Towards a Method Family Supporting Information Services Co-creation in the Transdisciplinary Context

Jolita Ralyté University of Geneva, Institute of Services Science, Switzerland

ABSTRACT Increasing popularity of the notion of service in the enterprise business and information systems development facilitates the creation of new types of inter-organizational and multidisciplinary collaboration and value co-creation. Simple exchange of services between organizations evolves into the co-creation of transdisciplinary services shared by all involved partners. In this paper we introduce the notion of transdisciplinarity and discuss how to support information services co-creation in this new context. For this purpose, we identify and explore four main principles (communication, collaboration, co-innovation, and agility) to be implemented in the transdisciplinary information services co-creation – the challenges that their implementation entails and the existing approaches and techniques that support their implementation. Finally, we propose a method family approach as a means to create new methods including a large variability of techniques and providing configuration mechanisms. In particular, we demonstrate how to create a method family providing a flexible and agile process model based on the transdisciplinarity principles and allowing to combine techniques and approaches from different disciplines in order to support collaborative creativity, modeling and development of transdisciplinary services.

Keywords. Information service, transdisciplinarity, co-creation, co-innovation, collaboration, method family

INTRODUCTION The continuous progress towards a networked, globalized and service-driven economy

emphasizes the need of designing new organizational forms and business models supporting multidisciplinary collaboration and value co-creation. In this context, the notion of service plays a major role in the enterprise development, innovation and prosperity. Different types of services can be mentioned: services to the customers and/or citizens, services supporting inter-organizational collaborations and value exchanges between business partners, as well as services enabling intra-organizational activities.

Enabling these new organizational models and activities inevitably leads to a deep transformation of enterprise Information Systems (IS). The adoption of service-oriented paradigm in the IS development and evolution seems to be a promising approach to cope with the constantly increasing IS complexity and fragmentation, information duplication and inconsistency. There is a clear need for a well-defined modularity and flexibility in the IS development in order to facilitate IS evolution and to guarantee their alignment with the new business and organizational requirements.

The concept of “information service” appears as a new building block to design service-oriented IS (Arni-Bloch et al., 2009; Arni-Bloch & Ralyté, 2008). Design and development of information services and information service-driven architectures become key to the success of organizations and their business.

 

Chesbrough and Spohrer (2006) argue that there is still a lack of a strong foundation for designing and managing service systems and service value creation networks. As a response to this argument, new approaches are emerging. For example, Le Dinh and Nguyen-Ngoc (2010) present a conceptual framework for designing service-oriented inter-organizational information systems. In (Le Dinh & Léonard, 2009) a conceptual framework based on information overlap analysis is provided as a foundation for a thorough understanding of services systems and modeling service value creation networks. A conceptual framework for service modeling in a network of service systems is proposed in (Le Dinh & Pham-Thi, 2010). Last but not least, Regev et al. (2011) discuss service systems and value modeling from an appreciative system perspective.

However, all these approaches consider services systems, networks and their architectures rather than the definition of the service itself. The design of information services and services systems in the new multidisciplinary and collaborative context is only very slightly investigated in the literature. In our previous work (Ralyté & Léonard, 2011) we have explored the potentiality that the notion of information service offers to the enterprise in terms of innovation and value co-creation. In that paper we have also revealed the challenges of this emerging transformation of the IS world into the information services systems world.

In this paper we extend our work presented in (Ralyté, 2012) where we explore how the inter-organizational collaboration context affects and extends the engineering process of new information services. In particular, we consider information services dedicated to support the collaboration of several partners from different business and/or public sectors. We name these services – transdisciplinary information services. The theory of the transdisciplinarity and the fundamentals in communication, collaboration, innovation and agility are the main drivers of our research in the field of transdisciplinary information services co-creation. In particular, we investigate the challenges of applying the transdisciplinarity principles in the new information services design and the approaches, techniques and methods from different disciplines that could be pertinent in their engineering process. The diversity of engineering situations and the multiplicity of suitable design techniques demonstrate that the formalization of the information service engineering process by one global methodology is not possible. A family of methods seems to be a better approach to deal with this diversity.

The notion of method family (Rolland, 2007; Asadi et al., 2011) was introduced as a new approach for situation-specific method engineering allowing to capture the variability of system engineering situations and corresponding techniques into one model that could be easily configured into a particular method line according to the situation at hand. In our case, the concept of method family allows us to cope with the multiplicity of service engineering situations and to offer the possibility to define a particular and configurable method line for each well-defined situation. Therefore, the aim of this work is to define a method family supporting the co-creation of transdisciplinary information services taking into account the transdisciplinarity principles and following situational method engineering approach. Our method family will provide a flexible, agile and situation-driven process model where various method components from different disciplines can be combined in order to support collaborative creativity, modeling and development of transdisciplinary information services.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows: in the next two sections we define and illustrate the concept of information service and the form it takes in the transdisciplinary context. Then, we discuss the notion of transdisciplinarity and its principles (communication, collaboration, co-innovation and agility) to be considered during the information services co-creation. The existing approaches and techniques that support the implementation of these principles are also discussed in this section. Finally, we propose a method family approach as a means to provide a rich and flexible methodological support for the co-creation of information services in the transdisciplinary context. The last section concludes the presentation and discusses our future perspectives.

 

THE CONCEPT OF INFORMATION SERVICE The concept of service is not new and today is widely used in both computer and business

sciences. However, many authors emphasize that the definition of service differs considerably from one research field to another and even within these fields. For example, Quartel et al. (2007) identify six categories of services related to the business and computer science domains. According to their classification a service can be: an interaction, a capability, an operation, an application, a feature or an observable behavior of a system. The probably most generic definition of a service is given by IBM (IBM Research, 2012), which says “a service is a provider/client interaction that creates and captures value”. The OASIS Reference model for service oriented architecture (MacKenzie, et al., 2006) perceives a service as a capability offered by a system or an entity, called service provider, to another entity called service consumer. In this model a service is also defined as “a mechanism to enable access to one or more capabilities…” Baida et al. (2004) define services as “business activities that often result in intangible outcomes or benefits; they are offered by a service provider to its environment”.

Other service definitions are more technology-oriented and dealing with different granularity levels. They range from a simple operation or a method defined on an object or a component in object-oriented and component-based design to a full application or a software component – typically a web service. For example, the W3C Working group (2004) defines a web service as “a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network”.

In most of these definitions, the concept of service is built on an input-output schema where the autonomy of a service can be defined easily. However, in the enterprise IS situation, services enable business activities, which means their content overlap. They have to share classes, integrity rules, actors, roles, events, processes, etc. Therefore, the autonomy of services in the IS domain must be defined in a different way. Besides, the information aspects are not really considered in these definitions. In the IS domain, information represents the knowledge necessary to make the business run: to carry out business activities, to report on business performance and to take decisions for the future. These aspects have to appear in the service definition.

