Survey
2010,
ICT~Office)
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in which the Netherlands excels at international level both in
knowledge and in commercial activities. Companies in the Netherlands
achieve a turnover of 10.2 billion euros from selling software developed
in-house. We are talking about product and tailor-made software (9.4
billion) as well as embedded software (0.8 billion). Programming for
third parties accounts for another 4.0 billion euros. Implementation,
testing, management, and maintenance contribute 3.8 billion euros to
the total sales. These are the main activities focused on by companies
that generate revenue especially from the development and sales of
software The software sector has 192,000 full-time employees, of
whom 68,000 are employed full-time in software development and
14,000 in research and development (R&D). The proportion of R&D is
highest among software producers, at 8 to 9 percent.
The survey can be regarded
as an instrument in strategy
route 3: Utilising ICT
potential. The
IIP/productsoftware has
chosen strategy route 4 to
complement the
Software~VOC strategy.
Route 4 entails Optimising
our software potential by
bundling our efforts towards the creation of a technosystem,
softportNL, that will create the critical mass in processing quality to
acquire foreign as well as native customers.
Our choice is strengthened by the VNO-ECW (Union of Employers in the
Netherlands) seeing the Netherlands as a potential candidate for
becoming the ICT portal of Europe, building on its prominent position as
a distribution hub in logistics (Schiphol, Rotterdam harbor) and data
traffic (Amsterdam Internet Exchange).
Strategic
Alignment
Route
IIP
Productsoftware
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SoftportNL as Software Potential Optimising Strategy
SoftportNL is a processing concept. From the Utility point of view it is
an enabler for the Nederland Kennisland agenda and the Lissabon
agenda, both striving to strengthen the competitive position of The
Netherlands and Europe in a knowledge-intensive economy. From a
Design Research point of view it is an Organisational Artifact acting as
culmination point of knowledge about software-intensive processing
quality. In the section Our Dream we have already called on an analogue
from the Dutch clothmaking trade to explain the effect on transaction
costs in organisational networks.
Weijnen69 points out that the Netherlands is well-poised to become an
important node in the global networkeconomy. Succesful examples are
greenport, Capital of Peace, Brainport, Schiphol airport, Rotterdam
Harbor, AMS Internet Exchange. She identifies a number of conditions
and mechanisms that contribute to the formation of strong nodes.
The strategic investment to deepen the Rotterdam harbor channels to
the Northsea has led to Rotterdam being the only one able to cater for
megatankers and bulcarriers. At Schiphol hardening the tracks as first
airport in Europe has given it an first mover advantage. The early
investments in the SURFnet backbone has led to the keystone position
of the AMS-IX.
The pluriform role that a node plays is one of the other mechanisms.
Rotterdam harbor not only gives access through its channels from the
Northsea but also has quality connection into the backland: the Rijn.
In addition to being a technical hub there needs to be a close connection
to knowledge and skills necessary to learn and upgrade the technical
aspects. Co-location of the technical core and social core is
recommended.
Managerial concepts to coordinate the node are also paramount.
Rotterdam is successful because it adopted the transferconcept of
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containers. Containers create interoperability between goods than
before had to be custom-handled. This created significant flexibility and
efficiency in the transfer workflows.
Schiphol is widely known for its bagagehandling concept, which has
been copied widely in other airports. Also it has created a synergie with
a commercial infrastructure hosting an integrated shopping mall.
The AMS Internet Exchange has as its main content driver the gaming
industry. It’s technical capabilities – large datacenters – and content
flow form a perfect team.
We aim to take this lessons to heart. The projects that we embark on
need to be supportive of infrastructure investment, pluriform role
formation, co-locative knowledge exchange and developing managerial
concepts.
.
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Rationale:
Productsoftware
Research
as
Design
Science
Research
The Rationale section describes how the previous sections were
developed seen from the frame of design science research. Design
science is an emerging science that deals with the interplay between
action and artifact. In this way it hinges the behavorial and natural
sciences. A seminal article about the role of this hinge was written in
2004 by Alan Hevner, who received a Design Science Lifetime
Achievement Award at the Fourth International Conference on Design
Science Research in Information Systems and Technology in 2009.
The top visual shows
how to separate and
circumscribe Utility
development and
Knowledge building by
seeing them as two
learning cycles around
the design of Artifacts.
The learning cycle coupled with the environment is called the Relevance
cycle and the learning cycle coupled with Knowledge Base is called the
Rigor cycle.
In this spirit we have
created a relevance
argumentation
represented by the
mission pyramid70 for
our environment and a
rigor argumentation
represented by our
worldview pyramid71 for
our knowledge base. The
relevance pyramid has
helped us to understand top-down how mission, vision, strategy hinges
Design
Science
Research
Cycles
(Hevner,
2004)
Productsoftware
Research
as
Design
Science
Research
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with our programme and projects. The Rigor pyramid helped us to
understand how our methods & tools hinge with our theory and
worldview.
