Advances in Information Systems Development

A conceptual data model that is created for example in UML (OMG 2003) can contain aggregation and composition relationships between entity types. This article describes how to preserve the semantics of this kind of relationships in a database that is created by an Object-Relational Database Management System, which implements the prescriptions, proscriptions and suggestions of The Third Manifesto (Date and Darwen 2000).

Information existed long before the development of computers and software. Systems for handling this information existed as well, with different technologies in use (cuneiform, petroglyphs, Gutenberg’s printing press, etc). Even further back in time, long before humans could use written language, they could communicate information and knowledge through myths and rituals. These rituals may be some of the first constructed information systems. Hunting stories and other extraordinary events became part of the stories told, and when they were acted out in a drama separated from all ceremonial concerns, a first significant step had been taken toward theatre as a specialized activity. The development process of a theatre production could hence be seen as one of the most genuine models for development of manual information systems. (Brocket 1987; Abelli and Révay 2004)

One of the modern research goals in software engineering is to find a software development process, which would provide fast and qualitative software development. Most now proposed methodologies, approaches etc. try to make the development process easier and still more qualitative. In order to achieve the goal in the approaches, a role of explicit models is considerably more important. In last time, the more preferable approach is Model Driven Architecture [1].

The ubiquitous use of databases (DB) in information systems (IS) today is a direct result of complex and enormous amounts of data processing required in modern businesses. The complexity of the data processing requires software to support the organization in being competitive in an increasingly demanding business climate. The software must support the organization in creating business advantages, thus the need for robust, yet flexible software solutions is increasingly important to maintain or gain effectiveness [1].

With the advent of e- and m-commerce and inter-organizational business processes, the notion of trust is becoming increasingly important. Yet, the trust-related requirements to a system are seldom addressed in early development phases, rather delayed to design and coding. Since general experience shows that it is significantly more expensive to fix requirement defects at later stages than fixing them during analysis, it would be useful to handle trust requirements early. But the notion of trust requirements is so far weakly understood. This paper provides a taxonomy of trust-related requirements and also discusses possible styles for expressing them. Such a taxonomy may be useful for teaching and training requirements engineers, and may be a starting point for developing guidelines and checklists that can be used during requirements analysis of systems where trust is essential.

Most existing agent-oriented methodologies ignore system extensibility, interoperability and reusability issues. In light of this, we have developed MOBMAS – a “Methodology for Ontology-Based MASs” which makes use of ontologies as a central modeling tool, utilising their roles in facilitating interoperability and reusability. As part of an ongoing validation of MOBMAS, we demonstrate in this paper its use on a peer-to-peer (P2P) community-based information sharing application. MOBMAS is used by an experienced software developer, who is not an author of the methodology, to guide the development of the P2P application.

In the field of information system (IS) design and modeling the topic of integrating different views and schemata to a common conceptual schema is a central issue. Integration of two schemata means that they are compared, conflicts between them are identified and resolved, and finally the schemata are merged. Integration is often based on a global ontology that provides the valid concepts and interdependencies of a domain. In this paper we adapt the definition of ontology [8]: “An

ontology

is an explicit specification of a conceptualization.”. Traditional integration techniques are often based on concept name comparison which even more motivates the use of an ontology as a domain lexicon.

Information systems development (ISD) methods are commonly engineered by integrating method components from existing methods into a new or a current methodical body. Finding suitable components and integrating them into a coherent, consistent and applicable ISD method requires that the purposes and conceptual contents of method components are described in a strict manner, typically through metamodeling. In this paper we present a contextual view of method component which, based on the contextual approach, expresses, more closely than earlier presentations, semantic features of those parts of an ISD context which are involved by method components. We also show, with a large example, how method integration can be carried out based on this contextual information of method components.

Information systems (IS) are socio-technical, man-machine systems that are used to provide effective support for the management and coordination of information and communication while maintaining economical efficiency (cf. (Davis and Olsen 1985), similarly (Hirschheim et al. 1995; Checkland and Scholes 1999)). According to Hirschheim et al. (1995) IS development is a change process undertaken in object systems in a number of environments by a development group to achieve objectives. To facilitate the exchange of thoughts, opinions, and beliefs about the IS development process and its objectives, the development group constructs representation forms of the object system. Conceptual modeling is considered to be a suitable means for creating such representation forms (Frank 1999).