In our recent work we have proposed a new type of service adapted to the IS domain and named information service (Arni-Bloch & Ralyté, 2008). We define an information service as “a component of an information system representing a well defined business unit that offers capabilities to realize business activities and owns resources (data, rules, roles) to realize these capabilities” (Arni-Bloch et al., 2009). Conversely, an IS is seen as built of a collection of interoperable information services. This approach aims to reduce the fragmentation of IS and to facilitate legacy IS evolution by integrating new services. More exactly, in this approach the definition of an information service includes four interrelated information spaces: static, dynamic, rule and role. The main concepts of this definition are shown in Figure 1, which depicts the simplified version of the metamodel for representing the information space of an information service; the detailed metamodel can be found in (Arni-Bloch & Ralyté, 2008; Arni-Bloch, 2009). We define the four information spaces as follows:

• The static space represents the data structure of the service (the set of classes and their relationships). The notion of hyperclass, introduced by Turki & Léonard (2002) to represent information systems components, is used here to embody complex domain concepts by putting together the corresponding set of classes. Classes are linked only via existential dependencies and specialization relationships. An existential dependency is materialized via an attribute with mandatory and permanent constraints.

• The dynamic space defines the capabilities of the service – the set of actions that can be executed by the service. An action is triggered by an event that occurs in the service information space and is described by a process to be executed, which can be a simple function or a more complex interaction involving several actors. An action produces one or more effects on the static space, e.g. create an object of a class, modify an attribute, etc. The notion of effect is used to

 

characterize the result of the action and allows to evaluate the impact of the action on the rule space.

• The rule space defines the set of rules that govern the service, i.e. business rules expressed as integrity constraints, and pre- and post-conditions of actions. An integrity constraint has a scope, which includes all the effects that could transgress the rule. Such an effect is called a risk of the rule.

• The role space defines the actors of the service – their organizational roles and the rights and responsibilities they have on the service actions.

Class

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Organizational Role

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Effect

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Actor OrgFunction

Existential Dependency

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EffectOnClass

PreCond

PostCond Scope

Risk

ReferenceCl

DependantCl

Event Trigger

Static Space Dynamic Space

Rule Space Role Space

Figure 1: Simplified metamodel for representing the information space of an information service

As an example, let us consider the service for merchandise transportation planning used by a transportation company. The simplified information model of this service, including the four information spaces, is illustrated in Figure 2. We use an integrated modeling notation to represent the whole information space (data, actions, rules and roles) of the service in the same model. However, it should be noticed that separate diagrams (e.g. different UML models) could be used to represent the same information. The integrated model permits to visualize the interactions between the four information spaces and to guaranty their consistency. As shown in this figure, the static space of this service includes the definition of goods, their categories and transportation conditions, the definition of trucks and their categories, the drivers and served destinations, etc. The dynamic space defines the actions like creation/modification of goods, trucks, drivers, route planning including the association of goods to the corresponding truck, allocation of the driver and definition of the itinerary, etc. The rule space defines the business rules as for example, which goods cannot be transported together, what kind of truck can be allocated to each category of goods, the category of driver to be allocated to a category of route, etc., and integrity constraints as for example the truck size must be sufficient for the allocated goods volume.

 

Finally, the role space defines the actors that will use this service, such as transportation manager, driver, and quality controller, each of them having a particular responsibility: while the transportation manager can create, modify or delete the routes, the driver can only read the information related to the route allocated to him, etc.

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Figure 2. An excerpt of the information model of the information service for merchandise transportation planning

INFORMATION SERVICES IN THE TRANSDISCIPLINARY CONTEXT Advances in the field of information technology as well as business innovations generate more

and more new situations where inter-organizational collaboration is encouraged or even required. Information services seem to be an adequate means to enable multidisciplinary collaborations and new value co-creation. However, it should be noticed that their engineering requires involving all the concerned organizations in the common service co-creation project, where each organization is equally responsible for the service quality. In such a situation, the distinction between service provider and service consumer is not always clear – each partner is expected to provide and aims to consume service information and capabilities, and can be called “service prosumer”. In this case, an information service needs to take into account the transdisciplinary aspects – to serve several organizations and/or activity domains with common as well as personalized information and capabilities. The scope of the information service has to cover the needs of each related organization and, at the same time, to go beyond these needs – to offer some new added value. Figure 3 depicts the metamodel for defining transdisciplinary information service engineering contexts. It allows to identify service partners that can be organization, departments/activity domains or individual persons. Each partner plays one or more roles regarding the service. A role can be classified as a consumer, a provider or a prosumer. A particular service value has to be identified for each partner. Service information space is defined by using the metamodel depicted in Figure 1. It includes the information spaces of all partners’ roles.

 

Consumer

Provider

Prosumer Service Service

information space

Partner Value

ValueForActor

Role information

space Part of

Organization

Activity Domain

Person

Role Name

Figure 3. Metamodel for describing transdisciplinary information service engineering contexts

The information space of a transdisciplinary service will include the information spaces of all involved partners with regards to their roles in the collaboration. It can also include new elements that concern the service added value and that will only exist in the new transdisciplinary context:

• Static space: the new collaborative context implies the partner organizations to share some existing data and also to create the new one with respect to the collaboration requirements. Therefore, there is a clear need to guarantee that the shared data is unambiguously understood by all involved partners.

• Dynamic space: a distinction should be made between common, personalized and overlapping actions and their effects on each organization.

• Role space: for each organization, roles and responsibilities related to the service usage have to be identified. Because organizations may have similar roles, inconsistent overlaps and potential conflicts have to be identified and resolved. Besides, some service capabilities could necessitate the definition of new – transdisciplinary – roles to perform them.

• Rule space: because of the overlapping actions and new transdisciplinary roles, it can be necessary to create new transdisciplinary rules to ensure their consistency and the integrity of the related data.

Based on this reasoning, we define the transdisciplinary information service as an information service that represents a business unit supporting the inter-collaboration of two or more organizations (or business departments) and provides new and distinctive added value. All organizations share the same information space but each of them is offered with customized capabilities.

As an example, let us consider the creation of a service for dangerous materials (liquids, gas, radioactive substances, etc.) transportation planning (we will call it DMTP service). A large number of organizations would be concerned by this service: the owners of dangerous materials, public security, transporters, warehouses, customs, police, hospitals, etc. The competence, knowledge and/or obligations of all these professions are necessary to make this service possible. For example, the role of the transporter is to organize merchandize transfer (as service provider). However, because of legal restrictions, this organization cannot operate alone, it needs to obtain various permissions, approved itinerary and escort (as service consumer). The public security department has an obligation to ensure that the transfer will be secure; it provides security instructions and gives permissions (as service provider) and is informed about the transfer details (as service consumer). Similarly, the police will also play different roles as service provider and/or consumer. The added value of this service is in the seamless coordination of actions and responsibilities of all involved partners having different goals and/or obligations but converging to the same main objective – to enable a secure transportation of dangerous materials.

