The Internet of Things (IoT) is recognised as one of the most disruptive technologies in the market as it integrates physical objects into the networked society. As such, the IoT also transforms established business-to-customer interactions. Remote patient monitoring, predictive maintenance, and automatic car repair are examples of evolving business-to-thing (B2T) interactions. However, the IoT is hardly covered by theoretical investigations. To complement the predominant technical and engineering focus of IoT research, we developed and evaluated a taxonomy of B2T interaction patterns. Thereby, we built on sociomateriality as justificatory knowledge. We demonstrated the taxonomy’s applicability and usefulness based on simple and complex real-life objects (i.e., Nest, RelayRides, and Uber). Our taxonomy contributes to the descriptive knowledge on the IoT as it enables the classification of B2T interactions and facilitates sense-making as well as theory-led design. When combining weak and strong sociomateriality, we found that the IoT enables and requires a new perspective on material agency by considering smart things as independent actors.

Cooperative information systems (CIS) are at the core of a digital economy that is dedicated to providing hyper-connected citizens with access to intuitive and sophisticated technology. No longer are commercial applications the only driver of development activities, but wider societal and individual deployment areas are now explored. CIS researchers have for more than two decades studied the nature and requirements of cooperative systems linking latest technologies with hybrid user bases. However, the current opportunity-rich landscape of digital technologies such as mobile and social computing, advanced data analytics, robotic process automation or smart devices has triggered entire new, exciting research questions. In light of this setting, the 23rd International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems took place within the context of the 14th OnTheMove Federated Conferences and Workshops in Rhodes, Greece, in October 2015. This Special Issue features the carefully selected and comprehensively reviewed best papers from this event.

Business process modeling is widely regarded as one of the most popular forms of conceptual modeling. However, little is known about the capabilities and deficiencies of process modeling grammars and how existing deficiencies impact actual process modeling practice. This paper is a first contribution towards a theory-driven, exploratory empirical investigation of the ontological deficiencies of process modeling with the industry standard Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). We perform an analysis of BPMN using a theory of ontological expressiveness. Through a series of semi-structured interviews with BPMN adopters we explore empirically the actual use of this grammar. Nine ontological deficiencies related to the practice of modeling with BPMN are identified, for example, the capture of business rules and the specification of process decompositions. We also uncover five contextual factors that impact on the use of process modeling grammars, such as tool support and modeling conventions. We discuss implications for research and practice, highlighting the need for consideration of representational issues and contextual factors in decisions relating to BPMN adoption in organizations.

Although the service-oriented paradigm has been well established in the technical domain for quite some time now, service governance is still considered a research gap. To ensure adequate governance, there is a necessity to manage services as first-class assets throughout the lifecycle. Now that the concept of service-orientation is also increasingly applied on the business level to structure an organisation's capabilities, the problem has become an even bigger challenge. This paper presents a generic business and software service lifecycle and aligns it with the common management layers in organisations. Using service analysis as an example, it moreover illustrates how activities in the service lifecycle may vary on lower levels of granularity depending on the focus on business or software services.

Although the benefits of service orientation are prevalent in literature, a review, analysis, and evaluation of the 30 existing service analysis approaches presented in this paper have shown that a comprehensive approach to the identification and analysis of both business and supporting software services is missing. Based on this evaluation of existing approaches and additional sources, we close this gap by proposing an integrated, consolidated approach to business and software service analysis that combines and extends the strengths of the examined methodologies.

Service Science, Management, and Engineering (SSME) is a research area with significant relevance to research and practice. Networked systems of web services are a field of service science that enjoys growing interest from researchers. The complex and dynamic environment of these service ecosystems poses new requirements on quality management that are insufficiently addressed by current approaches that focus mainly on the technical aspects of quality. This focus is a severe limitation for the development of service networks because it neglects perceived service quality from the viewpoint of service consumers. In this paper we propose a reference model for quality management in service ecosystems. This reference model is linked in particular to innovation and new service development. Towards the end we propose premises for the implementation and outline a future research agenda.

The common presupposition of enterprise systems (ES) is that they lead to significant efficiency gains. However, this is only the case for well-implemented ES that are well-aligned with the organisation. The list of ES implementation failures is significant which is partly attributable to the insufficiently addressed fundamental problem of adapting an ES efficiently. As long as it is not intuitively possible to configure an ES, this problem will prevail because organisations have a non-generic character. A solution to this problem consists in re-thinking current practices of ES provision. This paper proposes a new approach based on configurable process models, which reflect ES functionalities. We provide in this paper a taxonomy of situations that can occur from a business perspective during process model configuration. This taxonomy is represented via so-called semantic configuration patterns. In the next step, we discuss so-called syntactic configuration patterns. This second type of configuration patterns implements the semantic configuration patterns for specific modelling techniques. We chose two popular process modelling languages in order to illustrate our approach.

Business process modelling has gained widespread acceptance as a valuable design and management technique for a variety of purposes. While there has been much research on process modelling techniques and corresponding tools, there has been little empirical research into the success factors of effective process modelling, and the post hoc evaluation of process modelling success. This paper reports on the first attempt to identify process modelling success factors and measures, as empirically evidenced in case studies of nine process modelling projects in three leading Australian organizations.

Enterprise systems interoperability (ESI) is an important topic for business currently. This situation is evidenced, at least in part, by the number and extent of potential candidate protocols for such process interoperation, viz., ebXML, BPML, BPEL, and WSCI. Wide-ranging support for each of these candidate standards already exists. However, despite broad acceptance, a sound theoretical evaluation of these approaches has not yet been provided. We use the Bunge-Wand-Weber (BWW) models, in particular, the representation model, to provide the basis for such a theoretical evaluation. We, and other researchers, have shown the usefulness of the representation model for analyzing, evaluating, and engineering techniques in the areas of traditional and structured systems analysis, object-oriented modeling, and process modeling. In this work, we address the question, what are the potential semantic weaknesses of using ebXML alone for process interoperation between enterprise systems? We find that users lack important implementation information because of representational deficiencies; due to ontological redundancy, the complexity of the specification is unnecessarily increased; and, users of the specification have to bring in extra-model knowledge to understand constructs in the specification due to instances of ontological excess.

For many years in the area of business systems analysis and design, practitioners and researchers alike have been searching for some comprehensive basis on which to evaluate, compare, and engineer techniques that are promoted for use in the modelling of systems’ requirements. To date, while many frameworks, factors, and facets have been forthcoming, none appear to be based on a sound theory. In light of this dilemma, over the last 10 years, attention has been devoted by researchers to the use of ontology to provide some theoretical basis for the advancement of the business systems modelling discipline. This paper outlines how we have used a particular ontology for this purpose over the last five years. In particular, we have learned that the understandability and the applicability of the selected ontology must be clear for IS professionals, the results of any ontological evaluation must be tempered by economic efficiency considerations of the stakeholders involved, and ontologies may have to be focused for the business purpose and type of user involved in the modelling situation.