Advanced Information Systems Engineering Workshops

Time-aware activities are characterized by a set of time-related aspects, independently from the involved application domain. For example, an activity may need to reason on facts that are held to be true in specific time intervals, or it may need to be executed at precise time instants. In this paper we present a temporal model capturing these concepts and their relations. The model is described by means of an UML formalization, enriched with OCL constraints where needed. The model turns into a set of architectural abstractions that makes time-related concepts visible at the application level. This eases the analysis and implementation of time-aware systems and enables adaptivity so that temporal constraints may be dynamically met.

Contracts are fundamental toward characterising the very nature of a firm (or enterprise). The firm is considered by some economic theories as a bundle of contracts and contracts in turn are considered also as bundles of rights and obligations (commitments). As such it can be argued that the ontological relationships between the firm and its contracts can be explained through a set of mereological (or whole-part) relationships. Specifically, the relationships between a contract and its parties and between the parties and their rights/commitments are all mereological. This view of what contracts are may appear at first surprising but a perdurantist interpretation of contracts results in such an ontology. The main contribution of this paper is a perdurantist ontology of contracts which introduces the following distinctive features: (1) a differentiation between contract specification and contract execution, (2) contract executions as objects whose spatio-temporal extents intersect those of its parties and (3) a generic model of contractual commitments and fulfilment events impacting the economics of the enterprise. The ontology proposed in this paper is applied to an example scenario to demonstrate its benefits in enterprise modelling.

The definitions of ‘‘event’’ and ‘‘crowd’’ are still representing controversial issues that have been tackled by different disciplines like Sociology, Philosophy and Computer Science. The proposed ontology of events takes advantage of results and perspectives already present in literature and in available resources, like DBpedia. Events, such as celebrations, concerts, sport matches and so on, are, in this work, defined as structured entities spatially and temporally confined, codified by a specific script, and participated by urban crowds. The integration of an ontology of ‘‘event’’ with an ontology of ‘‘crowd’’ constitutes the originality of this work. A conceptual framework has been defined, and then implemented in Protègè, to create a versatile tool to profile crowds. In the paper the assumptions that underline the development of the ontology are introduced, then its implementation in Protègè and its application to a case study is presented.

One of the challenges of using ontology evolution approaches is the capability of exposing the ontology with information that may be used by third-party tools for tracking the updates carried out on the ontologies. In this paper we present and enhanced version of the

MoKi

tool equipped with an ontology evolution approach that permits to evolve an ontology by providing a mechanism for facing the tracking challenge. By considering, as use case, the context of the Organic.Lingua EU-project, we will discuss the effectiveness of the proposed approach and possible drawbacks.

The interlinking, maintenance and updating of different Linked Data repositories is steadily becoming a critical issue as the amount of published data increases. The wealth of information across the World Wide Web can be exploited in order to provide additional information about the way that an object is described in the real world. This paper proposes a method for discovering new concepts and examining the equivalence of properties in different LOD description schemas by using Open Information Extraction techniques on web resources. The method relies on constructing association graphs from the extracted information, proceeding to a transfer on the conceptual level using information previously known from the LOD repositories and examining the similarities and discrepancies between the produced graphs and the LOD descriptions, as well as between the graphs derived from different repositories.

Institutional repositories (IR) and Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) among other kinds of systems store and manage information on the context in which research activity takes place. Several models, standards and ontologies have been proposed to date as a solution to give coherent semantics to research information. These present a large degree of overlap but also present very different approaches to modeling. This paper presents a contrast of two of the more widespread models, the VIVO ontology and the CERIF standards, and provides directions for mapping them in a way that enables clients to integrate data coming from heterogeneous sources. The majority of mapping problems have risen from the representation of VIVO sub-hierarchies in CERIF as well as from the representation of CERIF attributes in VIVO.

The usefulness of economic indicators in assessing functioning of an enterprise depends on comprehension by decision-makers of semantic connections existing between ratios. Analysis of economic indicators with regard to semantic relations often has essential impact on formulating accurate conclusions. However, the knowledge of semantic connections and resulting from them information concerning functioning of an enterprise is often possessed only by experienced financial analysts. Topic map standard allows creating a model of knowledge representation, searching and acquiring unique information. The creation of topic map for the ontology of economic indicators facilitates inter alia analyzing economic ratios on account of semantic connections between them. In the semantic search in topic map the visualization plays important role. We have audited the heuristic evaluation of the visualization in searching information on economic indicators based application for Return on Investment indicator. The research with participation of users was carried out.

