Bachelor's Thesis Sandro Stürzenhofecker

Abstract

Nowadays, many manufacturing companies need to transform their Information Technology (IT) landscape to achieve a competitive advantage and to be well-prepared for future demands. Especially within historically grown companies, one often can recognize a silo-based structure representing organizational units, which tend to be redundant and complex. A potential remedy for this are platform-oriented architectures sharing services across organizational units. The transformation towards this is discussed in literature under the term platformization (Bygstad and Hanseth, 2018). This thesis focuses on the technical aspects of such a platformization in the manufacturing IT of high-tech electronics manufacturers. During the transformation, many architectural design decisions have to be made. One of the affected areas where decisions are required in an early stage are the interactions between services within the platform and the interactions between services and the ecosystem. However, it is unclear how to interact within the platform-oriented architecture. Thus, it is challenging to align with the architecture when applying new interactions. Therefore, this thesis provides a framework that aims to facilitate applying standardized interactions within a platform-oriented manufacturing IT of high-tech electronics manufacturers. To that end, a participatory action research was conducted in collaboration with a German high-tech electronics manufacturer as practical counterpart. The framework consists of two artifacts. The first artifact is a classification tree that allows one to identify matching interaction patterns for an interaction use case and, subsequently to classify the use case by assigning it to a pattern. Therefore, metadata dimensions of an interaction were identified. The second artifact is the minimal set of interaction patterns that provide standardization for the required interactions, and thus, facilitate the design of interactions for practitioners. Thereby, the dimensions, which define the properties of an interaction, and their characteristics were identified and classified for each suitable interaction pattern. Subsequently, the suitable interaction patterns were consolidated to remove redundancy. The findings of this thesis contribute to practice by facilitating the application of standardized interactions in a platform-oriented manufacturing IT of high-tech electronics manufacturers. Furthermore, the findings contribute to theory by proposing a decentralized approach to interact within the integration framework of a platform-oriented architecture that may increase its stability and by introducing a framework that proposes standardized interactions for a platform-oriented manufacturing IT through interaction patterns.