– Noting that a fundamental tenet of service‐dominant (S‐D) logic is the co‐creation of value‐in‐use, this paper aims to explore the theoretical possibility that the interactions between service systems cannot only co‐create value, but also have adverse consequences leading to actual value co‐destruction., – This conceptual paper critically reviews the dominance of value co‐creation and value‐in‐use in S‐D logic. Noting the relative lack of research in the converse possibility, the study proposes and explores the implications of value co‐destruction as a new concept which should be introduced within the framework of S‐D logic., – The study proposes a formal definition for the new proposed concept of value co‐destruction. It describes in detail the process by which it occurs, showing that value can be co‐destroyed through the interactions between different systems, resulting in value destruction‐through‐misuse. Indeed, value co‐destruction occurs when a service system accidentally or intentionally misuses resources (its own resources and/or those of another service system) by acting in an inappropriate or unexpected manner., – This paper is purely conceptual and exploratory. Empirical examination of the theoretical findings regarding value‐co‐destruction is required. Possible avenues of interest for such empirical research of value co‐destruction are suggested., – Limiting the occurrence of misuse by aligning the mutual expectations of interacting service systems should reduce the risks of value co‐destruction. Recovering from misuse should also be considered., – This study is apparently the first to have introduced the notion of value co‐destruction into the conceptual framework of S‐D logic.

Not always co-creation: introducing interactional co-destruction of value in service-dominant logic

Tackling the Digitalisation Challenge: How to Benefit from Digitalisation in Practice

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/joms.12639

A Systematic Review of the Literature on Digital Transformation: Insights and Implications for Strategy and Organizational Change

Knowledge Discovery in Databases.

The aim of this paper is to provide insights regarding the state of the art of Digital Transformation, and to propose avenues for future research. Using a systematic literature review of 206 peer-reviewed articles, this paper provides an overview of the literature. Among other things, the findings indicate that managers should adapt their business strategy to a new digital reality. This mainly results in the adaptation of processes and operations management. Scholars, for the other side, are also facing challenges, as prior research may not have identified all the opportunities and challenges of Digital Transformation. Furthermore, while the Digital Transformation has expanded to all sectors of activity there are some areas with more prospects of being developed in the future than others.

/pdf/digital-transformation-a-literature-review-and-guidelines-1zg38399jb.pdf

Digital Transformation: A Literature Review and Guidelines for Future Research

Excellence in IT is both a driver and a key enabler of the digital transformation. The digital transformation changes the way we live, work, learn, communicate, and collaborate. The Internet of Things (IoT) fundamentally influences today's digital strategies with disruptive business operating models and fast changing markets. New business information systems are integrating emerging Internet of Things infrastructures and components. With the huge diversity of Internet of Things technologies and products organizations have to leverage and extend previous Enterprise Architecture efforts to enable business value by integrating Internet of Things architectures. Both architecture engineering and management of current information systems and business models are complex and currently integrating beside the Internet of Things synergistic subjects, like Enterprise Architecture in context with services a cloud computing, semantic-based decision support through ontologies and knowledge-based systems, big data management, as well as mobility and collaboration networks. To provide adequate decision support for complex business/IT environments, we have to make transparent the impact of business and IT changes over the integral landscape of affected architectural capabilities, like directly and transitively impacted IoT-objects, business categories, processes, applications, services, platforms and infrastructures. The paper describes a new metamodel-based approach for integrating Internet of Things architectural objects, which are semi-automatically federated into a holistic Digital Enterprise Architecture environment.

