Information technology (IT) has been identified as a major organizational resource that enables organizations to achieve competitive advantage or to survive in their market (Brynjolfsson & Hitt, 1996). As business and IT should nowadays cooperate seamlessly, the rigidity of old IT proved to be a bottleneck for sustaining competitive advantage in the markets.

Information technology (IT) has been identified as a major organizational resource that enables organizations to achieve competitive advantage or to survive in their market (Brynjolfsson & Hitt, 1996). As business and IT should nowadays cooperate seamlessly, the rigidity of old IT proved to be a bottleneck for sustaining competitive advantage in the markets.

In rapidly changing markets it is of primary importance for organisations to be able to cooperate in a flexible manner with diverse external partners. in such a joint venture it is readily required to integrate business processes and their associated IT support.

This research approaches the service register as an Information Intermediary. This enables the use of design theories which not only focuses on the technical aspects of delivering the right description to the user, but also the organizational processes and procedures to support this. The result is an attempt for creating an effective design for a service register.

The main goal of this thesis is to describe the relation between SOA and BI, by providing an overview of the opportunities and limitations of using BI in an organization that adopts SOA for building its applications. Opportunities describe how the adoption of SOA can improve the use of BI. Limitations describe the constraints of these opportunities, and the limitations of traditional approaches to BI on SOA applications. The opportunities and limitations are described in concepts and technologies, of which the technological description will be mainly described by the resulting software architecture. Since the academic literature on this subject is rather thin, this research poses to establish a useful source of information to those practitioners and academics working and learning in the field of BI, who are interested in the developments of BI.

Requirements Engineering as a scientific discipline has matured over the last decade, the process itself is rather well understood and led to numerous of techniques and models. Lately, the term requirements management has become more important. Requirements Management adds traceability to the requirements engineering process and artefacts. Although requirements management is a fairly well understood discipline, in practice companies still have questions and issues how to deal with requirements. This report describes a method that will guide practitioners through the requirements engineering process and show how to incorporate traceability into that process. It also describes tool support and how to model requirements.

The Dutch mortgage-market has experienced significant changes during the last decade. Several aspects led to a shift in market share from the banks to intermediary organizations. As a response to this development, Topicus teamed up with a few intermediary organizations and developed an application that offers support for the workflow in the intermediary organization. This system, Finture, is developed based on the FORCE framework. The main functional goal of Finture is to offer complete support for the intermediary’s primary process, as well as all interactions with its chain-partners. In realizing this goal, Topicus questioned how Finture’s role in the intermediary’s primary process could be improved and extended. This question is the main research question in this research. ...