Co-Engineering Applications and Adaptive Business Technologies in Practice: Enterprise Service Ontologies, Models, and Frameworks

Business services change, and the technology supporting them has to change with them. This book explores how organizations can bring business and IT perspectives together through a co-engineering approach to enterprise services—connecting strategic needs, architecture, operations, and ongoing improvement.

Jay Ramanathan and Rajiv Ramnath first develop an Adaptive Complex Enterprise (ACE) framework, then turn to examples of how its concepts and work products can be applied. The result is a structured look at the decisions involved in aligning IT with complex, evolving service organizations.

A framework for business and IT co-engineering

The opening chapters introduce service orientation and the adaptive enterprise, then examine the ACE framework’s ontology, modeling concepts, principles, and work products. Later chapters consider governance, alignment among conceptual, logical, and installed architectures, enterprise knowledge infrastructure, and operational service patterns.

From architecture concepts to organizational practice

The book’s second section applies the framework to practical concerns: strategic improvement of non-routine services, connecting business needs with IT services, and engineering IT services for lean operations. Further chapters address service knowledge management, monitoring and mining knowledge, service innovation, and research challenges in complex systems.

By linking models and principles to these varied examples, the book gives readers a way to think about business and technology decisions as connected parts of service delivery—not as separate planning exercises.

For enterprise and information-systems readers

Practicing professionals, advanced students, and academics interested in enterprise architecture, business information systems, service delivery, and business–IT alignment will find a detailed, research-oriented treatment of the subject. It is especially relevant to readers looking for a framework-based perspective on how organizations plan and improve IT-enabled services.