Identifying business services from small and micro enterprises' collaboration: the activity-based service identification framework

In a service-oriented (SO) development paradigm, service identification (SI) occurs earlier to describe service requirements from a business process (BP). There exist several SI strategies. However, they have been devised to identify services from mature BP. There is, therefore, a need for SI strategies that cater to identify services from the emerging heterogeneous collaborative environments such as exist for small and micro enterprises (SMEs). This paper has developed the activity-based SI framework (ASIF) from activity-theory (AT) using design science research (DSR) methods. Guiding the selection and scoping of the collaboration activity, analysing goals and goal-oriented activity (actions), analysing objects, analysing stakeholders and their interactions, analysing rules and division of labour (DOL) within the collaboration processes, and identifying reusable, granular, and composable services are the contextual design principles of ASIF. The framework has been exemplified using a case study on SMEs' peer-to-peer collaborative lending activities in the Ethiopian context.