In global supply chains, many public and private organizations collaborate in order to succeed in transporting goods from the seller to the buyer. Given the dynamicity of global supply chains it is hard to predict which information is needed by whom at which point in time which oftentimes causes service delivery issues. Integrating relevant information, processes and services prevents deterioration in service provisioning caused by missing information required for processes that need to be executed to supply services. In this paper, an ontology-based event-driven architecture is described for integrating information, processes and services that acts as a mechanism to coordinate service delivery. The architecture is illustrated in the context of a global supply chain of plastic toys, where it is shown how the architecture enables the availability of valuable information based on events which positively influences the delivery of a barge planning service.

The relationship between requirements and architectures is an important research field on software engineering. One of its challenges is to provide proper support for their co-evolution, i.e., how to assess the mutual impact of requirements and architecture changes on each other, as well as how to react to these changes in order to prevent misalignment between them.We advocate the use of a single goal model to express both requirements and architectural concerns. In this paper we put forward an approach for requirements and architecture co-evolution considering such a model. Moreover, we outline the reasoning required in order to support forward and backward co-evolution of service oriented systems.

Distributed and concurrent systems have become common in enterprises, and the complexity of these systems has increased dramatically. The self-adaptive feature can be advantageous for complex systems, because it can acclimate to a dynamically changing environment. To achieve this goal, this paper presents a Self-Adaptive Framework for Concurrency Architecture (SAFCA). SAFCA includes multiple concurrency architectural alternatives and is able to adapt to an appropriate architecture based on changes in the environment and the control policy. With an autonomic control, SAFCA can handle bursty workloads by invoking another architectural alternative at runtime instead of statically configured to accommodate the peak demands, which requires higher system resources even when they are not needed. Experimental results demonstrate that SAFCA can improve performance. The experience can be useful for building complicated systems that have multiple configurations or diverse demands, such as cloud computing.

Enterprise architecture software design is all about composing applications to assemble value-added solutions rather than standalone products. Yet, each product and technology may have been designed and developed separately because of software engineering practices, management control over the deliverables, or technology acquisitions. To promote efficient assembly, solutions must be architected in a similar style, adhering to fundamental design principles while leveraging capabilities available in modern environments and relevant platforms. Furthermore, business agility and cost requirements dictate the identification of common capabilities and their development as reusable components across products and solutions. The 4x6 Tiered Architecture Method presented in this paper imposes a structured design, in terms of steps to follow, structure and documentation, for the logical view of an enterprise solution. Application of the 4x6 method to the analysis of an enterprise solution yields a six-tiered architecture structure and an abstract architecture specification. This specification expresses the various components, dependencies and design patterns using a graph-based data model (or “architecture catalog”) and blueprint, the latter expressed as both a diagram and XML document. The 4x6 Method has been applied in practice; this experience indicates that this method results in higher quality architecture and requires lower effort for both constructing and reviewing the architecture and its documentation.

The architecture of Data Warehouse systems is described on basis of so-called reference architectures. Today’s requirements to Enterprise Data Warehouses are often too complex to be satisfactorily achieved by the rather rough descriptions of this reference architecture. We describe an architecture of dedicated layers to face those complex requirements, and point out additional expenses and resulting advantages of our approach compared to the traditional one.

Service-based architectures have become commonplace, creating the need to address their systematic maintenance and evolution. We investigate architecture change representation, primarily focusing on the identification of change patterns that support the potential reuse of common changes in architecture-centric evolution for service software. We propose to exploit architecture change logs - capturing traces of sequential changes - to identify patterns of change that occur over time. The changes in the log are formalised as a typed attributed graph that allows us to apply frequent sub-graph mining approaches to identify potentially reusable, usage-determined change patterns. We propose to foster the reuse of routine evolution tasks to allow an architect to follow a systematic, reuse-centered approach to architectural change execution.

