Future Internet Enterprise Systems (FInES) Cluster
Position Paper
Version 1
15 May 2009
For Public Comment and Consultation with all Interested Stakeholders
“You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.”
Heraclitus, Greek philosopher (540 BC – 480 BC), On the Universe
Courtesy of Mr Gérald Santucci, European Commission
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15 May 2009
FInES Cluster Position Paper
Editors’ note
This Version 1 of the FInES Cluster Position Paper covers Sections 1, 2 and 3 as per the structure and scope
provided in the Outline Document which accompanied the EC’s Call for Project Contributions of 4 March 2009.
It is intended as a preliminary draft for consultation and for triggering further discussions and contributions.
Accordingly, we target comprehensiveness rather than conciseness. For these reasons, there is also a degree of
overlap between the sections, which will be adjusted on the basis of comments and further contributions.
The final version of this document will be shorter (target length of the main text is 10 pages). Explanatory and
other details are planned to be moved to a new Annex III.
Acknowledgements
The editors would like to thank the European Commission services for their support
in the planning and preparation of this document.
The recommendations and opinions expressed in this document are those of the editors and contributors, and do
not necessarily represent those of the European Commission.
The views expressed herein do not commit the European Commission in any way.
The responsibility for any remaining errors remains with the editors.
© European Communities, 2009
Reproduction authorised for non-commercial purposes provided the source is acknowledged.
FInES Cluster Position Paper
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Editors
Man-Sze Li, IC Focus
Mehmet Kürümlüoğlu, Fraunhofer Institut für Arbeitswirtschaft und Organisation
Margaretha Mazura, European Multimedia Forum
Roelof van den Berg, Erasmus Research Institute of Management
Contributors to V1.0
FP7 COIN, http://www.coin-ip.eu/, in particular Sergio Gusmeroli, Claudia Guglielmina, Man-Sze Li,
Andrew Faughy and Marco Conte
FP7 COMMIUS, www.commius.eu, in particular Enrico Morten
FP7 iSURF, www.srdc.com.tr/isurf/, in particular Asuman Dogac
FP7 K-NET, http://140.203.154.228/K-net/index.jsp, in particular Rui Neves da Silva
FP7 SPIKE, http://www.spike-project.eu, in particular Oliver Gmelch and Günther Pernul
FP7 SYNERGY, www.synergy-ist.eu/, in particular Keith Poplewell
FP6 CoVES, www.coves-project.org, in particular Mehmet Kürümlüoğlu
FP6 LEKTOR, http://www.lexelerator.eu, in particular Margaretha Mazura
FP6 OPAALS, http://www.opaals.org/, in particular Paolo Dini
FP6 SUDDEN, http://www.sudden.biz, in particular Nikolay Mehandjiev
European Commission support
Carlos Ruano Sánchez
European Commission contact point
Cristina Martinez, Head of FInES Cluster, EC, [email protected]
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Versioning and contribution history
Version Description
1.0
Date
First public version, focusing on Sections 1 - 3
15-05-2009
All public versions of this document, including all materials submitted by contributors, are available at
http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/enet/fines-positionpaper_en.html
Key References of FInES Cluster
FInES Cluster Projects
http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/enet/ei-projects_en.html
Enterprise Interoperability Research Roadmap
http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/enet/ei-research-roadmap_en.html
Value Proposition for Enterprise Interoperability Report
http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/enet/ei-isg_en.html
FP7 ICT Work Programme 2009-2010 (Objective 1.3)
ftp://ftp.cordis.europa.eu/pub/fp7/ict/docs/ict-wp-2009-10_en.pdf
.
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Table of Contents
1.
INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................................... 1
2.
CONTEXT ANALYSIS ................................................................................................................................. 2
3.
VISION: FUTURE INTERNET BASED ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS 2025 .............................................. 6
3.1 IMPACT ON THE RESEARCH DOMAIN OF FINES ................................................................................................ 6
3.2 AN OUTLOOK FOR EUROPEAN ICT .................................................................................................................. 8
3.3 THE FUTURE OF EUROPEAN ENTERPRISES ..................................................................................................... 10
4.
THE FINES CLUSTER: PROPOSALS..................................................................................................... 13
5.
RECOMMENDATIONS ............................................................................................................................. 14
ANNEXES…………………………………………………………………………..SEPARATE DOCEMENTS
ANNEX I
CONSOLIDATION OF PROJECT CONTRIBUTIONS
ANNEX II
REFERENCES
ANNEX III
EXPANDED NOTES (for future versions of this document)
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1.
Introduction
On 19 February 2009 the Future Internet Enterprise Systems (FInES) Cluster was launched by the
European Commission in Brussels. The FInES Cluster is an evolution of the former Enterprise
Interoperability (EI) Cluster. It brings together constituencies of three major research streams
supported by the Commission over a number of years - EI, Enterprise Collaboration and Digital
Ecosystems. The combined research domain of FInES is now one element of the overall Future
Internet research field, with a specific research focus on ICT adoption and usage by enterprises.
