A framework for analyzing and measuring business performance with Web services

Abstract

The Web services paradigm provides organizations with an environment to enhance B2B communications. The aim is to create modularized services supporting the business processes within their organization and also those external entities participating in these same business processes. Current Web service frameworks do not include the functionality required for Web service execution performance measurement from an organization perspective. As such, a shift to this paradigm is at the expense of the organization's performance knowledge, as this knowledge will become buried within the internal processing of the Web service platform. This research introduces an approach to reclaim and improve this knowledge for the organization establishing a framework that enables the definition of Web services from a performance measurement perspective, together with the logging and analysis of the enactment of Web services. This framework utilizes Web service concepts, DSS principles, and agent technologies, to enable feedback on the organization's performance measures through the analysis of the Web services. A key benefit of this work is that the data is stored once but provides information both to the customer and the supplier of a Web service, removing the need for development of internal Web service performance monitoring.