 

In comparison with the simple transportation planning service described above (Figure 2), the information space of the transdisciplinary DMTP service will be extended. The static space will be completed with the information related to the security of the transportation (available hospitals, road conditions, storage conditions, security requirements, permissions and certificates, etc.). The dynamic space will have to offer new actions related to the new data management as for example, the possibility to define the new security conditions for each type of material, the itinerary definition based on the related route map, warning notifications, etc. The rule space will include new rules related to the new business activities. Some examples: the police will have to validate each itinerary, a sufficient number of policemen and appropriate vehicles will have to be associated to the convoy to ensure the security of the transportation, and so on. Finally, the role space will include several new roles like police responsible for dangerous transportation, public security administrator, hospital manager, etc. A small part of this service information space is illustrated in Figure 4.

to## Route#

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Figure 4. An excerpt of the information model of the information service for dangerous materials transportation planning

FUNDAMENTALS FOR ENGINEERING TRANSDISCIPLINARY INFORMATION SERVICES

While traditional IS development mainly focuses on one discipline (one business area), creation of new transdisciplinary information services requires a transdisciplinary approach where a range of professions with different competences and different knowledge background has to collaborate. In this section we define first the notion of transdisciplinarity in the information services development context. Then, we discuss four principles, namely communication, collaboration, innovation and agility that in our opinion are fundamental to enable information services co-creation in the transdisciplinary context.

Transdisciplinarity In order to understand the notion of transdisciplinarity we can compare it with the

interdisciplinarity. Indeed, the two terms, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, mean interaction between two or more disciplines. However, their semantics are different. The prefix “inter” is defined as

 

“between, among, in the midst of, reciprocally, shared by”1 and therefore represents an interaction and interchange between the disciplines. It concerns the transfer of methods and knowledge from one discipline to another, allowing research to spill over disciplinary boundaries, but staying within the framework of disciplinary research.

Differently, the prefix “trans” is defined as going “across, beyond, trough”2 the limits of each involved discipline. In line with this definition, Nicolescu (2002) states that transdisciplinarity “concerns that which is at once between the disciplines, across the different disciplines, and beyond each individual discipline”. Similarly, Max-Neef (2005) says that “transdisciplinarity, more that a new discipline or super-discipline is, actually, a different manner of seeing the world, more systematic and more holistic”.

Therefore, while the interdisciplinarity concerns the transfer of methods from one discipline to another but staying within the framework of disciplinary research, the transdisciplinarity promotes the creation of a completely new holistic approach on the basis of methods, techniques and tools of different disciplines.

Young (2000) identifies four main components that determine transdisciplinarity:

1. The presence of research questions generally emerging because of changing circumstances (e.g. new technologies or new business models) that generate complex and elusive problems;

2. The subject matter determined by the overlap of multiple disciplines;

3. The distinctive lenses created by the systematic use of multiple methods drown from multiple disciplines;

4. A solution that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Therefore, a transdisciplinary approach for the development of information services has to consider the scale, complexity, elusiveness and novelty of the problem, and to provide guidance (methods, patterns, techniques) based on the cross-cultural expertise, knowledge and data.

According to Somerwille and Rapport (2000), a transdisciplinary approach is something more than only bringing together people from different disciplines – a “magic ingredient” is required to carry out the co-creation process successfully. This magic ingredient is identified as a “transcendence”, which is defined by Somerwille and Rapport (2000) as “the giving up of sovereignty on the part of any one of the contributing disciplines, and the formation, out of the divers mix, of new insight by way of emergent properties.” In the transdisciplinary services co-creation process, each organization not only has to find its own interest and value but also it has to be able to contribute to the common new value co-creation. Establishment of a win-win situation is very important for all involved partners in order to foster their collaboration and orchestrate processes among them. However, it is not sufficient. To achieve transdisciplinarity, it is necessary to create a more advanced situation called “win more–win more” (Ramaswamy, 2009) situation where involved organizations not only create a common value but also efficiently create a unique value.

Most of the value co-creation approaches and frameworks are limited to the inclusion of customers in the service/product creation process (Payne et al., 2008; Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004; Ramaswamy, 2009; Fragidis et al., 2011). They mainly aim to enable customers, users and/or citizens in creating, modifying and integrating services to develop individualized solutions that meet their unique needs. In the field of IS, the co-creation of services is not only about customers’ involvement it is also about the collaboration of all concerned information service partners. For example, in the creation of the service for dangerous materials transportation planning (DMTP), the merchandise owner is only one of many involved partners. While his/her objective is obvious (to have merchandise transported from one location to another), objectives and responsibilities of other partners have to be discovered and specified.

The discussion above reveals that the creation of information services in the transdisciplinary context is not obvious. There is a clear need for an appropriate methodology but first a few questions have

 

to be answered: How to involve all the related organizations in the transdisciplinary service creation? How to make all these involved people work together? How to ensure that they understand each other? How to transform and/or unify their ways of working and their ways of thinking? We look for the answers to these questions by analyzing what is really particular in the transdisciplinary services creation or, more exactly the co-creation. In this perspective we identify four principles that we believe are key in the transdisciplinary information services co-creation process:

1. the communication between the participants from different organizations involved in the service engineering project,

2. their collaboration including motivation, initiatives and availability in creating the service,

3. the co-innovation where each participant brings means not only to discover its own value but also to create a new transdisciplinary one, and

4. the agility of the engineering process.

We discuss these four principles in the sub-sections below. Main challenges and existing solutions related to each of these principles are summarized in the end of this section in Table 1.

Communication While the communications process itself is not really a problem because of the large variety of

existing communication tools and channels, the communication challenge in the transdisciplinary service co-creation context consists in guaranteeing that all information exchanged between the involved partners is complete and unambiguous.

Indeed, communication plays a critical role in the process of knowledge gathering and sharing where several different actors aim to reach a common understanding. The situation becomes even more serious when the actors are from different organizations. Different organizations generally mean different knowledge, different experiences and especially different vocabularies. All these factors hinder the achievement of a high quality communication and need to be taken into account seriously.

Use of ontologies is considered as a potential solution to ensure communication and knowledge sharing between different professions working in a common information services development project (Yurchyshyna & Leonard, 2009; Yurchyshyna & Opprecht, 2010). Domain ontologies can help people to familiarize themselves with other disciplines involved in the transdisciplinary service co-creation and to learn their vocabularies. For instance, in the case of the DMTP service development, we would need ontologies for the transportation domain, for the public security domain, for the police domain, and probably some more. However, learning from domain ontologies is probably insufficient, because, as discussed in the previous section, the transdisciplinarity needs to go beyond the scope of the involved application domains and aims to create something totally new. Therefore, it requires its own ontology – a common language dedicated to the new transdisciplinary service domain – which helps to agree upon a shared terminology and a set of constrains on the objects in the ontology.