The present document is the first collective output of the FInES Cluster.
The document has four purposes:
1. To analyse the current economic context from the perspective(s) of European Enterprises;
2. To provide a contribution on the vision, nature, shape and requirements of Future
Enterprises in complement to the above;
3. To support the re-orientation of the FInES Cluster in light of the new entrants;
4. With reference to the current (2009-2010) and the next (2011-2013) FP7 ICT Work
Programmes, to input to the context for the research work of Objective 1.3.
The scope spans three inter-related areas - Future Internet, a new generation of ICT-enabled
enterprise systems, and sustainable businesses. Importantly, while the issues raised are global, the
focus is European, and the underlying perspective is business-driven.
Taking the current economic context (and especially the global financial and economic crisis) as a
starting point, the document provides context analysis and assesses the potential impact of that
context on the research domain of FInES. Taking account of the changing contexts and in
anticipation of the requirements of future enterprises, the document articulates a vision for the
FInES Cluster. It makes recommendations that support the definition of research priorities for
FInES as an integrated research domain and proposes related actions.
In line with the European Commission’s Future Internet research initiative, the document has a
reference timeframe up to 2025. But importantly, the articulation of a long term vision goes hand in
hand with targeting short and medium term capabilities to support industry, as recovery from the
current crisis begins. This standpoint guides the development of the document, and is reflected in
the contents of the recommendations.
Accordingly, the document has two main target audiences:

Research projects and researchers in the FInES Cluster and beyond

All other stakeholders of FInES, in particular European enterprises and policy makers.
The document takes stock of and builds out from the achievements of the EI Cluster of the past 5
years, including the vision of the Enterprise Interoperability Research Roadmap, the analysis of the
Value Proposition for Enterprise Interoperability Report, and the relevant available research results
of the Cluster projects.
The contents in the following sections are based on contributions from projects associated with the
Cluster and interested parties. A consolidation of the project contributions is provided in Annex I.
In order to fully cover its scope, the document also draws on the published materials from a large
collection of external sources identified by the contributors, the European Commission and the
editors. These reference sources are listed in Annex II.
Expanded notes to amplify and substantiate the main text are provided in Annex III (available for
future versions of this document).
The development of the document is under the overall coordination of the FInES Cluster.
Successive draft versions are published by the Commission for open consultation. The document is
prepared by four voluntary editors.
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2.
Context Analysis
Editors’ note: The FInES Cluster has received contributions from 10 cluster projects (see Page
iv) to input to this document. These contributions and selected reference literature (see list in
Annex II) have been used to draft this section.
With regard to the economical context and in particular the current crisis, most of the
contributions advocate a rethinking of economic values and see an opportunity in the crisis. The
crisis made apparent that it is no longer possible to separate policy from economy, business from
energy and environment, research & development from business. This is furthermore emphasized
by the global character of ICT.
Economy context
Europe is shaken by the global financial crisis and faces the biggest recession since the 1930s. For
the Eurozone, the European Commission adjusted its forecasts from 2 to 4% of recession. Although
EU Member States are affected at different levels to different degrees, one issue is clear: the crisis
goes far beyond the visible economic turmoil. It is an existential crisis of values that so far have
been undisputed in most European countries. Without prejudice to microeconomic views that tend
to dissociate the crisis from day-to-day business, one should draw lessons from the economic
downturn and appreciate it as an opportunity towards sustainable value creation.
Thus, the economy as a whole and each single stakeholder will have to rethink their founding values
involving new factors. Because beyond the economic crisis, the global economy will additionally be
confronted with an emerging energy distribution problem arising from the global economy’s
dependence on carbon fuels. At the same time, the effects of climate change may become obvious,
affecting the environmental conditions of EU-located enterprises. There is a strong need to develop
leaner ecosystems and environmental and energy measures need to become part of mainstream
business practices, and be supported by and fully integrated into next generation enterprise systems.
Policy context
The concept of the Knowledge Economy recognises that physical value (wealth) creation chains
depend also on the intellectual capability to design products and manufacturing systems. As product
life cycles are shortened, and the technological content of products explodes, the ability to design
both products and their manufacturing systems become a major proportion of economic activity. In
this context knowledge is considered to be itself a commodity, and there is a knowledge exploitation
chain, which has an interesting duality with the conventional physical value chain. Seen in this light
the knowledge economy is also based on wealth creation from knowledge as raw material.
The EU has put forward free movement of knowledge as a fifth freedom. Knowledge should be
available to all, no matter where it is situated. While scientific and technical knowledge is crucial
for the competitiveness of the ICT sector, promising technologies alone will not provide the
competitive edge for enterprises. More must be done to stimulate investments in enterprises’
intangible assets. But we are faced with two opposite phenomena: the search for new solutions, e.g.
new business models, customised services etc. versus the clinging to traditional (and high-valued)
rights such as copyright, data protection and privacy. The balance between these two will be critical
for the success of the Future Internet. The regulatory environment is part of the business or socioeconomic environment and must support it. There is, therefore, a major challenge to involve
legislators outside their narrow scope of the law to understand the opportunities and mechanisms of
the “next generation of the knowledge society”, and take these into consideration when revising
existing or drafting new regulations.