Multi-tenancy (MT) architectures allow multiple customers to be consolidated into the same operational system. Multi-tenancy is key to the success of Software as a Service (SaaS) by means of a new software distribution formula in which customers share application and costs are indirectly assumed by all of them. However, as traditional applications do, each MT application deploys a single functionality, therefore component sharing between applications only occurs in an ad hoc manner and thereby hindering software reuse. In this paper it is introduced Multi-tenancy Multi-target (MT

2

), an extension to MT Architectures for the development and deployment of one single software application encompassing several functionalities. To this end, some new components are added to traditional MT Architectures, thus providing new benefits for software developers, vendors and clients, and which are described by means of real examples.

Virtual Integration systems require a crawling tool able to navigate and reach relevant pages in the Deep Web in an efficient way. Existing proposals in the crawling area fulfill some of these requirements, but most of them need to download pages in order to classify them as relevant or not. We propose a crawler supported by a web page classifier that uses solely a page URL to determine page relevance. Such a crawler is able to choose in each step only the URLs that lead to relevant pages, and therefore reduces the number of unnecessary pages downloaded, minimising bandwidth and making it efficient and suitable for virtual integration systems.

The Web is the largest repository of human-friendly information. Unfortunately, web information is embedded in formatting tags and is surrounded by irrelevant information. Researchers are working on information extractors that allow transforming this information into structured data for its later integration into automated processes. Devising a new information extraction technique requires an array of tasks that are specific to this technique and many tasks that are actually common between all techniques. The lack of a reference architectural proposal in the literature to guide software engineers in the design and implementation of information extractors, amounts to little reuse and the focus is usually blurred because of irrelevant details. In this paper, we present a reference architecture to design and implement rule learners for information extractors. We have implemented a software framework to support our architecture, and we have validated it by means of four case studies and a number of experiments that prove that our proposal helps reduce development costs significantly.

Automation is the essence of MDD (Model-Driven Development). Transforming models into models following a set of rules is at the core of automation. It allows using tools to enliven processes that have been defined. Transition methods are most likely the most important player in the engineering of software. The 4SRS (Four Step Rule Set) is a transition method we adopt in this paper to focus the discussion on the transition from the analysis to the design of software. It has been formalized as a small software development process that can be plugged into larger software development processes. That formalization was conducted with the SPEM (Software & Systems Process Engineering Metamodel), which is a process modeling language for the domain of software and systems. This paper exemplifies how a transition method like the 4SRS can be modeled with the SPEM as a way to study the benefits of the automatic or semiautomatic execution of a transition method as a small dedicated software development process.

Model Driven Engineering (MDE) refers to the systematic use of models as primary engineering artifacts throughout the engineering lifecycle. MDE has a lot of potential to make adaptive software systems, but it requires maturity and tool support. Here we present a domain specific language, called

T

□

(pronounced as T-Square) for writing workflow process specifications which allows us to write procedural statements for tasks and branch conditions, to query an ontology and to declare user interfaces. We apply transformation methods to generate executable software from the abstract process specifications.

Contemporary tools for business process modeling use menu-based interfaces for visualizing process models and interacting with them. However, pure menu-based interactions have been optimized for applications running on desktop computers and are limited regarding their use on multi-touch devices. At the same time, the increasing distribution of mobile devices in business life as well as their multi-touch capabilities offer promising perspectives for intuitively defining and adapting business process models. Additionally, multi-touch tables could improve collaborative business process modeling based on natural gestures and interactions. In this paper we present the results of an experiment in which we investigate the way users model business processes with multi-touch devices. Furthermore, a core gesture set is suggested enabling the easy definition and adaption of business process models on these devices. Overall, gesture-based process modeling and multi-touch devices allow for new ways of (collaborative) business process modeling.

Designing business processes in a creative way is an important requirement for implementing process-aware information systems. In this article we investigate how process modeling competence and individual creativity style and capacity influence creativity in a business process redesign task. We explore these relationships with a laboratory experiment with 48 business students. Our preliminary results showed that process modeling competence is positively associated with the creative quality of a business process redesign, while individual creativity style and capacity measured by well-known creativity inventories seem to be less relevant. The findings underline the importance of training in process modeling to enable employees to realize their full creative potential when redesigning process models in process improvement projects.