Defining a common ontology can appear a rather cumbersome task; the same word can mean a different thing for persons from different activity domains. It needs to be created collectively by all project partners with at least one representative from each involved partner and with the help of an appropriate method. Besides, a facilitator could be relevant to assist the construction of this common ontology. Several generic ontology engineering approaches and tools have been proposed in the literature and can be adapted to the transdisciplinary ontology creation. Uschold and King (1995) propose a skeletal methodology for ontology building while Gruber in (1993) defines the basic ontology design criteria. We can also mention a few more elaborated ontology engineering approaches such as: METHODOLOGY – a complete ontology development process from scratch or by reusing other ontologies (Fernández et al., 1997), DOGMA – a methodological framework for “highly reusable and usable, easy to build and smoother to maintain” ontology engineering (Jarrar & Meersman, 2008), UPON – an approach for large-

 

scale ontology building based on unified software development process (De Nicola et al., 2009), OntoLearn – an approach for the extraction of domain ontologies from websites and other available documents (Navigli & Velardi, 2004), On-To-Knowledge (OTKM) – an approach for ontology development in the domain of knowledge management (Sure et al., 2004), TOVE – a formalized method for building ontologies based on competency questions (Uschold & Gruninger, 1996), etc.

Collaboration Two perspectives have to be considered to enable collaborative projects in general: people and

tools. People have to agree to work together and tools are necessary to co-produce and to share project results. In the transdisciplinary service co-creation context the challenges emerging from these two perspectives are even bigger.

Before starting any collaborative project, it is important to be sure that people involved in this project not only have required skills and knowledge but also are sufficiently motivated. Collaboration in an enthusiastic and cohesive team is generally much more productive than in an apathetic and fragmented one. Therefore, it is important to increase participants’ motivation and involvement in a transdisciplinary service co-creation and to maintain their interest until the end of the project. Use of games and team-building techniques is recommended to break the tension and anxiety in the team while the competition elements help to stimulate persons’ incentive. For example, Gray et al. (2010) provide a catalogue of games to support creativity and innovation sessions. A few games are especially dedicated to the team building, warming up before a collaborative session, and for increasing participants’ interest and curiosity. For example, the game named “Welcome to my world” gives participants an opportunity to better understand other players’ roles and responsibilities. Each player is asked to make a picture of its own activities and to do the same for another player. Then, each couple of pictures is compared and discussed in order to establish a more uniform understanding of the related profession. For instance, in our DMTP service project, this game would help the main actors (transportation manager, public security administrator, police responsible for dangerous transportations) to understand each other activities and responsibilities. Another game, named “Context Map”, aims to show the external factors, trends and forces surrounding the activity domain. For example, this game could help to identify political factors (e.g. new law projects concerning dangerous materials), landscape and climate aspects to be taken into account when planning transportations, technology factors that could improve transportation conditions (e.g. sensors, mobile devices, GPS, tracking devices), etc.

Collaboration of people from different disciplines and having different knowledge background can lead to the situations of confrontation, which can be positive or negative to the project realization. In any case, a conflict has to be resolved in order to preserve persons’ motivation and faith in the project. Taking decisions on service scope, features, information, rules, etc. demand project members to agree. However, because of the diversity of their background, their perception of the world, and therefore of the service under consideration, is naturally different. It is important to attain an agreement in a multidisciplinary team that there is no “one common truth”, but there are as many truths as partners in the team and each “personal truth” has to be respected. In extreme cases, it is necessary to set up a special role of team mediator. Mediators use various mediation, conciliation and negotiation techniques, like the ones proposed in (Gasser, 2012; Berghoff et al., 2007), to open, or improve, the dialogue between disputants, aiming to find invariants in different visions and to lead the group to a common arrangement. For example, during the DMTP service development, we can imagine a disagreement between the public security and the police concerning the validation of the transportation itinerary, because both of them could feel to be responsible for this task. An agreement in this case could be found in the corresponding law or (if the law does not provide any direct solution) by using some legal expert as a mediator.

From the tool support perspective, similarly to IS engineering, information service engineering uses various modeling techniques as a support for service requirements elicitation and design. Modeling is considered as the main activity in the service co-creation process where a number of people actively

 

contribute to the creation of models representing different perspectives of the service. Various approaches and tools supporting collaborative modeling are progressively emerging (van Bommel et al., 2006; Rittgen, 2007, 2009, 2010a,b), each of them considering different techniques to share knowledge and to co-create models. For example, Hoppenbrouwers et al. (2005) consider modeling as a structured conversation supporting knowledge elicitation, creation and dissemination. Rittgen (2007) investigates the role of conversations and loud thinking during collaborative modeling sessions and characterizes collaborative modeling as a negotiation process. In (2009) Rittgen identifies a set of problems that are often uncounted when doing modeling in groups and proposes means for solving these problems.

The roles that individuals can have in a collaborative modeling are also discussed in the literature. For example, Frederiks and van der Weide (2006) identify two principal roles: the domain expert who creates the initial informal model (generally described in a natural language) and the system analyst who abstracts the corresponding formal model. The role of domain expert is also mentioned in (van Bommel et al., 2006) together with the roles of modeling mediator, model builder and collaboration engineer. A particular attention we pay to the role of modeling facilitator (Rittgen, 2007), which is necessary to help in the integration of different views and different models. This role is even more important in the transdisciplinary approach. In the case of the DMTP service design, experts of the involved domains (transportation, public security, laws concerning dangerous materials, laws concerning merchandise transportation) could be involved in a collaborative service modeling.

Modeling tools alone are not sufficient to ensure the quality of the transdisciplinary service engineering. There is a need for a full and common design framework hosting people with different knowledge and skills (business, marketing, information, governance, security and computing) and supporting their collaborative service co-creation activities. The works by Le Dinh and Nguyen-Ngoc (2010) and Le Dinh and Pham-Thi (2010) aim to satisfy this need. While the first paper presents a conceptual framework for designing service-oriented inter-organizational information systems, the second one offers a conceptual framework for service modeling in a network of service systems.

Having a collaborative design platform is essential to support asynchronous co-modeling where people from different disciplines contribute to the common models directly from their workspaces. However, the offer of good collaborative modeling tools is rather poor. Riemer, et al. (2011) analyze 7 process modeling tools and finally deduce that any of them support asynchronous co-modeling even though they provide some collaborative features like version control, commenting and role management.

Hopefully, new proposals for collaborative design platforms are emerging. In particular, we can mention the collaborative modeling architecture (COMA) proposed in (Rittgen, 2010a) and the concept of cross-pollination space (CSP) introduced in (Yurchyshyna & Opprecht, 2010) as a collaborative platform enabling collective, transdisciplinary and co-creative activities for the generation of ideas and design of new business services. This CSP is based on the use of several ontologies (legal, domain, knowledge, etc.) and the concept of information kernel. While ontologies aim to facilitate communication and collaboration of people from different disciplines, the objective of the information kernel is to define and agree on service semantics.