Policy makers are naturally not ignoring the current crisis. At the European Commission High Level
Conference, “Industrial Competitiveness and the Role of Policy in Difficult Times” in March 2009,
President Barroso underlined “the chance for setting new priorities and stimulating the renewal of
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FInES Cluster Position Paper
the industrial sector. At Community level, the European industrial policy provides the right
framework for actions that target sustained competitiveness while avoiding short-sighted
interventionist moves”. Thus, he acknowledges the need for a growth-inductive political and
regulatory environment without too much State involvement. This approach is in line with the
observations made by some project contributions. The cross-stakeholder cooperation is also
emphasised by eBusiness W@tch1: “The main barrier for ICT adoption by SMEs appears to be a
lack of awareness of the possibilities and benefits that ICT could offer. […]. Again, this requires
multi-national cooperation between governments, industry representatives (e.g. chambers of
commerce) and the ICT industry.”
The vast majority of registered businesses within the EU are SMEs. However, there is one caveat if
SMEs should benefit: make a differentiation! The notion of “SME” is far too broad to easily address
the needs of all encompassed in it. Depending on the sectors, the structures and needs of SMEs are
both varied and complex. This combined with the rapid growth of R&D centres in emerging
countries has led to a fragmented production and use of innovative products and services over a
wide cultural and geographic base. The eBusinessW@tch study makes sectoral differences, and
experience from project partners showed that there are different needs between micro, small and
medium enterprises. These should be taken into consideration for more effective measures targeting
SMEs in the future. The current crisis demonstrates its uneven impact on European SMEs beyond
the universal credit squeeze. There is a need to re-think the “SME paradigm” and the policy
approach to support SMEs as the engine of the European economy, including a reconsideration of
the SME definition of the European Commission.
Business context
Critical times are always opportunities for the public to accept change. This view is shared by most
of the stakeholders. “During an economic crisis, the increased pressure on firms to be more efficient
can lead to new innovations, including organisational ones”2. And A. Schneider3 formulates it as
follows: “Actually, one can say that new considerations and anticipations are usually emerging
when the economy is tense, not in a period of prosperity. Thus, the crisis can help SMEs to be less
skeptical”, in particular vis-à-vis new technological business solutions.
Many projects underline the multitude of advantages attributed to collaboration networks. The
predominant advantage is the opportunity to open up new markets because of domain-specific
knowledge of one partner, which can be used in a more efficient way by other partners joining an
alliance with this partner. Another advantage to be taken into account is the ability to use economies
of scope (cost reduction by joint activities) or economies of scale (cost reduction by increasing a
company's output). Furthermore, large projects may often require a critical size of the partner
applying for such a project, which is achieved more easily when more partners are involved in a
collaboration network.
Cross-industry collaboration and new business partnerships are emerging, e.g. for content
aggregation and distribution.4 As an example, companies like Nokia buy into content production to
add value to their original core business thus becoming e-publishers. New business models emerge
(and will continue to do so). The conclusion is to provide motivation to work together in new ways,
across disciplinary boundaries, between theory and applied people, and between all stakeholders:
academia, business, governments, civil society, and society at large.
Any Future Internet (FI) technologies and tools must be flexible, available at low costs, and easily
adaptable to the business needs to have a chance of broad take-up. The shift to outsourcing IT leads
to an increasing uptake of the “software-as-a-service” model, where the software needed to support
1
“An Economic Assessment of ICT Adoption and its Impact on Innovation and Performance”, Study report No.10, 2008
2
European Commission High Level Group, “The Impact of the Economic Downturn on ICT”, Feb.09
3
« Business Intelligence: Les PME entrent dans la danse » par Alexander Schneider, in: PC Expert, avril 2009.
4
OECD IT Outlook 2008, p.22
FInES Cluster Position Paper
15 May 2009
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business operations is delivered when needed from the “Cloud”. These needs are not an isolated
opinion but are confirmed by most comments/studies on ICT and SMEs.
More and more companies try to meet this challenge by concentrating on their core competences,
which determine the need to cooperate with other companies to complete the value chain. Besides
this classical core competence orientation, the permanent preparation to initiate or join new
businesses will become a mandatory management task.”