Quality of Experience (QoE) metrics describe the service usability from the endusers’ point of view. In a networking environment QoE metrics are very close to Quality of Service (QoS) metrics, except the fact that end-user experience is subjective in nature, moreover, it is also influenced by the access capabilities of end users and the used service path. Our ultimate aim is to find methods determining QoE by passive measurements on an aggregated network link. One step towards this is determining the correlation between network overload and QoE. There can be several scenarios where the experienced service quality becomes less than satisfactory.

In information systems (IS) research major problems are discussed in literature, often regarded as crucial for the identity and existence of the discipline itself (Benbasat and Zmud 2003).

The paper discusses the problem of dynamics in conceptual models. The paper argues for the idea that also the conceptual elements of the reality should be viewable dynamically – as a process. Such view is the way to understanding the basic process constrains of the Real World, which is critically important for the correctness of business processes design.Two basic types of dynamics in the Real World are discussed – internal dynamics of objects on one hand (their life-cycles) and their behavior on the other hand (business processes). Possibilities of modeling object life-cycles are analyzed specifically regarding the UML. The rules for mutual consistency of different objects life cycles are de fined with the use of the structural coherency rules according to the theory of M.A. Jackson.

The competitiveness and efficiency of an enterprise is dependent on its ability to interact with other enterprises and organisations. In this context interoperability is defined as the ability of business processes as well as enterprise software and applications to interact. Interoperability remains a problem and there are numerous issues to be resolved in different situations. We propose method engineering as an approach to organise interoperability knowledge in a method chunk repository. In order to organise the knowledge repository we need an interoperability classification framework associated to it. In this paper we propose a generic architecture for a method chunk repository, elaborate on a classification framework and associate it to some existing bodies of knowledge. We also show how the proposed framework can be applied in a working example.

It is frequently the case that at early stages of the requirements engineering process, critical decisions about what the system should provide are taken. Stakeholders and developers must evaluate alternatives and conflicts among the system requirements. In addition, a great deal of work must be done through focused brainstorming, validation, negotiation, and decision-making associated to vague or not completely defined requirements. In this context, Goal-Oriented modeling techniques emerge as a suitable way of defining and analyzing requirements, but also as an effective way to provide the necessary traceability towards other derived software artifacts.

It is very important for Internet content providers to keep track of the amount of visitors of their sites. The content of the pages and advertisements can be improved by knowing statistical properties of the visitors.

Conceptual modeling and MDA is becoming more and more important for Information Systems (IS) development. Tools which support code generation are already on the market. However, the problem still remains, that end users who are not familiar with these models do not understand them. As a result, the communication is still on a very concrete level based on the natural language description of requirements with all it’s deficiencies (e.g. ambiguity, incompleteness and huge requirements documents).

Industry-academia partnerships are common in the IT field because they benefit both parties. Research on moral issues in these relations is scarce, and this case study is aimed at increasing knowledge in this area by investigating moral problems in a form of partnership, a collaborative IT project with a university. Twenty-one client representatives from IT firms or organisations were interviewed during a project course in information systems. The analysis was inspired by phenomenography. The results show that concern for the beneficial objectives of the client organisations typically conflicts with concern for students and their learning objectives. A two-dimensional structure constituting six types of moral problems was determined. The results are compared with the existing literature, and recommendations for practice and research are presented.

We present a complex function that we argue enhances the usefulness of so-called Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs [4]). The background for this conceptual development is PRIME, Privacy and Identity Management for Europe – an integrated EU project within the Information Society Technology track of the 6th Framework Program [12]. The project is directed towards a holistic architecture and framework for identity management where data processors and citizens alike will be able to engage in secure and privacy-friendly communication over the Internet and mobile phone networks.