We think that a good collaborative platform should offer guidance for the selection and use of different modeling techniques and tools according to the particular situation of the service development project, and to configure a project-specific method to be shred by project partners. To enable this type of facilities, the framework should adopt Situational Method Engineering (SME) principles (see (Henderson-Sellers & Ralyté, 2010) for the state of the art in the SME domain).

Co-innovation Innovation, or rather co-innovation, is in the heart of the transdisciplinary approach. The co-

creation of a new and unique service value asks the participants to be creative, to think differently and to agree on their invention. However, creativity is not something easy and natural to reach in the working

 

atmosphere and needs some particular stimulation. Inspiration can come from innovation games and creativity techniques that aim to foster people’s imagination, originality and creativity. In the contrary, in order to achieve an agreement between business partners on the service value, it is necessary to use methods and techniques allowing to specify this value in a shared semi-formal language. We are convinced that both types of techniques, game-based and method-based, could be combined in the transdisciplinary service co-creation process.

In the domain of information and software systems engineering, the use of creativity techniques is mainly encouraged in the requirements elicitation and domain information discovery phase. Maiden et al. (2010) consider requirements engineering as a creative problem solving process and present a collection of creativity theories, techniques, tools and trainings that can be adopted to improve requirements engineering research and practice. A tool supporting creative thinking during requirements elicitation process is presented in (Karlsen et al., 2009). In (2004) Maiden et al. report on their very positive experience in applying creativity techniques during the requirements process for an aircraft traffic control system. The authors also discuss lessons learned, report the main encountered problems and provide recommendations to overcome them. For example, they report that creativity techniques based on analogical reasoning (comparing the analysis domain with other completely different domains) need step-by-step guidance and time to illuminate analogical ideas. The authors also insist on the necessity to structure and plan creativity workshops, to find a champion for each workshop and to give participants some time to let off steam before being creative.

Similarly, Mahaux and Heymans (2012) propose to use improvisational theater (improv) games for discovering and designing new information services. They claim that improv games support team-based innovation by providing techniques for improving communication between participants, increasing their mutual understanding, open-mindedness, creativity, empathy, self and mutual confidence and agility. Besides, the notion of “story-telling”, used in the improv games, helps generating and testing new ideas.

Furthermore, several games for stimulating innovation and creativity are collected in dedicated books. For example, Gray et al. (2010) propose an important collection of games classified into four categories: core games, games for opening, games for exploring and games for closing. In this book they also provide a full approach, called “gamestorming”, which explains how to put these games in practice. Another collection of innovation games, like “buy a feature”, “product box”, “remember the future”, proposed in (Hohmann, 2009) as “product” innovation tools, can be customized to the service creation. All these novel techniques help to define the roles of participants and the ways to exploit their knowledge and skills, to create the atmosphere of confidence and trust between the co-creators and to foster their imagination. For example, the game named “Product box” was adapted to the service design domain and named “Create service box”. Small groups of participants are provided with a white paper box and the material to decorate it. Each group is invited to express service features, values and user experiences on the box by using pictures, colors, slogans, etc. Then, a representative of each group has to tell a story about the service by using this decorated box. This non-traditional way of expressing ideas and sharing them with other participants increases people’s creativity and cultivates their innovation abilities. The author of this paper has participated in various “Create service box” workshops where services for different domains, such as e-administration, unique portal for small and medium enterprises, life long learning, children care, etc., have been explored and invented by people from different organizations and having different knowledge background (ThinkServices, 2010). The experience of the author is really positive. The obtained results provide an interesting input for further service requirements engineering by using more conventional techniques. We believe that this game would also be efficient for the DMTP service design.

In the transdisciplinary context, it is not sufficient to be creative and to discover new service features and capabilities. The value of the service has to be understood and agreed by all partners. The involvement of each partner and his/her role and responsibility in this value creation, utilization and sharing has to be specified by using business and value models. Osterwalders and Pigneur (2010) propose

 

a novel approach for business model generation with original canvas, business model patterns and strategies for rethinking business models. This approach can be easily applied for positioning the new transdisciplinary services in the inter-organizational business models. Besides, the authors propose to combine their approach with creativity techniques mentioned above. The e3value model proposed by Gordijn and Akkermans (2001) seems to be an appropriate technique to formalize information service value and value exchange between partners in the transdisciplinary context. Another approach presented in (Gordijn et al., 2006) proposes to combine goal- and value-modeling techniques to analyze e-service business models. In particular, the authors recommend to use i* modeling to explore strategic goals of involved partners and to use e3value modeling to find out how these goals can result in profitable enterprise services. Both approaches, business model canvas and e3value, seem to be appropriate for the DMTP service value definition. While the first one puts forward the value offered by the service to its clients, the second one focuses on the value exchange between different partners and their collaboration network.

Agility Transdisciplinary service co-creation process needs some agility to deal with the diversity of the

involved domains, their knowledge and skills on one hand, and the difficulty to stabilize service requirements and agree on service capabilities on the other hand. People from various organizations have to share their knowledge and co-create new values through common models. For example, they need to be able to understand, discuss and modify models produced by their partners. In this context, the Agile Manifesto (Beck et al., 2001) suggests to pay attention to a set of values of agile modeling such as communication, simplicity, feedback, courage and humility. Models are necessary to ensure information transfer and communication, but at the same time, they need to be sufficiently simple and clear for all participants. They facilitate rapid feedback of participants, but also they ask the participants some courage to take important decisions and some humility to accept that each participant is also an expert in his/her own domain. Sketching, rapid prototyping and other simple visualization techniques can help the development team to visualize, evaluate and adapt the new information service more easily.

According to Fowler (2005), the power of agile methods is that they are people-oriented rather than process-oriented, adaptive rather than predictive and promotes incremental and iterative development. Their role is to support the development team in their work instead of prescribing what they have to do and in which order. The transdisciplinary approach needs this agility in order to motivate people from multiple domains by providing them with “tangible” results (models, prototypes of the service) and reacting to their observations and remarks (modifying models and prototypes) very quickly. Traditional development phases like requirements engineering, analysis, design, development, etc., generally providing a particular deliverable in the end of the phase, do not have the same meaning neither the same ordering in an agile transdisciplinary approach. They rather need to be intertwined into an incremental and evolutionary process organized in short cycles where all models, prototypes and code progress together from one cycle to another.

While agility and creativity are indispensable in the transdisciplinary co-creation of services, today’s agile methods do not explicitly support creativity and innovation because of the short durations of sprints that can discourage the incubation and reflection needed for a creative thinking. Therefore, it is important to reach a smart combination of the two principles (innovation and agility) in order to help transdisciplinary project teams explore innovations and develop solutions in parallel. Creative thinking techniques such as the ones proposed in (Michalko, 2006; Michalko, 2011;) could be investigated and introduced in the agile development process.