An issue that has its focus clearly on the business side but covers all others, i.e. policy, economy
and socio-economic environment is the regulatory framework. IPR legislation needs to be revised
according to the new business scenarios. The needs and demands of society go towards user-centred
services, new business models, user-generated content, and knowledge sharing as the paradigm of
the FI. Social networking within the enterprise is getting accepted, wikis and corporate blogs are
often used within the enterprises. “Crowd-sourcing” is not yet mainstream, but user involvement
becomes an important issue for both, products and services. But the legal environment is still
dominated by traditional off-line paradigms that do not fit the “new economy”. This should not end
in new legislation but in more responsibility of the stakeholders, and ideally, wherever possible,
self-regulation. Without disputing acquired fundamental rights, the framework has to be re-visited
to accommodate the new environment. This can only be done by legislators that look out of their
legal box and recognise and understand the – admittedly complex – needs of all players in the
economy for a healthy balance. Those who are currently involved are all digital immigrants and
thus, have a limited vision of what is possible. It will be up to the digital natives to find ultimate
solutions, but until then, we have to pave the way towards it.
Technology context
Opportunities to develop new business models and pursue innovative ways of value creation rely to
a large extent on technological progress, in particular advanced in ICT. Developments related to the
Future Internet support a trajectory towards a more individualized approach to production and
consumption.
The infrastructure of semantically enriched seamlessly accessible distributed information that it
incorporates, leverages sophisticated creation and (digital) delivery of individualized combinations
of products and services, increasingly in the form of “experiences” that are provided in an ambient
personalized environment. Increased abilities to obtain insights in the behaviour and preferences of
individuals, for instance through more tracking and tracing of the precise use of goods and services
associated with the proliferation of the Internet of Things, will dramatically raise the opportunity to
really make the customer king and offering exactly what is needed at precisely the desired moment,
either explicitly “on demand” but more and more based on prior knowledge. Of course this also
creates challenges to privacy protection and thus appeals to new, innovative regulatory actions.
Further lack of limitations of location or mobility to collaboration will enable that enterprises can
offer individualized solutions more and more through dynamic virtual organizations that originate in
networks of firms, including SMEs and even individual freelancers. Various projects in this domain
are already directly devoted to this change and they stress that they expect that the Future Internet
will make it much easier for companies to find each other, integrate their systems very quickly and
thus create a secure environment to exchange sensitive information. Based on the contributions
received and other sources enterprise systems are very likely to exist less and less as in-house
facilities, but will be part of “a cloud”. All this will allow enterprises to more easily respond to
sudden opportunities in the market, work “out of the box”, produce innovative solutions quickly and
create “blue ocean” strategies of value creation. The contributions from the projects suggest a
variety of technical challenges that need to be addressed to achieve this, such as those related to
flexible (re)configuration of enterprise system functionality, much lower technical barriers to access
especially for SMEs, better scalability, the combination of very open systems that make it easy to
include “outsiders” in the community but at the same are very secure for “insiders” and the
development of services that exploit advanced semantics.
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Scientific context
The substantial changes described above also increase the importance of scientific research to
support our critical assessment and control of them, and to explain (?) how we make sense of them
from an economic, political, business and technological perspective that remains balanced and
enhances the quality of life.
Crucial questions must be asked to ourselves, and answers will depend largely on research:
How do we keep the economic engine alive? The engine of economy is growth, but to re-engineer
the engine so that growth becomes sustainable and clean, needs innovation in terms of developing
technologies that sustain this type of growth.
How for instance will change what it means to be “an organization”, “a team” and “a product” and
“an employee”? We need to reassess our ideas about “collaboration” and “decision making” and
develop more sophisticated views on how one builds trust and commitment in an increasingly
virtual world. We also need to develop approaches to assess benefits and profits that do not only
take the perspective of the single enterprise, but also look at the consequences for the network as a
whole. This needs to occur with appreciation for different industries, different types of companies,
different types of employees. Will all citizens and workers win from the Future Internet, or will
some also loose? How will ICT and the FI improve our ability to address global challenges related
to for instance the energy crisis, global warming and the stark divide between rich and poor? Is it
likely to make life in Europe more democratic or will it make Big Brother scenarios more likely?
Such questions merit scientific research beyond what it offered by the engineering fields alone.
Some projects already take such a more integrative perspective on developments of the Future
Internet, including most explicitly the OPAALS project.
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3.
Vision: Future Internet based Enterprise Systems 2025
Based on the context analysis and projecting forward to the future, this section describes and
discusses the impact of the changing context on the research domain of FInES, an outlook for
European Information and Communications Technology and the future of European Enterprises.
Editors’ note: This section incorporates the relevant contributions of the FInES Cluster projects
as well as (for Sections 3.1 and 3.2) published materials from external sources notably the latest
publications by the EC regarding ICT in light of the present crisis. These sources are listed in
Annex I.
3.1 Impact on the research domain of FInES
Defining long term FInES vision and also targeting short and medium term capability
In these times of economic trouble, we must continue investing in areas that are essential for our
short to medium term needs and our long-term future. It is essential that the research community
defines a long term FInES vision together with a roadmap that also targets short and medium term
capabilities to support industry as recovery begins.
Setting the research agenda to support “Next Generation Knowledge Society”
In the context of the current economic and financial crisis, it is important to remember the central
role played by the production and take up of ICT in driving innovation, productivity and growth.