Software development is a dynamic, complicated, and labor-intensive undertaking. Numerous software engineering process models have been created and applied to address its complexity, schedule pressure, and product quality. These process models are rather abstract and not directly operationally relevant for the software engineers executing these processes, since they mostly provide relatively coarse-grained work packages and lack fine-grained user-centric workflows directly supporting users. Such user-centric workflows have been difficult to implement in an automated fashion as they are very dynamic and user acceptance for both modeling and prescribing such fine-grained activities is fairly low. This paper provides an approach to abstractly model user decisions influencing the actual trace of such automated workflows. By hiding internal complexity, communication with users is simplified while supporting required flexibility. This contributes towards removing hindrances and enabling the application of and user acceptance for automated user-centric workflows in software engineering and in domains exhibiting similar issues.

Much compliance effort concerns adherence to contracts. Parties to a contract need to make sure the other party fulfills the contract. To this end they may require additional controls in the business process. Controls have costs. In this paper we argue that fully automated controls help to lower control costs, because (i) the can help prevent misstatements (compliance by design) or (ii) they increase the quality of audit evidence and thereby reduce the audit risk and additional audit fees. The line of reasoning is illustrated by a case study of the implementation of automated controls on the procurement process for public transport services for the elderly and disabled. The case study suggests open issues, which can be linked to concepts from Normative Multi Agent Systems.

Business process compliance tries to ensure the business processes used in an organization are designed and executed according to the rules that govern the company. However, the nature of rules (expressed in natural language) and the large amount of elements that can be involved in them make their materialization and automated checking quite difficult. That is why the existing support for compliance checking is generally restricted to specific kinds of rules (e.g. rules affecting the control flow of the process). In this paper, we introduce

compliance mashups

, and show how a mashup-based approach can help solve the problem of rule specification and checking at design time. Some advantages of such an approach are that: (i) any kind of rule can be specified, which implies that each user can specify a rule according to his/her interpretation of the rule; (ii) building the compliance mashup is transparent to the formalism(s) used to implement it, so different techniques can be used together; and (iv) mashup components or parts of them can be re-used. As an example we use this approach to build mashups to specify and check rules related to human resource management in business processes at design time.

Regulatory compliance in international trade can be enhanced by facilitating electronic exchange of trade documents to increase the supply chain visibility. Crucial for acceptance of the supply chain visibility concept is trust in the reliability of the data. This depends on both the integrity of information (no data is altered illicitly) and integrity of the flow of goods (no goods are unknowingly added or taken away). The challenge is to determine how these concepts of integrity are interconnected. In this paper, we discuss control measures to ensure integrity of supply chain information and the related goods flow. Such controls consist of three components. First, only trusted traders take part. Second, technical control measures ensure internal consistency of the information system, i.e., the system maintains integrity constraints based on a model of the transactions taking place. Third, physical and organizational control measures mitigate the risk that events in the real world do not correspond to the reported transactions. The usefulness and adequacy of the approach is illustrated with two case studies: the use of electronic seals in the Smart-CM project, and the use of biometrics for authentication in the E-Link project at Schiphol Airport, the Netherlands.

CPSAM is a context-based process semantic annotation model for annotating business processes in a process model repository. The purpose of the annotation model is to facilitate searching process models, navigating a process model repository and enhance users’ understanding of process models. The annotation model has partly been evaluated through an empirical study to test the annotation consistency and correctness. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of the process annotation (based on CPSAM) through a controlled experiment, where a prototype of the repository is used, to annotate and store process models based on the CPSAM. The evaluation is supposed to test whether process annotation based on the CPSAM can facilitate searching, navigation and understanding of process models stored in a repository. The results show that annotating business processes using the annotation model positively affects searching process models, navigating the repository and understanding process models.

Both simulation and process mining can be used to analyze operational business processes. Simulation is model-driven and very useful because different scenarios can be explored by changing the model’s parameters. Process mining is driven by event data. This allows detailed analysis of the observed behavior showing actual bottlenecks, deviations, and other performance-related problems. Both techniques tend to focus on the control-flow and do not analyze resource behavior in a detailed manner. In this paper, we focus on

workload-dependent processing speeds

because of the well-known phenomenon that people perform best at a certain stress level. For example, the “Yerkes-Dodson Law of Arousal” states that people will take more time to execute an activity if there is little work to do. This paper shows how workload-dependent processing speeds can be incorporated in a simulation model and learned from event logs. We also show how event logs with workload-dependent behavior can be generated through simulation. Experiments show that it is crucial to incorporate such phenomena. Moreover, we advocate an amalgamation of simulation and process mining techniques to better understand, model, and improve real-life business processes.