 

Table 1. Summary of challenges and solutions related to the information services co-creation in the transdisciplinary context Principle Challenges Solutions and techniques References

Communi-cation

Common understanding

Usage of domain ontologies Creation of a common ontology

Yurchyshyna & Leonard, 2009; Yurchyshyna & Opprecht, 2010

Knowledge gathering and sharing

Ontology engineering approaches and tools

Uschold & King, 1995; Gruber, 1993; Fernández et al., 1997; Jarrar & Meersman, 2008; De Nicola et al., 2009; Navigli & Velardi, 2004; Sure et al., 2004; Uschold & Gruninger, 1996

Information exchange

Multiple communication channels and tools

Collabo-ration

Co-modeling Collaborative modeling tools and platforms Approaches supporting collaborative modeling Modeling mediators and facilitators

Riemer, et al., 2011; van Bommel et al., 2006; Rittgen, 2007, 2009, 2010a,b; Hoppenbrouwers et al., 2005; Frederiks & van der Weide, 2006

Co-design Design frameworks Cross pollination space

Rittgen, 2010a; Le Dinh & Nguyen-Ngoc, 2010; Le Dinh & Pham-Thi, 2010; Yurchyshyna & Opprecht, 2010

Motivation Team building and warming techniques Games allowing to increase participants interest, motivation and competition

Gray et al., 2010; Hohmann, 2009

Confrontation Mediation, conciliation, negotiation techniques

Gasser, 2012; Berghoff et al., 2007

Co-innovation

Creativity Creativity workshops and techniques Tools supporting creativity Creative thinking Innovation games Improvisation theater

Maiden et al., 2004; Maiden et al., 2010; Karlsen et al., 2009; Michalko, 2006, 2011; Gray et al., 2010; Hohmann, 2009; Mahaux & Heymans, 2012

Value co-creation Business model generation techniques Value models

Osterwalders & Pigneur, 2010; Gordijn & Akkermans, 2001; Gordijn et al., 2006; Le Dinh & Léonard, 2009

Agility Incremental and evolutionary process

Application of agile development principles

Beck et al., 2001; Fowler, 2005

Rapid feed-back Prototyping, visualization and simulation techniques

Combination of innovation and agility principles

Creative thinking Michalko, 2006, 2011

 

Summary The discussion above demonstrates that in the transdisciplinary context conventional methods for

information systems and services development need to be extended with novel innovation and creativity inspiring techniques as well as collaboration and communication facilitating approaches and tools. In Table 1 we summarize, for each principle, the main discovered challenges and the existing and/or emerging solutions together with the related literature references.

BUILDING A METHOD FAMILY FOR THE CO-CREATION OF INFORMATION SERVICES IN THE TRANSDISCIPLINARY CONTEXT

The approaches and techniques mentioned in the previous section could significantly improve the quality of the transdisciplinary information services co-creation process if used in time and in an appropriate way. On the other hand, selecting and combining them with more traditional service design and modeling approaches require considerable method engineering knowledge and effort. Therefore, the aim of our work is to facilitate this method engineering task by providing a new method, or more exactly a family of methods, supporting the co-creation of transdisciplinary information services. This family of methods has to provide a flexible, agile and situation-driven guidance allowing to combine method chunks from different disciplines in order to support collaborative creativity in design and development of transdisciplinary services.

An Approach for Method Family Engineering The notions of method family and method line are quite new and their definitions were motivated

respectively by the notions of product family and product line used in the domain of software product development. In the domain of Method Engineering, they were introduced by Rolland in her keynote talk for the ME’07 conference (Rolland, 2007) as means to capture method knowledge commonality and variability in a method family and to enable easy method line configuration according to the project requirements at hand. Recently, Kornyshova et al. (2011) proposed to use the notion of method family to organize method components of a specific domain, while Assadi et al. (2011) applied it to develop semantically enabled families of Method-Oriented Architectures.

The choice of the method family concept to formalize our approach for the transdisciplinary information services co-creation is motivated by the fact that there are many different co-creativity situations and one method designed in a traditional way cannot consider all of them. The multitude of existing techniques and approaches also do not facilitate the method engineering task. Our objective is not to deal with one situation but to consider the variability of situations and approaches and to provide guidance to easily create a method line specific to the situation at hand. The method line approach is based on Situational Method Engineering (SME) principles and techniques (state of the art review available in (Henderson-Sellers & Ralyté, 2010)). SME promotes modularization and formalization of method knowledge in the form of autonomous, interoperable and situation-driven method chunks (Mirbel & Ralyté, 2006, Ralyté et al., 2003), fragments (Henderson-Sellers & Ralyté, 2010) and recently introduced method services (Guzélian & Cauvet, 2007; Iacovelli et al., 2008, Rolland 2009). In particular, we apply the assembly-based SME approach as proposed in (Ralyté & Rolland, 2001; Mirbel & Ralyté, 2006, Ralyté et al., 2003). This approach allows to achieve a multi-level modularity in the method structure and a high-level flexibility and agility in the method application process. Besides, it helps to ensure that the method takes all engineering situations into account and provides the best fitting guidance for the project at hand. The approach is founded on the Map (Rolland et al., 1999) process modeling formalism, which allows to express multi-process models in intentional terms where the ordering of steps is not fixed in advance but is created at process execution time. More exactly, it provides a representation system based on a non-deterministic ordering of intentions and strategies in the form of a labeled directed

 

graph where intentions are nodes and strategies are edges between intentions. The power of Map is in the fact that it allows to include multiple ways to achieve process intentions, i.e. many strategies can be defined for reaching each intention. Besides, each intention can be completed at any time, providing that the pre-conditions to do that are satisfied. Therefore, we consider that Map is the best suitable formalism to specify the process perspective of a family of methods – the commonality of method lines is represented in terms of common intentions while their variability is captured in terms of multiple strategies supported by various engineering techniques.

Originally, the assembly-based SME approach is dedicated to the “on the fly” method construction for a particular project situation. However, redoing this process every time from scratch can be quite expensive and time-consuming. In order to avoid this difficulty, we combine the assembly-based approach with the notion of method family. A method family includes several method variants or method lines; it provides a collection of common method chunks that form a generic framework for a family of methods dedicated to a particular application domain and/or having a particular purpose. In other words, a method family can be viewed as a core method that defines the commonality and variability between multiple method chunks in such a way that a situation-specific method is created by selecting a path in this core method.

According to (Ralyté et al., 2003), the assembly-based situational method construction is composed of three steps: (1) method requirements specification, (2) method chunks selection and (3) assembly of selected method chunks into a complete and coherent method. The method family engineering approach introduced in (Asadi et al., 2011) starts by the phase named method family scoping which is followed by method family requirements analysis and method family realization phases. In our work we combine these two approaches in the following way: we start with the method family scoping adapted from (Asadi et al., 2011), then we follow with the method family requirements specification, method chunk selection for the method family and method chunks assembly as proposed in (Ralyté et al., 2003).