ICT can contribute to a better handling and more swift recovery from the crisis. Beyond recovery,
Europe must stay on course in delivering the Next Generation Knowledge Society. R&D effort lays
the foundation today to ensure the technology progress on which Europe will capitalise in the
future, while diffusion of ICT across the economy accelerates the economic recovery. Clearly, the
“technology focus” only approach is not enough. Competitiveness of the ICT sector, involving
mastering the essential technologies, must be complemented by the opportunity to make novel
classes of innovative applications available and sustainable, which can have huge economic and
social impacts outside the ICT sector. ICT needs to be at the service of its users, who turn invention
into innovation and use. This applies in “normal times”. Recent publications from the European
Commission underline that this applies particularly in a crisis where private investment is severely
curtailed and commercial survival is a pressing problem.
The theme "Future Internet" is today broadly recognised as having key social and economic impact
and the potential to drive the European competitiveness of tomorrow. But the Future Internet as a
set of technologies is not a panacea for the problems confronting enterprises5. In order to equip
European enterprises with the short and medium term capabilities and to overcome Europe’s
competitiveness deficit in the long run, Future Internet technologies need to be adopted by
enterprises and applied to enterprise systems. The innovation facilitated by technologies must be led
by technology users, of which European enterprises are among the most important constituencies.
EU Future Internet research must fully embrace the application dimension and enterprise systems as
one key aspect of that dimension.
Implementing EU’s fifth freedom for European enterprises
The crisis has highlighted and reinforced the role of lead sectors in the economy, whose activity has
profound repercussions for the rest. To foster a comprehensive innovation culture, research should
pay attention to sectors which contribute to the whole value chain including raw material provision
and physical processes as much as the value adding elements. The concept of the Knowledge
Economy recognises that such physical value (wealth) creation chains depend also on the
intellectual capability to design products and manufacturing systems. As product life cycles are
5
According to one contributor: IT has always been vulnerable to a tendency to create solutions to problems nobody had, and then to sell
the solutions hard to recover investment, generate turnover and make profit. There is a disturbing similarity with the invention and trading
of imaginary financial instruments here.
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FInES Cluster Position Paper
shortened, and the technological content of products explodes, the ability to design both products
and their manufacturing systems become a major proportion of economic activity. In this context
knowledge is considered to be itself a commodity, and there is a knowledge exploitation chain,
which has an interesting duality with the conventional physical value chain. Seen in this light the
knowledge economy is also based on wealth creation from knowledge as raw material.
The EU has put forward free movement of knowledge as a fifth freedom. Knowledge should be
available to all, no matter where it is situated. While scientific and technical knowledge is crucial
for the competitiveness of the ICT sector, promising technologies alone will not provide the
competitive edge for enterprises. More must be done to stimulate investments in enterprises’
intangible assets. But we are faced with two opposite phenomena: the search for new solutions, e.g.
new business models, customised services etc. versus the clinging to traditional (and high-valued)
rights such as copyright, data protection and privacy. The balance between these two will be critical
for the success of the Future Internet6. The regulatory environment is part of the business or socioeconomic environment and must support it. There is, therefore, a major challenge to involve
legislators outside their narrow scope of the law to understand the opportunities and mechanisms of
the “next generation of the knowledge society”, and take these into consideration when revising
existing or drafting new regulations.
Taking account of environmental and energy issues
Beyond the economic crisis, global economy will additionally be confronted with an emerging
energy distribution problem arising from the global economy’s dependence on crude oil. With
global oil reserves declining continuously, oil prices have continuously climbed. At the same time,
the effects of climate change may become obvious, affecting the environmental conditions of EUlocated enterprises. There is a strong need to develop leaner ecosystems and thus reduce the trialand-error consumption (of all kinds of resources both natural and processed). Environmental and
energy measures need to become part of mainstream business practices, and be supported by and
fully integrated into next generation enterprise systems. The exercise of corporate social
responsibility needs not be a sunk cost, but a trigger for enterprise innovation.
Making the Future Internet truly democratic and available for all, including SMEs
The vast majority of registered businesses within the EU are SMEs. Depending on the sectors, the
structures and needs of SMEs are both varied and complex. This combined with the rapid growth of
R&D centres in emerging countries has led to a fragmented production and use of innovative
products and services over a wide cultural and geographic base. The current crisis demonstrates its
uneven impact on European SMEs beyond the universal credit squeeze. There is a need to re-think
the “SME paradigm” and the policy approach to support SMEs as the engine of the European
economy, including a reconsideration of the SME definition of the European Commission.
Today’s fragmented software systems are not appropriate for most of the SMEs from different
sectors due to the complexity, high cost and implementation efforts. Future tools have to support the
SMEs in their very flexible and agile daily processes as well as their collaboration within a global
economy. Furthermore research should also encourage ICT solutions that support mobility for
SMEs. Research targeting SMEs should take into account the following criteria: any technology
must be very flexible, easy to use, easy to implement and easy to maintain. Additionally any content
must be easy to find.
