Modeling Virtual Organization Architecture with the Virtual Organization Breeding Methodology

The concept of Virtual Breeding Environment (VBE) has been proposed by the ECOLEAD project as "an association of organizations and their related supporting institutions, adhering to a base long term cooperation agreement, and adoption of Common operating principles and infrastructures, with the main goal of increasing their preparedness towards collaboration in potential Virtual Organizations (VO)" [2]. An important task of each VBE is the support of VO creation [3] [4]. While the various steps of the VO creation phase have been studied in the ECOLEAD project [5], a methodology allowing VBE members to model a VO is still to be proposed. On the other hand, various methodologies addressing enterprise modeling, and more specifically enterprise architecture modeling (EAM), have been proposed in the past 20 years [TOGAF, FEAF, Zachman, MDA] as ways to ensure that the deployed IT infrastructure is aligned with the enterprise's business needs and goals. Methodologies such as TOGAF [11] [12] [14] and FEAF [15] are well developed, mature and accepted by practitioners.

However these methodologies miss important concepts identified in the ECOLEAD project, e.g. the concepts of VBE, VO composition, partners search and selection, definition of roles in VBE. Therefore, EAM methodologies have to be adapted to the specific characteristics of VBE to be useful for VO modeling Some works [1][8] [9] have studied the benefits that VO modeling would give to VBE members. However, the results presented in formerly mentioned papers were mainly focused on expected benefits without a definition of the methodology allowing VBE members to build the VO models [1] or were not concentrated enough on VBE characteristics [8] [9]. Additionally, to our best knowledge, none of these works are based on widely accepted EAM methodologies. Therefore, there is need for an EAM methodology tailored to the needs for VBEs and VOs. Such a methodology should be built on existing popular EAM methodologies, so that the learning curve of this newly developed methodology would be relatively small for EAM practitioners. The main contribution of this paper is such an EAM methodology, referred as the Virtual Organization Breeding Methodology (VOBM). VOBM is based on the TOGAF methodology, tailored to characteristics of VO and VBE architectures. This paper is organized as follows. In section 2, enterprise architecture modeling and popular existing methodologies are presented. In 3, the Virtual Organization Breeding Methodology is presented. Then, the Architecture Development Methodology for Virtual Organizations is detailed; Next, VOBM tools and methods are introduced. Finally, section 6 concludes the paper.

Enterprise architecture modeling (EAM) aims to provide a formal description of a given system: structure of components, their interrelationships, principles, guidelines, building blocks (applications, people, infrastructure, data etc.), to facilitate system evolution, evaluation, understanding and implementation. In particular, EAM focuses on business goals, strategy, organizational structure, business processes, human and technical resources, competences, information flows [11] Enterprise architecture is typically divided into four architectural domains: business, applications, data and technology [11], each domain having its set of models. This approach and its benefits have been described in [1]. Among EAM methodologies and frameworks the most popular ones [6] are The Open Architecture Group Framework (TOGAF) and the Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework (FEAF).

The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) is a mature and complex methodology for enterprise architecture modeling proposed by the Open Group [13]. The most important three parts in TOGAF are: the Architecture Development with the Virtual Organization Breeding Methodology Method (ADM), the TOGAF Enterprise Continuum, and the TOGAF Resource Base. ADM is the core of TOGAF and provides a precise description of all EAM steps leading to an enterprise architecture. The TOGAF Enterprise Continuum is “a “virtual repository” of all the architecture assets -models, patterns, architecture descriptions, and other artifacts -that exist both within the enterprise and in the IT industry at large, which the enterprise considers itself to have available for the development of architectures for the enterprise” [11]. Finally, the TOGAF Resource Base is a set of tools and techniques available for use in applying TOGAF. A detailed description of TOGAF may be found in [11] and [12]. An important aspect of TOGAF is that TOGAF is a generic architecture, i.e. it must be tailored to the need of a specific organization, mainly via the choice of appropriate tools and artifacts. Then, TOGAF is flexible enough to allow architects to use other enterprise frameworks, e.g. the Zachman Framework or Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework (FEAF), within TOGAF.

The U.S.A Federal CIO Council has defined in FEAF an enterp

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