The role of coordination and architecture in supporting ASP business models

The recent increase in the volatility of E-business environments and the increasing need for enterprise to participate in business webs, have forced enterprises to contemplate outsourcing key business services to Application Service Providers (ASPS) - entities that deploy, host, and manage access to applications delivered over networks on a subscription basis. In this paper, we hypothesize that a critical success factor for a successful ASP relationship between a provider and a consumer is managing the coordination activities involved. This we believe can be managed using an enterprise architecture which is extended over and coordinated between the service provider and the consumer of the service. To support these premises, we describe a methodology derived from coordination theory that helps in identifying and analyzing the coordination process. We apply this methodology to the ASP value chain and use the results to derive an architecture to support these coordination activities.