Seen in this light, the move to Future Internet-based Enterprise Systems brings with it additional
conceptual and technical complexity, and one of the strongest research challenges should be to
abstract this complexity and make the Future Internet truly “democratic” - opening it to the millions
of European SMEs who do not have dedicated IT staff, and are not interested in technology
developments per se, but only in the way these developments can help them achieve competitive
advantage and sustainable development.
6
For example, the recent infringement procedure of the European Commission against the UK for behavioural adverts and deep packet
inspection. The more general point is that IPR legislation needs to be revised according to new business scenarios, such as: who is the
proprietor of a digital object created by a community? How can the demand of multimedia objects to download and share be reconciled
with fair compensation for the intellectual property? Etc.
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Promoting user-centred products, services and tools
The whole of the IT sector can be considered as a service sector in support of users. FInES research
needs to clearly focus on the needs of enterprises as beneficiaries of ICT solutions, as enterprises
emerge leaner and fitter in recovering economies. Future scenarios, enabled by Future Internet
technology, should critically include a novel user-centred approach to the design, development and
commercialisation of new products and services based on a community approach. In this scenario
the active participation of the user community in the product creation process supports the
alignment between stakeholders/user expectations, needs and product specifications. The product
and service cycle (consumer insight, conceptual design, product design, production and marketing)
should be developed and exploited as a unique development process where the user community is
designing its own product and at the same time is marketing it.
Therefore, tools are envisaged to support a collaborative, community based design and development
of products and services. Tools should take into account the essential ICT requirements of
enterprises (e.g. quick set-up, ease of use, less complex etc.). In terms of software, there is a need
for agile software products, involving new software development techniques by new developers.
Also, flexible interfaces for fast collaboration between stakeholders are needed, as well as the need
to embrace uncertainty.
Supporting Future Internet and FInES via standardisation
In a world of increasing uncertainty, standardisation has a role in providing a stable foundation, or a
level playing field, to facilitate innovation and ultimately deliver choice for end users. In order to
usher in new economic opportunities, standardisation is the more important to remove artificial
trade barriers and the norms associated with old structures and obsolete business models. But the
approaches for standardisation have to be refocused; otherwise it can also provide a block point in
future R&D. Standardisation can be valuable when applied at one remove: that is not in restricting
the delivered content of applications and services, but in specifying a future oriented reference
framework and the implementation methodology e.g. through open standards.
3.2 An outlook for European ICT
According to Viviane Reding, the European Commissioner for Information Society and Media,
there are three main drivers in ICT:

Social networks - a shift from “Web 2.0 for fun” to Web 2.0 for productivity and services,
in particular “Web 2.0 networking” in the business world;

The Internet of things - new classes of application will come to life, combining information
from the virtual world with perception of the physical world, and supported by a powerful
open service infrastructure (of which distributed “cloud” computing capability is an
example in that direction);

The mobile Internet - the emergence of a wireless web is becoming a reality.
Taking into account the external factors enterprises may be confronted with in the future, the state
of the Internet 15 years ahead from now may be characterised by an evolution and revolution of the
existing technologies. Such developments may trigger continuous as well as discontinuous
innovation in enterprise environments. Specific hypotheses of future ICT that significantly impact
on enterprises may include:

Pervasiveness of the Internet, offering the ability to connect to any person at any location
and any time, allowing enterprises to act solely on a virtual basis, dramatically lowering the
entry barrier to business sectors, and fostering new business forms and ecosystems;

Widespread availability of portable and easily configurable “light-weight” tools and
customisable “rich Internet applications”, which enterprises can dynamically as well as
rapidly deploy to handle combinations of material and immaterial goods, leading to a
fundamental change in the way that a business may be run;
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
Transformation of the Internet “infrastructure” beyond today’s basic network connectivity
to encompass service interoperability, and from wire-based access to wireless access,
meeting the real-time demand for bandwidth, services, knowledge and collaboration
arrangements;

A break-through in the Internet’s security, reliability, quality of service and its general
trustworthiness, leading to an Internet that is fit for business.
On the basis of these hypotheses, European ICT-centric enterprises may be faced with a radical
change of their business models in the future due to the ongoing shift towards Internet-based
services, user (including customer) empowerment and new economics in computing the value and
cost of ICT. Future enterprises are expected to be organised into a wide variety of business networks
to deal with the increasing product and process complexity over the whole product life cycle. This
raises the need and benchmark for technologies to support fast, flexible and mobile collaborations,
as well as to support the whole product and service life cycle in a fully integrated way.
Already, the shift to outsourcing IT has led to an increasing uptake of the “software-as-a-service”,
which is projected to expand notwithstanding the economic downturn. Cloud computing has so far
centred on “systems infrastructure as a service”. Over the coming years, an increasing array of
application functionality is expected to become available as cloud services. Business semantics will
improve, potentially tapping into collective intelligence, and be embedded into business logic.
