Towards an Early Warning Mechanism for Adaptation Needs of Digital Services

Abstract

In many sectors, the ability to quickly respond to changes in the environment of an enterprise is considered as the key factor to long-term competitiveness. The focus of the paper is on enterprises providing digital services and the need for quick-responsiveness with respect to adapting these services. We investigate the feasibility of an "early warning" mechanism for the need of change in digital services, i.e., to detect events or actions which are likely to cause change requests. Such a warning mechanism is expected to allow for an earlier implementation of changes in comparison to a situation without early warning. The proposed approach to support early discovery of events and quick implementation of actions is based on context computing. Essentially, we propose to capture all factors relevant for quick-responsiveness of an enterprise in a computable context model and trigger organizational actions as soon as a relevant event is detected. One of the conceptual foundations for our work are the identified different aspects that constitute the context of digital service development.