A studio based approach for business engineering and mobile services

Abstract

In today's world, organizations are becoming increasingly interested in using mobile technology as a means to adapt to the ever-changing environment. An important challenge that the organizations are facing is how to efficiently and effectively support business process carried out by their mobile workers in distributed environments. In the research presented in this dissertation, we examined mobility issues within the context of current organizations' engineering effort. We carried out inductive case studies that revealed the need for an approach that support the reality of mobile workers, and based on these findings we developed a simulation based support studio consisting of an approach and software suite. The support studio can be used to assist organizations to design mobile workforce solutions for the purpose of process performance improvement. We implemented the simulation suite in a prototype and demonstrated its usefulness through two testing case studies. Further, we carried out expert evaluation based on the three dimensions of usefulness, usability, and usage of the studio. We concluded that simulation can be considered to be an effective method of inquiry for improving the effectiveness of business engineering and mobile services in organizations. The studio based approach was considered to be effective in providing insight into the business processes that are enabled by mobile services, through the possibility of carrying out 'what-if' analysis with different scenarios without having to perform the actual implementation of the solution.