Can web design improve electronic government (e-government)? This paper proposes that the use of paralingual web design can overcome the largest issue in e-government, that of trust, when used with bilingual populations. An experiment was conducted where e-government web pages were converted to paralingual format with site visitors surveyed on their resulting trust in the content and readability. Readability was surveyed to ensure that paralingual format did not reduce site usability (in this case usability can only be viewed as readability as no other functions are possible using the web sites.) The results of the experiment show that trust was improved for the minority language speakers with the majority language speakers remaining neutral. This is important for societies with large bilingual populations with issues of trust between them and the majority speakers.

Nowadays, e-mail is one of the most popular Internet applications and has become a useful marketing tool. However, e-mail marketing should be thought ineffectiveness due to the rampancy of spams. In order to explore the underlying phenomenon of e-mail marketing strategy, this study based on Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) and TRA Chain to investigate what factors affect people who read and forward e-mail. Specifically, perception of receivers and e-mail subjects are hypothesized to have positive effect on attitude to read, which in turn have a significant influence on intention to read. Moreover, intention to read, e-mail content, and motivation of sharing all have positive effect on intentition to forward. Web-based survey was conducted and 309 questionnaires were collected. The results reveal the good predictors to influence people who read and forward e-mail. Finally, gender influences one’s attitude and intention toward forwarding e-mail. Further, this study provides e-mail marketing strategies and offers suggestions focused on different gender for marketing managers.

The goal of this paper is to identify the issues in information systems (IS) management expected to be the most important over the next three to five years, to assess the importance of these issues, and compare the results of our study to the findings of similar investigations, with emphasis on the study done in Slovenia in 1992. The two-round Delphi method was used to collect the opinions of IS managers in Slovenian companies. The Qmethod and Q-sort ranking were used for data analysis. The study showed that views and opinions of IS department managers in Slovenia are becoming more similar to the views of their counterparts from other countries, revealed by other comparable investigations. This indicates that the economic and cultural environment in Slovenia that was specific after the economic and political transition in the nineties does not deviate considerably from the environment in other countries. Compared to the earlier study, technology-related issues became less important, and business-related issues appear to be more important.

Companies are investing in new information systems in order to achieve higher efficiency in their business operations. But innovations in information technology (IT) in the form of increased productivity have still been modest. This is a well known phenomenon, usually called the “productivity paradox” for investments in IT systems within enterprises (Brynjolfsson 1993). Even if the IT investments made during the last ten years have successively provided improved operational effects, they do not fully come up to the expectations of the top managements. Investments in large enterprise systems will not automatically generate improved efficiency in the organisation (Davenport 2000). The implementation in modern IT systems needs to be supplemented by new innovative business processes and solid investments in competence development to have full potential effects!

This paper analyses how the importance of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) implementation success factors changes across project phases. The study is performed on the basis of research conducted among experts working in ERP systems suppliers and dealing with many implementation projects. The findings extract the most important factors and suggest that their significance changes as the project goes through its lifecycle. However, there are factors, such as balanced team composition, with noticeable importance lasting through all project phases. On the basis of the research, conclusions were drawn for the practitioners dealing with ERP implementation projects.

Organisations today have information systems that support many tasks, such as decision-making, co-ordination, control, analysis and development (Pereira and Sousa, 2004). However, most enterprises are burdened with a vast array of computers and applications that are linked together through a variety of ad-hoc mechanisms.

Information systems development takes place within an economical context. Cost overruns are frequently reported and the delivery of information systems within appropriate time and cost limits has even been given as one justification for the utilization of information systems development methodologies [2]. However, the economical conditions, which shape systems development practice, are hardly ever researched and while outsourcing of IT services has been studied for quite a while (see f. ex. [6], [12]), an economical perspective on systems development is rarely applied by the information systems community.

This paper focuses on the relationship between Knowledge Management and Human Resources Management that will change the system of values in the 21st century. Today, the modern organisations have intelligent systems covering the technical necessities. With the help of these intelligent systems various areas of the organisation can be tracked:

sourcing, production, quality, stocks, and human resources management

. The methodology used in this article involved theoretical development and empirical research. The main idea stated that the research must identify some situations in which all research strategies might be relevant (Mellander, 2001, Yin, 1994).