1. Method family scoping: This step consists in defining the scope of the method family, and more exactly: its application domain (e.g. information services), the engineering lifecycle to be covered (e.g. from value discovery to implementation), the major functional areas (e.g. exploration, innovation, design), and the engineering principles to be respected (e.g. multi-disciplinarity, agility, innovation).

2. Method family requirements specification: The requirements specification for a method family is based on the intentional process modeling principles, in particular Map formalism, as proposed in (Ralyté, 2002; Ralyté et al., 2003). It consists in identifying the engineering intentions that the method family should assist to satisfy (e.g. specify service requirements, design service information space) and the main strategies to achieve these intentions (e.g. creativity techniques, goal-driven techniques, data modeling). Therefore, the method family requirements are specified in the form of a generic process map where the commonality of all method variants is captured in a set of common process intentions (represented as nodes in the graph) and the variability is captured in the various strategies (represented as arcs in the graph). The obtained map has to fit in the method family scope defined previously.

3. Method chunk selection for method family: Once the generic process model is created, method chunks can be selected for each section in this map (map section::= <start intention, target intention, strategy>). Several method chunks can be selected for each section in order to increase the variability offered by the method family. The selection of the method chunks is based on a set of similarity metrics defined in (Ralyté & Rolland, 2001) that help to assess to which extend the selected method chunk fits the requirements.

4. Assembly of method chunks: Finally, the last step in the method family construction consists in (1) assembling the selected method chunks into an interrelated, organized and complete

 

collection (the output of one chunk is used as input to another chunk, etc.), (2) defining process progression guidelines (in which order method chunks can be executed), and (3) specifying guidelines for a situation-specific method line configuration. The assembly of method chunks into a method family follows the approach presented in (Ralyté & Rolland, 2001; Mirbel & Ralyté, 2006). Using Map for the method family formalization implies to define process progression guidelines (next intention selection and next strategy selection guidelines) (Rolland et al., 1999) that are necessary for progressing in the method map and for choosing the most appropriate way to reach each intention. In particular, they have to specify the pre-conditions for achieving each intention and, in case of multiple strategies allowing to achieve the intention, to provide arguments and recommendations for strategy selection. Finally, it is also important to specify which combination of method chunks from this family is correct and complete for a particular situation. Kornyshova et al. (2011) propose to categorize method chunks composing the method family into mandatory and optional where mandatory method components must be selected when constructing a particular method line and optional may or may not be selected. Besides, some method chunks can be declared as exclusive or, in the contrary, requiring each other.

Building the Method Family In this section we aim to demonstrate that the method family concept helps to combine

conventional information systems engineering approaches with more original creativity and innovation techniques in order to produce a novel approach for information services co-creation in the transdisciplinary context. We explain below, how the four steps of the method family construction should be realized.

Step 1: Method family scoping

We define the scope of our method family as follows:

Application domain: engineering of information services.

Lifecycle: let’s suppose we aim to cover only a part of service engineering lifecycle starting from the service identification and going until the agreement of all involved parties on service information model.

Functional areas: our method family aims to provide a support for the following service analysis and design areas:

1. Service innovation and value identification (all partners have to agree on the value offered by the service and their responsibility in the value creation process),

2. Service requirements elicitation and specification including functional and quality requirements,

3. Service information space design including static, dynamic, rule and role spaces, and

4. Agreement of all service partners on the service content (shared information, common business rules, service capabilities, and roles and responsibilities to execute them).

Engineering principles: our method family should take into consideration the four principles (communication, collaboration, co-innovation and agility) in order to enable transdisciplinary co-creation of information services.

Step 2: Method family requirements specification

As mentioned above, this step consists in creating the generic process model of the method family by using Map formalism. The obtained map has to fit the method family scope defined previously. In

 

particular, it has to cover the transdisciplinary information service co-creation lifecycle and its functional areas mentioned above, which lead us to the identification of four main intentions named as follows:

1. Discover service value: this intention concerns service identification and innovation phase. For each involved organization or activity domain, the value to be gained from the service and the innovation that it will bring to the organization has to be discovered and agreed among all participants. In order to reach this intention, we identify two main strategies: by using Creativity and gaming techniques and/or with Value models. Brainstorming and conciliation strategy could be used to resolve potential conflicts related to the service value identification. As discussed in the previous section, the collaboration process can start with some Warming up and contextualization games for team building and stimulating participants’ interest.

2. Specify service requirements: this intention deals with service exploration phase where requirements of all service partners and their actors are elicited, negotiated, formalized and validated. Potential strategies to reach this intention include Creativity-based RE approaches, more conventional (goal-driven, scenario-based) RE techniques and Business process modeling following by Conflict resolution and validation techniques.

3. Design service information space: consists in collaborative modeling of different and complementary service perspectives (data, activities, roles, rules, etc.). Various Information modeling techniques (UML diagrams, integrated diagrams) and Ontology-based approaches can be used to satisfy this intention. The obtained information model is a source for further service value discovery and service requirements specification by using Model-driven techniques, which enable iterative and agile service design.

4. Agree on service content: this last step deals with service design validation. The validation can be Model-driven (validation of models by all involved partners) or by using some visualization and simulation techniques. The obtained Feedback is then used to iterate on the previous service design steps.

Figure 5 shows the requirements specification, formalized as a process map, for a method family supporting information service design in the transdisciplinary context. The map includes the four main intentions and all identified strategies to reach them.

Step 3: Method chunks selection for the method family

This work requires an extensive knowledge of existing methods, approaches, and techniques related to the method family intentions and strategies. As said above, we aim to combine traditional information systems and services engineering methods together with the approaches and techniques discussed in the previous section and listed in Table 1. For example, we can identify business model canvas (Osterwalders & Pigneur, 2010), e3value model (Gordijn & Akkermans, 2001), and i* combined with e3value model (Gordijn et al., 2006) as three method chunks fitting the section <Start, Discover service value, with Value models>. Creative thinking techniques from (Michalko, 2006, 2011), improvisation theater techniques (Mahaux & Heymans, 2012) and some innovation games (Gray et al., 2010; Hohmann, 2009) are selected as method chunks for the section <Start, Discover service value, with Creativity and gaming>. Similarly, all map sections have to be covered by at least one method chunk. In fact, more method chunks will be included richer the method family will be.