Our mission, vision and strategy were described in the section Impact.
Our worldview and theory will be explained shortly. The user-centric
part of the productsoftware Framework (blue-green) provides the hinge
in the Relevance pyramid from Strategy to Programme: within the
general idea of reducing complexity for the user we need to zoom in one
level deeper on what the pillars of research are. A similar line of
reasoning holds for the Rigor pyramid where the netcentric part of the
productsoftware Framework (blue-red) hinges processing theory with
processing in organisations, management and engineering.
Together they span up the artifact space in which we do
productsoftware research. By undertaking projects in the spirit of our
mission according to our canonical body of knowledge about organising,
managing and engineering we will be able develop the processing
concept of softportNL. In this effort we build on the research capabilities
in our IIP/psw network.
The 2010 Assessment on Research Quality in Computer Science72
shows that ICT Research in the Netherlands is a vibrant enterprise. As a
country, the Netherlands remains among the top nations in computer
science research, and in the absolute top in a number of sub-areas.
Our flagbearer group is the Business Informatics department at the
University of Utrecht. It’s research focus is on software products,
covering methodological studies of development processes in the
software industry, instrumentation, and theory validation for
implementation and adoption of software products.
Productsoftware research touches upon several themes from the NOAG-
I Dutch Research Agenda for ICT73.
The challenges in the Theme Data Explosion are the grounding of
domain knowledge in datamodels and supporting sustainable
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techniques. Standardisation of datasets based on format (technical eg.
XML) and language (semantic, eg RDF) are necessary, without
comprimising utility.
On the higher layers (Theme Networked World.) – presentation and
application layer – very big challenges come into play. Securing the
network and the exchanged messages, the shift of design decisions
towards runtime, the development of open system architectures,
bridging the gap between businessprocesses and ICT-systems, the
development of new services and businessmodels.
In the Theme Intelligent Systems it is of primary concern that
computational agents that operate in a more or less autonomous way,
can be coordinated thourg communication and synchronisation.
In the Theme Methods for Design fast and reliable implementation and
realisation of systems require the availability of components that have
proven and certified properties. To reuse these components it is
necessary that they can be used in different contexts. The development
of adaptable softwarecomponents that induce predictable
systemproperties, both functional as non-functional, is an important
area of research. Correct specifications of system- and
componentbehavior and of interfaces is of great importance here. This
will lead to many new research questions around techniques for
specification and composition of components, code generation, generic
programming and aspect-oriented programming. A special case of reuse
concerns the integration of existing legacy software in new systems.
This gives a whole new slant on techniques in the areas of analysis and
transformation of source code.
In the next sections we will justify the choices we made in creating the
productsoftware Framework informed by a commitment to a theory and
worldview.
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Worldview
Our worldview is one of design science. Design sciences regards the
world as a sociotechnical world and places at it’s core the dialogue
between action and artifact. Action and Artifact design mutually inform
and constrain each other. Design science is about the dialogue between
on the one hand the cognitive and social organisation, let’s call it
wetware, and on the other hand hardware artifacts.
Their meeting point is the information interface whose function it is to
enable interoperation of wetware and hardware. Guiding criteria are
consistency & coherence of control & feedback74 within the scope
created by hardware and wetware frontiers75.
The current manifestions of wetware are being mined out of digital
traces. These are our digital profiles. Our hardware on the other hand
becomes increasingly more augmented with sensors and actuators
Profiles and augmentations are coupled together through layers of logic.
Reuse hides itself in this logic in an ever more granular way. When
regarding productsoftware research we are really asking ourselves the
canonical question:
Which combination of logical layers with reusable patterns work
best to couple profiled wetware with the augmented hardware
environment?
Our theory postulates these logical layers as a medium through which
Users look for Value. This is elaborated in the next section.
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Theory
The visual below shows our theoretical outlook on ICT as Interface to
Value. User Value is defined in terms of Maslov76, being either a
commercial or societal product or service, or access to informational or
social networks. We can understand the role of ICT as a value-accessing
device by positioning it in the experience of the user. ICT together with
the organisational factor behind it represent a medium to the user. The
user uses this medium to forage for User Value77.