In developing countries, mobile, nomadic and handheld technologies have the capacity to gather, store, deliver and enhance information in ways that are completely different from countries where mains electricity, computer hardware and internet connectivity are stable, reliable, cheap and abundant. They also have the capacity to subvert the received wisdom on IS development. This paper describes work currently under way in Kenya to support education nationally with a project specifically developed to meet the infrastructural and organisational requirements of an environment dramatically different that of most IS projects.

Management Support Systems (MSS) are computer-based systems that are supposed to be used by, or at least to support, managers. A major problem in MSS development is requirements specification. There exist a large number of systems development methods (SDM) (Avison & Fitzgerald 1999; Jayaratna 1994). Watson et al. (1997) point out that there are differences between traditional SDM and MSS development methods and that the former are not very useful in MSS development. In a study focusing on the MSS development methods used by organizations in the US, Watson et al. (1997) found that only two formal methods were used, namely: the critical success factors (CSF) method (Rockart 1979) and the strategic business objectives (SBO) method (Volonino & Watson 1990-91). They, as well as other less used methods, focus primarily on specifying managers’ information needs and how an MSS can fulfill information needs. Although, they can be useful, they have one major limitation. Since they primarily focus on information needs they are not complete in generating MSS requirements. More complete needs requirements specification can be generated by focusing on managerial roles and how an MSS can support a manager’s different organizational roles. We present an MSS design approach based on a current management theory and model. In doing so, we build on three postulates.

Market competition drives companies at searching for new clients. Small and medium- sized entities often accept any client that would be willing to acquire their products, commodities and articles. However, there are numerous examples when not all customers render benefits, but some of them causing losses as well (Kaplan 2000), (Zielinski 2005). This seems to be a challenge for those companies that produce differentiated products or deal with customers who demand sophisticated packaging or special terms and distance deliveries (Cokins 1996), (Cokins 2001).

Software organizations rely on quality models designed for their specific purposes, the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) being the most prominent model to follow. However, in striving for both product and process quality in their activities, small and medium sized enterprises with a limited legacy of organizational culture and tradition in quality work, may profit from quality frameworks following the Total Quality Management (TQM) principles. The ISO quality standards (the 9000 series) provide such principles. A further framework suggested by the European Forum for Quality Management (EFQM) also gives a set of principles to follow. In a case study, we investigate how the principles of the EFQM model can be translated into practical use in a relatively young but rapidly growing software company. We suggest a “double bladed” quality tool to be used by small and medium sized software organizations: supporting the managerial work with TQM principles derived from the EFQM, together with process improvement efforts following the CMMI model.

This paper considers knowledge management concepts as applied in UK higher education. The IT Services Department at the University of Wolverhampton is then analysed in terms of current structure and practises with a view to identifying a knowledge management strategy. The analysis of the case study was undertaken using interviews of key staff, papers relating to a recent re-organisation and current strategic priorities.

The aim of this paper is to show the way Management Information Systems can help small and medium-sized enterprises to increase their productivity and gain or sustain a competitive advantage. This paper is intended to be practice relevant, by presenting implementable indications for the MIS solution development. Although field study documenting this research is based in Poland, general conclusions about MIS value-adding implementations seem to be transferable to other countries, both from emerging economies and the developed ones. The paper includes guidelines for creating value-adding MIS solutions and illustrates practical use of these guidelines in three Polish SME sector enterprises.

Although replacing the project manager in an on-going project is not uncommon in the IT field, studies on the topic are scarce. In order to increase understanding in this area, we investigated the perceptions of ten experienced project managers on replacement from the perspective of project success. We focused on the critical success factors in the projects, on how the interviewees perceived the replacement of the manager, and on the effects it had. We found that replacing the manager was perceived as an attempt to rescue a troubled project, and as a pertinent part of it, especially in cases in which it strengthened the project process. Replacement was found to affect critical factors such as management and human-relations issues. The results are reflected through the literature, and implications for research and practice are presented.

