Publications by Alain Wegmann | EPFL Graph Search

Three Stances in Enterprise System Design

In this paper we propose a framework for enterprise system design, which is based on Daniel Dennett's three stances for explaining and predicting the behaviour of an entity or system: the design stance, the physical stance, and the intentional stance. The ...

Springer Nature2025

Problem structuring to enable innovation in business/IT projects

Alain Wegmann, Gil Regev, Tatiana Porté

In this paper, we present a problem structuring method in business and IT analysis illustrated with an example. The project describes an IT consulting case done for a Swiss medical society faced with a problem of change management and digital transformatio ...

LUT Scientific and Expertise Publications2020

A Return on Our Experience of Using Services as a Unifying Concept for Business and IT Alignment in a University

Alain Wegmann, Gorica Tapandjieva Sekulovska

We describe the use of the concept of service for aligning the business activities of an organization and its IT resources. This work is set in the context of a longitudinal action-research project between our research unit and our university's IT departme ...

2019

Requirements Elicitation with a Service Canvas for Packaged Enterprise Systems

Alain Wegmann, Gil Regev, Blagovesta Hristova Kostova, Lucien Alexandre Etzlinger

We present a technique for eliciting requirements based on the use of a service canvas and the results of its application in the early phase of a customer relationship management integration project. The project was a collaboration between a research group ...

IEEE2019

Extending Business Process Models with Appreciation

Alain Wegmann, Gil Regev, Irina Rychkova

We use homeostasis, the maintenance of steady states in an organism, to explain some of the decisions made by participants in a business process. We use Vickers’ Appreciative System to model the homeostatic states with Harel’s statecharts. We take the exam ...

2019

A Novel Approach to Modeling Enterprise Services Leveraging Object Cloning and Multilevel Classification

Alain Wegmann, Lam Son Lê

Object-oriented modeling is concerned with capturing common properties of objects. The dominant thinking in this realm is to classify objects that share certain properties into what is called a class, which in turn enables us to instantiate additional obje ...

IEEE2019

Service-Oriented Business Design for IT Students

Alain Wegmann, Blagovesta Hristova Kostova

In this Full Innovative Practice Paper, we present a teaching approach, based on service science, for integrating a business curriculum in the engineering educational program. Our approach is a composition of experiential learning, systems thinking, and se ...

2019

Comparison of Two Value-Modeling Methods: e3 value and SEAM

Alain Wegmann, Gil Regev, Blagovesta Hristova Kostova

In the last few decades, several value-modeling methods have emerged in requirements engineering for IS research. We compare two value-modeling methods, e3value and SEAM. We illustrate their use with an example of the exchange of the Intellectual Property ...

IEEE2019

Ontology for SEAM Service Models

Alain Wegmann, Gorica Tapandjieva Sekulovska

A service system is a popular concept in academia and industry. At the same time, it is a challenging concept to represent, due to its recursive nature and difficulty to relate it to entities in reality. In this paper we present an ontology for modeling se ...

2018

Service-Oriented Business Design for IT students

Alain Wegmann, Blagovesta Hristova Kostova

In this Full Innovative Practice Paper, we present a teaching approach, based on service science, for integrating a business curriculum in the engineering educational program. Our approach is a composition of experiential learning, systems thinking, and se ...

IEEE2018

Technology-Transfer Requirements Engineering (TTRE) – on the Value of Conceptualizing Alternatives

Alain Wegmann, Blagovesta Hristova Kostova

In this paper, we describe a requirements engineering methodwith a focus on the conceptualization of alternative service offerings. Thepractical context for our project is based on the first author’s work in astartup. Our proposed method is suitable for ex ...

Springer, Cham2018

Co-Design of Business and IT Services – a Tool-Supported Approach

Alain Wegmann, Blagovesta Hristova Kostova, Natalia Nessler

Service modeling is an important step in designing service-oriented systems. There are multiple levels of design because service sci-ence includes both the business rationale and the IT implementation ofthe services. As business and IT perspectives differ, ...

2018

Expanding Requirements Through Observation: An Experience Report

Alain Wegmann, Gil Regev, Nina Desnica

In this paper, we describe our use of ethnographic techniques for identifying requirements for a web-based system for automatic updates and data exchange in a financial investment company. During a six-month long internship, we observed stakeholders in the ...

2017

A Return on Our Experience of Modeling a Service-oriented Organization in a Service Cartography

Giorgio Anastopoulos, Alain Wegmann, Gorica Tapandjieva Sekulovska

We present a longitudinal project using action design research, which is a four-year collaboration between two EPFL entities: The research Laboratory for Systemic Modeling (LAMS) and EPFL’s IT department, called the VPSI. During that time the VPSI was goin ...

Springer2017

Alignment Verification in the Early Stage of Service Design

Alain Wegmann, Gorica Tapandjieva Sekulovska, Matteo Filipponi

Verification is a costly task, sometimes burdensome and tedious, requiring strong formal background. To reduce the effort and cost invested in verification, we developed a model-driven approach for automatic verification of service properties, done in the ...

2017

Teaching Business Design at an Engineering School–Principles/Patterns/Practice

Alain Wegmann, Gorica Tapandjieva Sekulovska, Blagovesta Hristova Kostova

We present a research-in-progress project on teaching business design at an engineering school. We describe our teaching approach based on experiential learning, systems thinking and service-dominant logic. We highlight how we try, by repetition, to help t ...

ISPIM2017

Introducing Ethnography to IS Practitioners with Experiential Pedagogy

Alain Wegmann, Gil Regev

In this paper we describe a long-term effort to raise the awareness of IT practitioners in the Swiss French region to the value of ethnographic observation techniques for requirements elicitation. This effort brought together academia and industry. Several ...

2016

What Have We Unlearned Since the Early Days of the Process Movement?

Alain Wegmann, Gil Regev

The vision brought forth by Michael Hammer in the late 1980s was to save struggling American companies by getting them to focus on the creation of value for clients by reorganizing their operations and structure around the use of IT systems. This was the B ...

Springer2016

SLA: to Sign or Not to Sign

Alain Wegmann, Gil Regev, Gorica Tapandjieva Sekulovska

We present our experience of a three-week fieldwork in the form of a contextual inquiry with a service manager at the EPFL IT department. During these three weeks, we encounter a refusal of a user committee to sign a service-level agreement (SLA). We descr ...

CEUR Workshop Proceedings2016

IT Service Alignment Verification of Quantitative Properties in Service Design

Alain Wegmann, Gorica Tapandjieva Sekulovska

Despite many years of research, alignment of business and IT services remains a challenge. In this paper we show how to verify the quantitative properties of a service against stakeholder requirements during service design. We model the service with the Sy ...

2015