Digital Enterprise Architecture - Transformation for the Internet of Things

Microservices are a topic driven mainly by practitioners and academia is only starting to investigate them. Hence, there is no clear picture of the usage of Microservices in practice. In this paper, we contribute a qualitative study with insights into industry adoption and implementation of Microservices. Contrary to existing quantitative studies, we conducted interviews to gain a more in-depth understanding of the current state of practice. During 17 interviews with software professionals from 10 companies, we analyzed 14 service-based systems. The interviews focused on applied technologies, Microservices characteristics, and the perceived influence on software quality. We found that companies generally rely on well-established technologies for service implementation, communication, and deployment. Most systems, however, did not exhibit a high degree of technological diversity as commonly expected with Microservices. Decentralization and product character were different for systems built for external customers. Applied DevOps practices and automation were still on a mediocre level and only very few companies strictly followed the you build it, you run it principle. The impact of Microservices on software quality was mainly rated as positive. While maintainability received the most positive mentions, some major issues were associated with security. We present a description of each case and summarize the most important findings of companies across different domains and sizes. Researchers may build upon our findings and take them into account when designing industry-focused methods.

Microservices in Industry: Insights into Technologies, Characteristics, and Software Quality

In a time of digital transformation, the ability to quickly and efficiently adapt software systems to changed business requirements becomes more important than ever. Measuring the maintainability of software is therefore crucial for the long-term management of such products. With Service-based Systems (SBSs) being a very important form of enterprise software, we present a holistic overview of such metrics specifically designed for this type of system, since traditional metrics - e.g. object-oriented ones - are not fully applicable in this case. The selected metric candidates from the literature review were mapped to 4 dominant design properties: size, complexity, coupling, and cohesion. Microservice-based Systems (μSBSs) emerge as an agile and fine-grained variant of SBSs. While the majority of identified metrics are also applicable to this specialization (with some limitations), the large number of services in combination with technological heterogeneity and decentralization of control significantly impacts automatic metric collection in such a system. Our research therefore suggest that specialized tool support is required to guarantee the practical applicability of the presented metrics to μSBSs.

Automatically measuring the maintainability of service- and microservice-based systems: a literature review

While the recently emerged Microservices architectural style is widely discussed in literature, it is difficult to find clear guidance on the process of refactoring legacy applications. The importance of the topic is underpinned by high costs and effort of a refactoring process which has several other implications, e.g. overall processes (DevOps) and team structure. Software architects facing this challenge are in need of selecting an appropriate strategy and refactoring technique. One of the most discussed aspects in this context is finding the right service granularity to fully leverage the advantages of a Microservices architecture. This study first discusses the notion of architectural refactoring and subsequently compares 10 existing refactoring approaches recently proposed in academic literature. The approaches are classified by the underlying decomposition technique and visually presented in the form of a decision guide for quick reference. The review yielded a variety of strategies to break down a monolithic application into independent services. With one exception, most approaches are only applicable under certain conditions. Further concerns are the significant amount of input data some approaches require as well as limited or prototypical tool support.

From Monolith to Microservices: A Classification of Refactoring Approaches

IT environments that consist of a very large number of rather small structures like microservices, Internet of Things (IoT) components, or mobility systems are emerging to support flexible and agile products and services in the age of digital transformation. Biological metaphors of living and adaptable ecosystems with service-oriented enterprise architectures provide the foundation for self-optimizing, resilient run- time environments and distributed information systems. We are extending Enterprise Architecture (EA) methodologies and models that cover a high degree of heterogeneity and distribution to support the digital transformation and related information systems with micro-granular architectures. Our aim is to support flexibility and agile transformation for both IT and business capabilities within adaptable digital enterprise architectures. The present research paper investigates mechanisms for integrating Microservice Architectures (MSA) by extending original enterprise architecture reference models with elements for more flexible architectural metamodels and EA-mini-descriptions.

Alfred Zimmermann

Papers

Digital Enterprise Architecture - Transformation for the Internet of Things

Microservices in Industry: Insights into Technologies, Characteristics, and Software Quality

Automatically measuring the maintainability of service- and microservice-based systems: a literature review

From Monolith to Microservices: A Classification of Refactoring Approaches

Towards Integrating Microservices with Adaptable Enterprise Architecture