The paper covers different interpretations of virtual organization and explanation of current managerial theories that have impact on its development. Next, author presents business institution governance issues, particularly focusing on IT governance problems. Last part of the paper contains consideration of virtual university and virtual university governance components. Author argues that virtual university governance requires strategy management, value creation, IT architecture development, resource management by contracts, standardization for controllability, compatibility and interoperability, strategy performance measures and accreditation in education. Experiences gathered during participation in project named Virtual Space of Collaboration of Universities of Economics allowed to formulate theses presented in the paper.

Web Engineering is defined like a new area to propose models, techniques, processes, architectures, etc. in order to deal correctly with the special characteristics of the web environment. In the last years, new methodological approaches appeared in this environment. However, Web Engineering is not often applied in industries and real projects. This paper presents a general vision of a web approach, named NDT (Navigational Development Techniques) and it is focused on the study of its practical applications.

A vital task of software development is to test the correct implementation of functional requirements. Use cases are widely used artefacts that define the functionality of a software system in early stages of the development process. This paper exposes the lack of automatism in existing approaches that deal with the derivation of test cases, and introduces a new approach and tool to derive systematically test objectives from the use cases of the system under test.

Open source software (oss) is currently one of the most debated phenomena in both academia and the software industry. Several oss systems have achieved significant market success but they are rather server-side applications, such as the Apache web server, mail transport agent Sendmail, or other components of it infrastructure. On the other hand penetration of oss systems on the market of desktop applications is rather limited and it is virtually dominated by products of one software vendor, i.e. Microsoft. Recently one exception to the rule of non-existence of oss at the desktop was observed however. Mozilla FireFox, an Open Source web browser achieved 10 million downloads in one single month of December 2004, demonstrating success in the market totally dominated by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. The aim of the paper is to find out factors, which encourage users to adopt FireFox by applying the well-known framework of Technology Acceptance Model.

The Web represents an information space where the amount of information grows exponentially. This calls for personalized interaction between users and web-based information systems providing information. Current systems provide a certain level of personalization, which allows the user to set up her preferences manually. Improved efficiency of information acquisition can be achieved by personalization based on a user’s particularities used for the adaptation of content or navigation in the information space. A user model that reflects a real user, who requires information provided by an information system, is required for successful personalization. We present an ontology-based approach to user modeling and describe the user model that we designed for a web-based information system aimed at job acquisition. We point out several advantages of the ontology-based approach, namely the sharing of the ontology with other applications and reusability.

In the service marketing management literature, the service provider’s perspective is still the dominant paradigm of thinking. Gustafsson and Johnson (2003:1-2) posit that: “The business logic of competing through services is simple: solving customer problems with cost-effective service solutions is the best way to keep your customers from doing business with somebody else.”

Diagrams play a critical role in IS development. Despite this, ISD practitioners receive little or no instruction on how to produce “good” diagrams. In the absence of this, they are forced to rely on their intuition and experience, and make layout decisions that distort information or convey unintended meanings. The design of ISD graphical notations is

ad hoc

and unscientific: choice of conventions is based on personal taste rather than scientific evidence. Also, existing notations use a very limited graphic vocabulary and thus fail to exploit the potential communication power of diagrams. This paper describes a set of principles for producing “good” diagrams, which are defined as diagrams that communicate effectively. These provide practical guidance for both designers and users of ISD diagramming notations and are soundly based on theoretical and empirical evidence from a wide range of disciplines. We conclude that radical change is required to ISD diagramming practices to achieve effective user-developer communication.

The amount of data available on the Internet is continuously and rapidly growing. It is a well-known fact that even the best search engines cannot index more than a relatively small fraction (15–30%) of entirety of data on the Internet, and due to the mentioned increase rate, this portion is solidly decreasing. The fraction of the indexed data is even smaller if one considers not only the easily indexable surface web, but also the so-called deep web (DW).

Formal languages and especialy formal grammars are able to describe conformance testing. This paper is focused on the correlation between testing and regular grammars. We compare the standardized formal methods relation described in ISO standard [1][2] and formal grammars. We show that the implementation relation can be specified with distributing or inter-working grammars. Our goal is to demonstrate that formal grammars are able to describe communication protocols and they can be used also as a test notation. The attention is focused mainly on second part, where we show the importance of these grammars, because they can describe the test environment and the test suites of these protocols [3].