This paper presents the idea of the convergent approach to modeling and simulation of business requirements and software development based on the combination of the FSM and the Object-Oriented Approach. The first part of this paper discusses the motivation for the need to connect two areas of modeling and simulation: business requirements and software engineering. The second part of the paper presents the idea of modeling of processes and business situations as more mutually associated FSM representing particular objects and shows examples of this approach. The third and the last part of the paper presents the mapping of the proposed approach to BPMN-based and UML-based models and provides interesting new findings resulting from the proposed approach. This approach is based on our experience with our recent practical projects concerning business modeling and simulation in various application areas (e.g. health care, gas supply industry, regional management, administration process design of a new faculty of a university) and subsequent software development in these application areas.

This article engages in issues of Enterprise Systems and SBPM (Social Business Process Management) influence, integration, joint evolution and reasons which cause these matters of fact. Afterwards, the Author describes his own approach based on extensions of WebRatio CASE tool, primarily targeted as a tool for supporting WebML method, to assist in modelling, developing and operating enterprise SBPM systems. Subsequently, the Author proposes several design components intended for BPM developers which can be easily used to create a SBPM system with features as a collaboration of users, dynamic changes of workflow in runtime, common cooperation through Facebook or Twitter, etc. In the end, the Author summarizes the paper, suggests questions and discusses future directions of implementation of Enterprise SBPM Systems, especially from the point of view of an employment of WebRatio CASE tool as an analytic and design tool as well as operating platform into one.

Currently, no single UML diagram provides the satisfactory completeness and consistency of the system description. There is also no BPMN diagram to satisfy such requirements. The satisfactory completeness means that the model enables to describe fully a function, a structure, and a behaviour of the IT system. With BPMN diagram one cannot provide a complete data model i.e. the structure of the IT system. The proposed Function-Behaviour-Structure activity diagram introduced in this paper enables to develop consistent and satisfactorily complete models.

Business process modeling methodologies need to pay attention to (1) the changing and distributed nature of business process, and (2) the contextual and tacit nature of the knowledge that operational actors have regarding business process. However, available methodologies offer little guidance to these concerns. This paper describes how to model business process models from work practices, using the BAM methodology. BAM is a methodology for business process modeling, supervision and improvement that works at two dimensions; the dimension of processes and the dimension of work practices. The paper illustrates BAM’s business process discovery approach, which encompasses learning and modeling subphases, with a case study in an organizational setting.

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a multidimensional model-based approach which enables analysis and decision-making in organizations. Currently, most EA approaches produce inherently static models: they focus on structural qualities of the organizations and represent their state only in one specific point in time. Thus, these models are not suitable enough for analyzing dynamic and run-time features of the organizations. This paper aims to solve this situation by proposing a model-driven platform for EA modeling and simulation. The proposal includes the means to build executable EA models, define experiments over the models, run the experiments, observe their run-time behavior, and calculate indicator-based results to aid the decision-making process.

This paper aims at exploring issues on the edge of information systems development, business process and decision making as well as related law and legal regulations. It describes several lessons learnt based on author’s experience when applying a method of integrated legal and technical analysis in the development of an information system in the area of intellectual property protection. They contribute to the taxonomy of possible impacts of law on information systems as well as to the design of efficient methods which facilitate collaboration between analysts, lawyers and business decision makers.

Business rules are very important part of a business model. They should be defined in an unambiguous, understandable way, especially when they are going to be implemented in a software system. There are some attempts addressing that issue but none of them considers business rules written in Polish. The paper presents existing methods and tools that support business rules written in English, and the roadmap to adapt them to Polish language.

Interorganizational worfklows represent workflows which involve several business processes, belonging to different organizations, which need to coordinate thier actions in order to achieve a common goal. This paper proposes a Petri net model which permits the modelling and verification of interorganizational workflows. The model allows the explicit representation of the organizational dimension of each component workflow, the shared use of resources among different organizations as well as the specification of security constraints. A property of soundness, which describes the correct execution of the interorganizational workflow, is defined and proven decidable.