 

Start

Stop

Discover service value

Specify service requirements

Value models

Agree on service content

Creativity and gaming

Brainstorming and conciliation

RE techniques

Information modeling techniques

Model refinement

Model-driven RE

Business process modeling

Ontology-based

Feedback analysis

Creativity-based RE

Feedback analysis

Model-driven validation

Conflict resolution and validation techniques

Model-driven value discovery

Visualization and simulation

Design service information space

Conflict resolution and validation techniques

Feedback analysis

Warming up and contextualization

Figure 5. Requirements specification for a method family supporting information services co-creation in the transdisciplinary context

Step 4: Assembly of method chunks

Selected method chunks come from different sources: research works, modeling languages, standards, etc. Besides, they are specified in different ways: some of them are only informally described while others are formalized by using metamodeling techniques. At this step, we need to establish relationships between method chunks, to identify and resolve their overlaps and to unify their terminology. For example, we identify that the notion of value is used in the business model canvas approach and in the e3value approach, and in both approaches it has the same meaning. However, as discussed in the previous section, the two approaches use different perspectives to describe service values and can be considered as complementary ones. Another example of similar method chunks would be BPMN and UML activity diagrams for service business process modeling. The objective of both techniques is similar but, because of the difference in notation and semantics of concepts, it is not recommended to use both techniques in the same project. Therefore, in the method family they would be declared as exclusive alternatives.

Once the assembly of method chunks is done, the progression guidelines in the method family map have to be defined in order to specify all possible configurations. For example, the intention selection guideline associated to the intention Discover service value will state that once a service value has been identified and agreed by all service partners, there are two ways to progress: 1) to reach the intention Specify service requirements if service terminology and domain ontology are clear for all participants, otherwise 2) to create service ontological model, i.e. to progress toward Design service information space following Ontology-based strategy. If several strategies allow to reach an intention, as for example from the intention Discover service value there are three strategies to satisfy the intention Specify service requirements: 1) by using traditional requirements engineering – RE techniques, 2) by applying creativity-based approaches – Creativity-based RE and 3) based on business process models – Business process

 

modeling. The associated strategy selection guideline will indicate that the three strategies are complementary and the order to execute them depends on the service innovation degree. For example, in a highly innovative situation the Creativity-based RE strategy would be recommended to apply first. In the same way, all progression guidelines are defined in order to make this method family exploitable in practice.

At this step, our method family represents a generic process model for services co-creation supported by a collection of various techniques at each process step. The obtained process map includes several different ways to go from one intention to another and provides guidance for the decision-making and progression at each process step. From this perspective, it shows that the whole service co-creation process can be very flexible, agile and situation-driven according to the path we choose in this process model.

AN EXAMPLE OF METHOD FAMILY CONFIGURATION The application of our method family in practice consist in:

• Defining the method line that fits the situation of the project at hand by choosing the path in the method family process map, i.e. by selecting the most appropriate strategies to achieve the four intentions. The obtained result will be a sub-map of the family process map;

• Selecting for each method line map section the most appropriate method chunks. These method chunks are selected from the family collection based on the particular service co-creation project characteristics such as the range of the concerned organizations, the scope of the project, the degree of innovation, participants skills and interests, etc.;

• Validating the obtained method consistency and completeness. At least one method chunk have to be selected for each method line section.

Configuration of a particular method line for the project at hand can be done either before the project starts or at project run time by selecting progressively the path in the method family. The first approach is appropriate when project situation and characteristics are clear and skills and interests of all participants are known. Otherwise, if the situation is less predictable, the second approach fits better.

In this section we briefly illustrate the configuration of our method family for the DMTP service design. The particularity of this service is in the mix of private ambitions (e.g. the transportation company wiling to realize the merchandize transfer and to be paid for that) with public responsibilities and obligations (e.g. the public security and the police responsible for defining and validating transfer procedures and conditions). While all parties share a common objective – to ensure the security and liability of the dangerous materials transfer, their motivations and interests in this service development can be totally different and a smooth start of the collaboration is recommended. We select the strategies in the method family and the adequate method chunks as follows:

• Because of multiple participants with different backgrounds, the project would certainly need to start with a warming up and contextualization techniques. For this purpose, we select two game-based techniques: (1) “Welcome to my world” (Gray et al., 2010) for team building and (2) “Context Map” (Gray et al., 2010) for better understanding of the project situation.

• Next, for the service value discovery, we decide to start with an informal approach “Create service box” (Hohmann, 2009; ThinkServices, 2010), which helps to identify opinions of different service actors and to discover innovative ideas. These ideas then are formalized by using business model canvas (Osterwalders & Pigneur, 2010).

 

• Because of the institutional nature of the DMTP service, we need to guarantee the compliance of the service with the laws governing activities related to the dangerous materials manipulation. Therefore, we choose the ontology-driven strategy to construct service information model and we select the approach proposed in (Khadraoui et al., 2008) that helps extracting ontological service model from selected laws.

• For the service requirements specification phase we propose to start by defining the main service business process models with a BPMN-based approach (Silver, 2009) and then to apply a goal decomposition approach in order to identify, refine and specify requirements of all service actors.

• The phase of service information space design will use the integrated modeling approach (as illustrated in Figure 4). This design will be based on the previously obtained service requirements specification and the ontological model extracted from laws.

• Finally, the obtained models will also be used to reach partners agreement on the service content and if necessary will trigger feedback analysis and iteration on other service design phases. The obtained method line is illustrated in Figure 6. It demonstrates the selected method chunks and the proposed order to execute them.

“Welcome to my world”

“Context map”

“Create service box”

“Business model canvas”

Ontological model construction from

laws

Goal refinement Integrated

information space modeling

Model-driven validation

Business process modeling

Feedback analysis

Start% Discover%%service%value%

Discover%service%%requirements%

Design%service%%informa4on%space%

Agree%on%service%%content%

Stop%

Figure 6. A method line for the information service design in the transdisciplinary context

CONCLUSION While the use of the concept of service and the application of service-oriented paradigm in the

field of IS engineering are growing, especially for supporting new inter-organizational collaborations, the transdisciplinary context of these new developments is not well explored in the literature. In this paper we present our vision of the notion of transdisciplinarity and its impact on the intra- and inter-organizational services engineering. In particular, we explore the engineering principles to be used in order to support the co-creation of information services in the transdisciplinary context.

First, we define the notion of information service as a building block for the service-driven information systems engineering. Then, we put this concept in a specific situation, that we name a transdisciplinary context, where the information service is dedicated to support collaboration of at least two (but generally more) activity domains from the same or different organizations by offering them a new and unique value.

 

The next contribution of this paper is the exploration of the transdisciplinarity concept and its impact on the information services engineering. In particular, we identify and discuss four main principles to be considered when co-creating information services in the transdisciplinary context: communication, collaboration, co-innovation, and agility. We look at the challenges related to each of these principles and we identify existing and/or emerging approaches and techniques that support the implementation of these principles.

Finally, we propose the method family approach as a potential way to capture and formalize the method knowledge related to the information services co-creation in the transdisciplinary context. We claim that the method family approach allows to design a flexible and agile methodology where various method chunks from different disciplines can be combined in order to support collaborative creativity, modeling and development of transdisciplinary services. Our example demonstrates that conventional information systems engineering techniques can be easily combined with less formal and more innovative ones.

Our current preoccupation is to further explore the value of our method family, to complete it with other strategies and method chunks and to evaluate it in real transdisciplinary service co-creation cases.

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2  http://www.merriam-­‐webster.com/dictionary/trans-­‐