Towards Meta-Design for E-Business: Experiences & Challenges.

One way to address the challenge of application evolution management in the highly competitive and quickly changing area of e-business is user empowerment through meta-design support: By integrating user-friendly and, task-oriented tools for Web application design and evolution into the Web application itself, users are empowered to act as application codesigners and to directly control the creation and the evolution of the Web application. The development and evolution of Web applications requires a coupling of entities from at least two different domains: 1) the Web application development domain 2) the application domain, which includes business objects, relationships and business processes of the application domain under consideration. A systematic approach to a flexible coupling of the two domains and their entities is based on the explicit modeling of the different domains. In a second step, a mapping from objects of the Web application user interface to business objects or business process subtasks of the application domain has to be enabled. Therefore, a third model is needed that systematically specifies the process of mapping between the two domains. This user-centered approach to application system evolution has been evaluated in first trials of the FAIRWIS project implementing an e-business solution with user empowerment for the trade fair business. Exploiting heuristics from the Web application design as well as from the application domain task-oriented authoring tools for Web application components combined with business process subtask packages form a powerful and comfortable domain oriented design environment for user empowerment in the FAIRWIS system. Evaluation of the FAIRWIS system by different fair organizers showed significant viability and users’ acceptance of the approach, but also showed up challenges for the next generation of such user-oriented design empowerment support.