Alain Wegmann

Alain Wegmann joined EPFL in 1996. His interests are in techniques to better align business and IT. He developed, with his group and partners, the SEAM methods: SEAM for business (strategic thinking), SEAM for enterprise architecture (business/IT alignment) and SEAM for software (IT). The originality of SEAM is in the integration of generic systems thinking principles into discipline-specific methods. This integration has three benefits: (1) the possibility to relate the different disciplines (by having common systemic principles); (2) the capability to leverage on discipline-specific knowledge (by using the vocabulary and the heuristics of each discipline) and (3) to be more efficient in solving problems (by benefiting from the problem solving techniques developed in systems thinking). SEAM is currently applied in master courses and consulting. Consulting is done for start-ups developing their business and technology strategies and for large companies having service-oriented architecture projects.

Prior to joining EPFL, Alain Wegmann worked for 14 years with Logitech in software development/engineering management (Switzerland, Taiwan, US), manufacturing (Taiwan) and marketing (US). When he left Logitech, Alain Wegmann was engineering vice-president and marketing director for large accounts.

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CS-490: Business design for IT services

In this course, students practice designing digital business services. The students learn to apply the principles of technical sales while developing their own projects. Through this process, students gain insight into the co-creation of relationships between a company and its customers.

Problem structuring to enable innovation in business/IT projects

Tatiana Porté, Gil Regev, Alain Wegmann

In this paper, we present a problem structuring method in business and IT analysis illustrated with an example. The project describes an IT consulting case done for a Swiss medical society faced with a problem of change management and digital transformation. We show business analysis techniques of modelling actors’ behaviour, motivation, and information exchanged between them. We model business and IT services and structure case information in order to design a solution to the problem and its implementation requirements. We highlight how accommodation of different viewpoints enables business and IT alignment and removes hindrances to innovation.

LUT Scientific and Expertise Publications2020

A Novel Approach to Modeling Enterprise Services Leveraging Object Cloning and Multilevel Classification

Lam Son Lê, Alain Wegmann

Object-oriented modeling is concerned with capturing common properties of objects. The dominant thinking in this realm is to classify objects that share certain properties into what is called a class, which in turn enables us to instantiate additional objects. Deep modeling takes a step further by introducing the notion of clabject that might be instantiated multiple times until its instantiation potency runs out. This initiative has gained a lot of momentum of late, primarily due to the inadequacy of the classical mechanics of two-level object instantiation. There exists a less familiar way of reasoning in object-orientation that takes its root from the prototype theory. We believe that they co-exist as two sides of the same coin. Unfortunately, prototype-based modeling still stays on the sidelines in the mainstream of conceptual modeling and related areas (e.g., enterprise modeling). In this paper, we argue that the two methods actually complement each other. We propose a hybrid modeling suite that allows for both instantiation and cloning in enterprise modeling. We formally state that a clabject not only features the so-called potency (i.e., for how many levels this clabject might further be classified) but also carries the notion of characteristics (i.e., the extent to which this clabject resembles those being represented). We demonstrate our novel ways of modeling for capturing business processes in a service-oriented enterprise architecture.

IEEE2019

A Return on Our Experience of Using Services as a Unifying Concept for Business and IT Alignment in a University

Gorica Tapandjieva Sekulovska, Alain Wegmann

We describe the use of the concept of service for aligning the business activities of an organization and its IT resources. This work is set in the context of a longitudinal action-research project between our research unit and our university's IT department. We use one concrete and real example to illustrate the many projects we worked on. The research outcomes of this collaboration are two business/IT alignment and architecture recommendations that are relevant for practitioners.

2019