The notion of User Value has changed in the past decades. This is
symptomatic of the dialectic nature of the action-artifact dynamic. The
perceived User Value is determined by Bounded Rationality78: we have
IIP
Productsoftware
Theory
on
Medium
Upscaling
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a limited perception of what we want bounded by the complexity of our
societal arrangements. Creating artifacts that encapsulate current
values augment this rationality and deepens the horizon on which
Value is perceived. In the 1980’s ICT was perceived as an enabler of
computation. The design emphasis was on utility of ICT. Once this was
well encapsulated the role of ICT shifted to enabler for the value of task
execution. The design emphasis was on the usability of ICT. With the
rise of a mature GUI the role of ICT shifted to enabler of processes. The
design emphasis was on alignment of business processes with the ICT
landscape. Now we see mature Enterprise solutions coming up the value
in sight is the Societal and Economic Product. The Internet boom’s
adagium of organisations moving from bricks&mortar to clicks&mortar
has now become mainstream. The current ethos of customer- and client-
centricity implies that it is not the organisation that should matter but
that it is the service of giving access to a societal or economic product
that counts.
Design science in ICT in those decades has had different manifestations
but if we abstract from the increase of scale in the medium we see that
the engineering factor and the organisation factor mutually inform and
build each other with designers trying to make engineering more
human-centered and organisational consultants trying to make the
organisational factor more service-oriented. This is visualised by the
wave of emphasis in theory visual.
From this theoretical perception we induce that the coming decade will
be characterised by a next step change in scale of the medium. This will
cause a new set of problems in the interplay between engineering and
organisation. It will bring a new wave of Data & Systems complexity.
(see Youp van het Hek’s commentary on helpdesks).
Professional services organisations are working on bridging the service
gap by enabling personalisation, using combinations of portal
technology and organisational orchestration services (See Municipal
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Customer Contact Centers; See ING’s recent campaign “Hoeveel bank
wil je hebben?”)79.
Processing in networks will be revisioned on a business level, on a
management level and on an engineering level. The great unbundling
has set in already. The challenge now is how do we put things together
again, controlled by quality terms, informed by the digital traces of user
workarounds, using runtime decisions about personal and situational
relevance.
Software vendors and software-intensive customers will work together
in business networks. These business networks will be interwoven
partnerships between software ecosystems and functional information
networks creating a virtual medium product.
This virtual medium product will be managed in a federated way by
product managers owning partial solutions provided by multiple
businesses forming a virtual organisation.
Software Designers will focus on methods and protocols how ICT can be
loosely coupled by making systems interoperable, both on the level of
user-centric value transaction and network-centric transaction
management.
Informed by these theoretical commitments we will now describe the
productsoftware Framework consisting of a user-centric part dealing
with new questions addressing complexity reduction and a netcentric
part dealing with questions around coordination in organisational,
managerial and engineering processing .
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User-‐centric
framework
In the traditional product&service landscape the User got to Value
through local services that were using productsoftware behind the
scene. This was very local Value but
the route to it was fairly simple.
Because of the increased
medialisation between product and
service - that connected software
ecosystems brought on - the scope of
Value that became available was
greatly enlarged, but also the Data &
Systems complexity the user was
faced with80.
A huge opportunity for vendors and customer alike now lies in
analysing the foraging behavior of users81. By finding correlations in
users’ behaviors recommendations
about User Value can be made on
the basis of profile similarity. This
can be seen as the Social route to
Value. The alternative is the
Rational route to Value. Here
correlations in users’ behavior can
be used to improve usability of
foraging functionality. This
informs the architecture of
processing. The current emphasis on mining (analysing the behavior of
workers82, analysing the behavior of engineers83) is indicative thereof.
The main Utility Challenge for productsoftware research is therefore
hygiene of processing that optimises Usability and safeguards Profiling.
Data
&
Systems
complexity
has
increased
due
to
upscaling
of
the
medium
Users
deal
with
data
&
systems
complexity
while
foraging
for
value
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Out of this increased medialisation that makes visible the digital traces
of foraging behavior the 9 research topics arise that have been
described in more detail in the section Research Agenda.
Our core focus is becoming consciously capable in managing
participation in heterogeneous networks of software, ways of working
and ways of organising. From an engineering perspective we see the
rise of the SOA paradigm that capatilises on the principles of
information hiding and
dependency
minimalisation. As for
now the emphasis lies on
design time, but emergent
runtime qualities remain
largely unchecked. We
are consciously incapable
in this area. We see this in
the rise of questions
around privacy and
security brought forth by
new forms of interfaces
and social technologies
based on process and
data mining techniques.
Their interplay has to be
looked upon as a whole
and we need to revisit our
methods, protocols,
languages and standards to see how they interoperate. This needs to
driven by an organisational strategy, but this time the organisation is
virtual consisting of different partnering organisations. Partnering is
difficult. Full fruition is often stalled because of organisation-centric
incentives schemes. We are consciously incapable in this area. We see
the rise of Strategic Alliances in joint products but in a lot of cases this
IIP
productsoftware
research
framework
:
user-centric
part
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bogs down in the jurisdictive qaugmire. We are consciously incapable in
this area. In all three areas defusing the conflict potential has begun by
unbundling organisations, processes and tools so that their components
can be re-assembled per coalition, per project and per task. We have to
become consciously capable in these areas to simplify access to societal
and economic products for the User.