The contract-based software implementation improves accuracy and verification capabilities of business information systems. This paper promotes contract identification in early phases of the software development and defining contracts within models. Design and implementation artifacts that are responsible for system functionality and system constraints are transformed during the consecutive development phases. Combination of the Model Driven Engineering paradigm and Design by Contract ideas constitutes the Contract Aware Software Development process (CASD). The approach is specialized for system modeling in UML, contracts specified at model level in Object Constraint Language (OCL), and the final implementation in the C# language. The specialized process is supported by the tool transforming the models with associated contracts into the corresponding programs with contracts at the code level.

With cloud computing growing in popularity cloud-service providers must guarantee that data are processed rapidly and transferred when and where they are needed. Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult to predict the exact performance characteristics and demands on the network at any particular time. In this paper we show that the cloud computing demand can be developed as a branching stochastic process. Branching processes are used to describe random systems such as population development, nuclear chain reactions and spread of epidemic disease. A statistical model is described and using this model we propose a method for determining the unknown probability distribution of queries. Network traffic modeling is an issue of great importance to both consumers and providers of cloud-based services. Firstly, traffic modeling helps to represent our understanding of dynamic demand for cloud services by stochastic processes. Secondly, accurate traffic models are necessary for service providers to properly maintain quality of service.

OpenCASE

, an original CASE tool supporting conceptual modelling is presented in this paper. The CASE tool has been developed during the research focused on the ontology-centred conceptual modelling. It provides a strong emphasis on terms and their relations while supporting standard notations (now BORM, other notations are planned). The tool has an open plug-in-based architecture founded on the Eclipse platform, which makes the tool modular and extensible. The knowledge base of the models may be accessed via an API and thus used to implement verifications, various calculations (statistics), to transform models to outputs (reports) and to make inner transformations (e.g. normalisation). The architecture of the tool is briefly mentioned as well.

Smooth integration of services is one of the key benefits of service- oriented enterprises. But the key questions are “Does the selected service address the real business need?” and “How to select the right service?”. Separating the business choices and technical choices is necessary in order to structure the solution to these questions. In this research, the two perspectives are handled by embedding service thinking at business level design and secondly, by supporting the integration with available services and process templates. To reach this combined goal, we present a pattern-based approach for business service integration.

From the business perspective, one of the core concerns within Business-IT alignment is coordinating strategic initiatives and plans with Information Systems (IS). However, while substantial work has been done on linking strategy to requirements for IS development, it has usually been focused on the core value exchanges offered by the business, overlooking other aspects influencing the implementation of strategy. One of these,

consumer preferences

, has been proven to influence the successful provisioning of the business’s customer value proposition, and this study aims to establish a conceptual link between them and system requirements. The core contention is that reflecting consumer preferences through business strategy in system requirements allows for the development of systems aligned to consumer preferences, and therefore systems that better support a consumer orientation, where the reasoning behind a particular solution stems from them. The contribution of this paper is the proposal of a consumer preference meta-model along with an illustration of its relationship to a requirements’ technique (i*) through the Strategy Maps business strategy formulation.

The Resource-Event-Agent (REA) ontology is a powerful and well accepted approach towards the design of accounting information systems (AIS). However, the REA notation - that is currently based on class diagrams - is not very intuitive for business experts. Accordingly, we aim at a REA domain specific modeling language that facilitates the communication between business experts and IT professionals. In previous work we defined the REA-DSL operational layer reflecting actual business events which ”have occurred” or ”are occurring”. In this paper we extend the REA-DSL by the planning layer capturing what future events ”are scheduled” or ”are planned” by commitments. Now, our REA-DSL covers all basic concepts to describe a full accounting infrastructure. The REA-DSL may serve as a solid basis for generating a conceptual AIS data model - which is subject to future work.

