Title: Identifying business services from small and micro enterprises' collaboration: the activity-based service identification framework

Authors: Sertse Abebe; Hossana Twinomurinzi

Addresses: College of Computer Science and Information Technology, Sudan University of Science and Technology, Khartoum, Sudan; Bahir Dar Institute of Technology (BiT), Bahir Dar University, Bahir Dar, Ethiopia ' Centre for Applied Data Science, School of Consumer Intelligence and Information Systems, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa

Abstract: In a service-oriented (SO) development paradigm, service identification (SI) occurs earlier to describe service requirements from a business process (BP). There exist several SI strategies. However, they have been devised to identify services from mature BP. There is, therefore, a need for SI strategies that cater to identify services from the emerging heterogeneous collaborative environments such as exist for small and micro enterprises (SMEs). This paper has developed the activity-based SI framework (ASIF) from activity-theory (AT) using design science research (DSR) methods. Guiding the selection and scoping of the collaboration activity, analysing goals and goal-oriented activity (actions), analysing objects, analysing stakeholders and their interactions, analysing rules and division of labour (DOL) within the collaboration processes, and identifying reusable, granular, and composable services are the contextual design principles of ASIF. The framework has been exemplified using a case study on SMEs' peer-to-peer collaborative lending activities in the Ethiopian context.

Keywords: collaboration service identification; collaboration service requirement analysis; activity-based service identification; SMEs' collaboration process.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPMB.2023.134151

International Journal of Process Management and Benchmarking, 2023 Vol.15 No.3, pp.373 - 399

Received: 13 Jun 2022
Accepted: 19 Jun 2022
Published online: 12 Oct 2023 *

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