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Netcentric
framework
Productsoftware is designed for a
market, but runs for a particular
customer. One dilemma therefore is
how to reuse functionality in an
optimal way, but allow for
configuration by the customer.
Productsoftware has to be deployed
by the Vendor in an environment
over which they have no control.
The dependencies in the host
environment can cause performance problems that are attributed to the
product, while it is really the host environment that is debit.
Productsoftware has different releases and if the Customer upgrades its
version configuration settings, databases and custimisations have to be
maintained.
The productsoftware landscape is
changing because of the
opportunity to re-arrange what is
done at the vendor and what is
done at the customer. Because of
an increase in Technical Capacity,
devices become powerful and the
network becomes faster, vendors
are experimenting with different
modes of delivery. We see a shift
from onpremise deployment to
online deployment. The latter is often referred to as Software as a
Service (Saas). The phenomenon of deploying functionality and data
online is called Cloud Computing. This re-arrangement changes the
distribution of costs: the Total of Cost of Ownership for the customer
reduces because he needs no more hardware and personnel. The vendor
Increase
in
Technical
Capacity
and
Business
Commodification
creates
new
research
questions
Productsoftware
vendors
work
in
software
ecosystems
and
need
to
coordinate
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can now serve several customers from one application container which
is called Multi-tenancy. This eases deployment and maintenance
because all customers are running on the same instance. It complicates
variability and quality issues because now all variations have to be
catered for in the same code base. Also the load of the instance varies to
a much greater extent than before. Partitioning of customer data is
sought after.
There is also threat that drives change in the productsoftware
landscape. Software products commodify fast because supply increases
fast: software engineering skills become more abundant. On the other
hand demand is stalled by legacy investments which make the market
saturated. Productsoftware is a fighting market, but also Open Source
solutions mature fast and services surrounding them become more
professional as well.
Because of the opportunity of Technical Capacity increase and the
threat of Business Commodification the competitive edge shifts to
networked applications delivered by networked businesses. Vendors are
specializing and partnering in software ecosystems and the Customer
now deals with an ecosystem portals. Vendor are refactoring their
applications into modules and components that augment ecosystem
platforms. All of these now often run online in a Service Oriented
Architecture in which services are orchestrated by a broker.
Conceptually, this introduces the need for coordination in between
designtime and runtime.
In terms of productsoftware engineering we can now distinguish
between the corners of the matrix and the cross that is emerging from
the middle. The corners represent the areas that are well-known but
that are now affected by networking demands. We will call these the
innovation corners.
The areas in the middle cross are relatively unknown and are in need of
more research. We will therefore refer to these areas as the research
cross.
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These areas of research &
innovation have been
described in more detail
in the section Research
Agenda.
For these areas methods,
protocols, languages and
standards have to
investigated and
improved. This holds for
engineering, managerial
and organisational fields.
Our engineering field is
informed by the work
done in the web-services
area, best referred to as
Service Oriented
Architeture.
Our managerial field is informed by Software Development
methodologies, ranging from Waterfallclass methodologies for quality-
centric design to Incrementation-centric methodologies for utility-
centric design.
Our organisational field is informed by thinking about modular
organisations and business networks.
These are three levels of analysis and logic that mutually inform and
build on each other. Our aim is to investigate how we lift a utilitarian
best effort approach onto a more defined level which may allow us to
introduce Quality of Service. QoS in loose coupling.
All three levels of engineering, management and organisation have in
common that they need to be conceptually recasted to work in
ooordinated networks. This conceptual recasting on an engineering
IIP
Productsoftware
Research
Framework
:
net-centric
part
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level is known as Service Oriented Architecture. On a managerial level
this is known as business process redesign, unbundling processes into
atomic tasks that can re-assembled per project and coalition. On an
organisational level this is known as toppling (kantelen) towards a
customer- or citizen-centric perspective. All three paradigms introduce
brokering concepts: the service broker, the director manager, the
midoffice. They move away from central command&control paradigms
and are looking at decentral peer-2-peer paradigms. Research in these
areas tries to articulate different variants of
orchestration and choreography in relation
to the degree of turbulence in the
environment . From an engineering stance
the conceptual ambition is to create a service
delivery infrastructure84 that allows
management of service delivery quality. Like
TCP introduced QoS on the Network
Transport layer as alternative to UDP we are
now looking for a way to introduce QoS in
networks of productsoftware,
productsoftware management and software
ecosystems. With TCP the notion of the Virtual Circuit was introduced.
We now need to find out what virtual products and virtual organisations
are and what federated management is.
Service
Delivery
Infrastructure
according
to
Flederius,
TNO
(Future
Internet
–
PPP
2010)
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