It is widely recognized that a large percentage of IT initiatives fail from a business perspective. This is attributed to many factors, namely system complexity and change pace. We believe that the system development process itself is a crucial aspect of this state of affairs and a paradigm shift is required. There is a lack a common set of concepts and language to use through an IT development process. Essentially, appropriate models and founded theory for articulating the teleological and ontological perspectives of a system are necessary. In this paper, we present and discuss an innovative value-oriented approach to System Design and Engineering. Our contribution begins by identifying a relevant problem space regarding current approaches, particularly the lack of a sound structure to model a service system’s

purpose

. We believe that system modeling with a market mindset will help improving quality and improve change response. The approach draws from a combination of theory based on Enterprise Engineering, Service Science and Value Modeling. A four-layer framework (System, Service, Value and Purpose) is pointed as a conceptual solution for simultaneously representing relevant concerns for promoting dynamic alignment between Business and IT.

SAMM is a useful tool for measuring the maturity of business/IT alignment in an organization at the macro level. However, at the micro level, organizations use several frameworks including cascading BSC, ITIL, COBIT, etc. to align business and IT processes. The complexity of alignment increases with the existence of more than one tier of cascading and usage of different tools or frameworks. Studies have shown that measuring business/IT alignment at the micro level is difficult. Therefore, in order to accurately measure outcomes, mapping between metrics at all levels is required. It is also important to establish metrics that are aligned with those prescribed by SAMM. Using a multi-level cascading BSC that was previously published in BUSITAL by this author, this study attempts to apply the underlying components of SAMM and to establish relevant alignment metrics. It also highlights some applicability problems and suggests appropriate solutions for future implementations.

Organization’s concerns as controlling costs, improving quality, increasing effectiveness, and managing risk increasingly impose strong requirements on Business-IT alignment (B-ITa). Several Maturity Models came into being for considering improvement actions in B-ITa. The IT-Enabled Collaborative Network organizations (ICoNOs) maturity model specifically addresses the processes needed for achieving B-ITa in networked organizations. We have evaluated ICoNOs maturity model on a case study in an Asian organization. On the basis of this study, we propose to introduce a new domain named as “Cost Management”.

Enterprise Architecture (EA) allows describing how an organization can achieve its objectives and/or develop innovative strategies, through the creation of a set of engineered models that can be understood by the people associated with the organization. To this end, the set of EA models should be developed as any product in any engineering domain. In general, those models are the artifacts on which we reason to understand the alignment between several viewpoints of the organization. Reasoning on those artefacts in an objective and systematic way requires a shared way to represent them and a set of weighted measures based on this way-of-representing. This paper proposes a framework to analyze and to represent multiple viewpoints of an organization and develops a set of measures to qualify the alignment between those models. These measures are experimented from the alignment of Information System functions with respect to business processes for medical research.

This paper is concerned with a real world case study in Business/IT alignment at the strategic level. The case study is situated in the Dutch public sector, involving the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment (SAE). In this case study, the GEA (Generic Enterprise Architecting) method was used. This paper will therefore take the GEA method as a given. Nevertheless, to better understand and appreciate the case study, we will also briefly review the GEA method and its background. Even more, we will also provide an evaluation on the GEA method, which was/is developed using a design science approach.

Organisations are investing heavily into enterprise system infrastructure. With a move to agility and Agile software development, there is an increasing need for understanding how Agile developers and User Experience (UX) designers work together in practice. This paper outlines the current approaches to investigating the combination of Agile development and UX design and indicates a direction for future research that could benefit integration across the cross-functional teams required for enterprise software development.

Viewing information systems (IS) as services is beneficial but still an unexplored approach for IS in organizations. The aim of this exercise is to contribute to the knowledge base on designing IS as services. This paper presents an analysis of enterprise resource planning (ERPs) systems through the lens of service oriented architecture (SOA). Services are explained and defined through SOA theory. IS are explained and defined through ERP theory. This paper contributes to the debate on viewing IS as services by presenting a view of ERPs facilitating to fulfill business needs. This paper is influenced by systems and design thinking, and service oriented IS development. Framed by shared promises between SOA and ERP systems we discuss the question whether SOA or ERP fulfills business needs? The analysis of ERPs from a SOA perspective provides us with the conclusion that the question is not about SOA or ERP but rather to provide SOA architected ERPs. It can be said that by viewing ERPs as services it is clear that the combination of ERPs and SOA could be seen as one way forward when designing software aiming at bridging the gaps supporting IS and business processes and allowing the business shaping the IS.