Engineering roles for constructing ecosystems

The digital transformation of nearly all industrial sectors leads and will lead to a disruptive change. Instead of traditional linear value chains, we will move towards networked, interconnected value creation - digital ecosystems where multiple organizations and their software systems interact with each other. We can observe an increasing number of ecosystems that strongly gain value by contributions added by other organizations. However, what does this mean for engineering skills needed to initiate and grow an ecosystem with software systems being developed, evolved and operated? In this position paper, we introduce new roles and skill profiles required for engineering software ecosystems. We derived the initial role description based on practical experiences in projects we conducted over the past five years and found these roles to be crucial for the overall success of the organization within a digital ecosystem. Key capabilities we found are strength in business and technology at the same time, the ability to think end-to-end in the ecosystem, and interdisciplinarity regarding software engineering disciplines.