Convergence will extend beyond the technology domains today to convergence between business
contexts, applications, semantics and Web 2.0/X.0 technologies; all mediated by services. In
addition, the wide deployment of the utility based service concept will further drive essential IT
functions for enterprises down the value chain, ushering in a new generation of commoditised ICT
services as part of the open Future Internet infrastructure. Such an infrastructure facilitates an
explosion of value added, customised services along the “long tail” of the ICT market. It will
therefore be particularly attractive for collaborative SMEs, new forms of business networks, as well
as new market entrants.
The Internet of Things (IoT) will further extend the distributed computing paradigm, with
enterprises having to manage massive surges of information generated by billions of devices. IoT
enables the integration of all things around into the communication experience. It signals a move
from the Internet as a communications medium to an information-centric Internet. Not only do
future enterprise systems need to function in mobile environment and work with a new generation
of endpoints (mobile devices). They will also have to be equipped to handle complex information
management issues, such as information uncertainty, inconsistency, reconciliation, provenance,
security, access and control, high data volumes etc on a vast scale unimaginable today. Knowledge
management for the trading of extremely diverse and exceedingly high volume information assets
may become part of the business norm, and moreover a key channel of access to enterprise
collaboration.
The Future Internet will be dominated in the long term by “digital natives”. That will help the uptake of tools of whatever technical kind. It is important, though, to bridge the transition phase, when
most business persons will still be “digital immigrants”. For this purpose, easy-to-use, selfexplanatory tools, or tools similar to those known in other contexts (e.g. social networking) will be
vital for enterprise collaboration. In addition, the content available and created daily on the Future
Internet could help enterprises considerably in accessing and exchanging knowledge, thus
increasing their collaboration and ultimately their competitiveness. Despite the constant
development of Web techniques, content aggregation (e.g. business intelligence) and its targeted
customisation is still the main challenge. In the transition phase, while enterprise requirements will
have some influence on the direction of Future Internet development, this will however most likely
reflect the interests of enterprises providing Internet infrastructure and services, rather than the
needs of enterprise end-users of Internet services, who lack in the main the technical expertise to
evaluate design alternatives, and (because of the financial pressures noted above) the capacity to be
involved in determining future requirements.
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3.3 The future of European enterprises
Towards sustainable value creation
Current research7 confirms that effective knowledge management leads to value creation with the
potential to increase and sustain organisational innovation. In particular, sustainable development is
hampered by the inability of making sense and exploiting effectively the large amount of knowledge
generated by individuals across teams, projects, and organisations8. Sustainability related
knowledge may take several explicit forms, but it is also inherent in human actors’ skills,
interactions, experiences, and lessons learned. Sustainable value creation is grounded in the
appropriate combination of human networks, social capital, intellectual capital and technology
assets, facilitated by a culture of change. It has been proposed that sustainable value creation is the
meeting point between business needs and community research9.
New business models for future enterprises
Market conditions are not static. ICT as an enabler contributes to change and, according to Viviane
Reding, drives social evolution. This lead to new products and services, new collaboration
networks, new ecosystems, new markets and, above all, new value proposition of what enterprises
may offer to customers.
The related new business models, allowing products focused on user needs existing as well as new,
with faster development cycles, need to be assisted by new ICT, which are Internet based and
developed with active participation of the users’ community. There are numerous possibilities here,
facilitated by the novel application of ICT. In the quest for new business models, SMEs face a lot of
competitive disadvantages due to their size. But they may react and adapt faster to the changed
market situation, and test (even improvise) and more easily exploit totally innovative business
models. The SMEs culture of doing more with less is an added bonus10. The new generation of ICT
may support the enterprises in this process and create new opportunities, but for what concerns the
SMEs, next generation of ICT needs to address the most evident barriers which prevent most of the
EU SMEs from adopting innovative.
The present eBusiness area includes new services such as multimedia context distribution, shared
virtual environment, geographic information etc11. The new generation of ICT will create new
business opportunities, and new opportunities will rise if more powerful Internet based connectivity
and architectures are available (e.g. easy to use, ubiquitous, performant, adaptable to different user
needs and devices, secure,....). Therefore the potential for innovative business models needs to be
explored.
Managing complexity within future enterprises
European enterprises are currently faced with accelerated increase of complexity in products and
processes. This will be further increase in the future. One reason for this is the involvement of
different disciplines in a product: beside mechanic, electric and electronic, more and more software
will be included in future products. Another reason for the increase in complexity is the
development and manufacturing of products in networks; a prominent example is the automotive
industry. This increase of complexity is strongly pronounced in terms of supporting information
technology to manage the complexity in product and process over the product life cycle.
Technology push is very influential in the overall increase of complexity, with new standards and
buzzwords being invented by IT suppliers on a daily basis. Technical complexity and support are
problems that must be solved for enterprises.
7
Vorakulpipat, & Rezgui, (2008) Value creation: the future of knowledge management, The Knowledge Eng. Review.
8
Wetherill, M., Rezgui, Y., Boddy, S., Cooper, G. (2007). Intra and Inter-organisational knowledge services to promote informed
sustainability practices. Computing in Civil Engineering 21(2), 78–89
9
This proposal is made by the K-NET project, see Annex I for details.
10
“Networked enterprises” could provide a solution to the problems associated with “disadvantages due to size”.
11
e.g. Overview of business models for Web 2.0 communities, www.alexandria.unisg.ch/Publikationen/31411
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Flexible and agile business processes
Classic business process modelling describes activities connected through various operators12. Due
to the huge number of possible process variants, it is hardly possible to use only these languages for
capturing flexible processes. New approaches are suggested to cope with the complexity of the
future networked enterprises which will be able to exploit a set of business services supporting
collaboration and interoperability, based on the Future Internet connectivity. Ideally the business
process needs to become interactive, and the business flow needs to vary and evolve according to
the behaviour of the actors who cope with the external (market) requirements. Another approach
may be based on a high modularisation of the processes, enabling easy reconfiguration and
adaptation. The final objective of enabling flexible and agile processes is to support inter and intraorganisational collaboration and the creation of new successful joint strategies to address new
business opportunities.
Community based open networking and collaboration for future enterprises
Wikis and corporate blogs are more and more applied in the industrial enterprises. However, they
are still seldom integrated into one between the other or within the general IT-environment. This is
due to the lack of defined structures and rules, security issues etc. for including and the handling of
the user generated content and knowledge. Furthermore, interfaces to other enterprise software like
e.g. ERP, PLM, CRM etc. are missing respectively these tools are not supporting community based
networking and collaboration in a proper way. Another aspect of the community based networking
and collaboration is that enterprises, especially large enterprises, tend to have a different approach
from individuals. They perceive more the threat of sharing information and experiences with their
competitors, suppliers, customers etc. than the advantage of the collaboration in addressing common
business challenges. The Open Innovation approach is an example using communities to support
(pre-)competitive developments in a win-win situation. Overall, community based networking and
collaboration has the potential to leverage the efficiency of various business areas and can thereby
be very beneficial for enterprises internally as well as externally. A major challenge for the future IT
is to build the basic infrastructure to support the Community based networking and collaboration for
future Enterprises, based on the utility service concept described in Section 3.213.
Future Internet based Enterprise Systems 2025
Editors’ note: the following is placeholder text. More inputs from the FInES community are
needed to develop this sub-section.
The Enterprise Interoperability Research Roadmap has set out four research Grand Challenges that
aim to leverage interoperability to enable enterprises to collaborate as well as compete. The Value
Proposition for Enterprise Interoperability Report demonstrates the interoperability imperative for
innovation. But innovation at the level of interchangeable parts is not enough. We need high impact
innovation that combines standalone innovations at the parts level to deliver innovation at the
system level for enterprises. Also, interoperability as a potential is stunted without easy ways to
gain access to it. Tomorrow’s enterprise systems must leverage and build on top of the capability of
interoperability to deliver richer, more diverse and more customisable innovation.
Interoperability that is simple, affordable, accessible and reliable must be extended from tools to the
whole of ICT systems for enterprises.
12
e.g. Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), Enterprise Process Center (EPC) etc.
13
This include, for example, (1) Defining appropriate templates, pre-structures, rules as well as security guidelines which will match the
mutual trust of the enterprises within the community; (2) Combining different tools for enterprise internal (department and crossdivisional level) and external (with customers, partners, suppliers, competitors as well as other sectors) networking and collaboration
within communities; (3) Defining, collecting, semantically annotating and supporting the access to community generated and shared
business knowledge and information; (4) Developing business oriented software tools for community based networking and collaboration
integrated into the business software environment. This is especially necessary for supporting interdisciplinary collaboration and
networking; and (5) Developing communication and collaboration tools supporting flexible interoperability, interactive multimedia and
3D object creation and manipulation, inter-organisational agile workflow management.
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The (Future) Internet is the Enterprise14

A new participative web, hosting a new wave of services, using user-friendly technologies
is empowering the enterprise of the future;

For the enterprise, the Internet becomes the platform through which knowledge is
manipulated dynamically, experienced in the business context and re-presented in a
radically different way to create new value;

The Internet blurs the boundaries between the intra and extra-muros enterprise domain;
collaboration becomes rooted in the essence of entrepreneurship;

Web-based applications become as rich as the desktop: it is the emanation of the
WYSIWYG15 enterprise.
14
Cristina Martinez, “Future Internet Enterprise Systems (FInES) Cluster Meeting”, European Commission, February 19th, 2009.
15
What You See Is What You Get
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FInES Cluster Position Paper
4.
The FInES Cluster: Proposals
Editors note: Text to be developed for Version 2 of this document. This section will cover:
 Vision Statement of the Cluster
 Scope of the Cluster
 Priorities for the Cluster
 Any other specific issues relating to the Cluster
FInES Cluster Position Paper
15 May 2009
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Requirem
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Editors note: Text to be developed for Version 2 of this document.
Des
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FInES Cluster Position Paper