Digital Enterprise Design and Management 2013

Business Intelligence link to an EDA (Event Driven Architecture) for a “Zero Latency Organization”

Individuals are autonomously designing, creating, and operating their own complex, idiosyncratic information systems. These systems are designed in an experiential and emergent way. This growing individual technological autonomy creates dynamic bindpoints where formerly there were relatively static user endpoint interfaces across an air gap. This enables the organization to adjust the location of its enterprise system bindpoints in relation to the individual system endpoints.

In this paper, we will present two examples of how Enterprise Architecture could help make better investment decisions within a multi-country Telecommunications Company (Telco). These two examples relate to two of the significant challenges that a Telco is currently facing:

For each of the examples, we will present a strategic view and an engineering view, showing that it is possible to show, on a single A4 sheet, a summary of the technical policy for the delivery of end-user services regarding the two above mentioned challenges.

Online advertising is a fast developing industry - in 2011 its revenues reached $31 billion. Paid search marketing is extremely competitive while online advertising campaign creation and development are very demanding in terms of time and expert human resources. Assisting or even automating the work of an advertising specialist has emerged as a requirement for companies and research institutes over the last few years, mainly because of the commercial value of this endeavour. In this context, we developed GrammAds, an automated keyword and ad creative generator. This system generates multiword keywords (n-grams) and automated ad creative recommendations, while it organizes properly the campaigns which are finally uploaded to the auctioneer platform and start running. In this paper, we analyze the proposed methodology and we also present the main functionality of the GrammAds application along with an experimental evaluation.

Interoperability is essential for modern enterprise software; one of the most promising ways of providing interoperability is though Services Oriented Architectures (SOA) usually implemented using the Web Services (WS) standards. SOA/WS has the potential to be a transformational technology but there are a number of problems that may hinder its application. One of these is the classic slowness of software evolution. This paper discusses the issues of SOA evolution and describes ongoing research experimenting with the use of search technology to speed comprehension of SOA applications. Flexible but specialized search tools may be a good match for the “open world” of a SOA system which may encounter frequent novelties in programming languages and technology during its lifetime. We describe a basic search tool adapted to SOA/WS artifacts, a knowledge-based extension to it to improve software comprehension, and ongoing work to handle additional document types and to provide ontology-based support. Development of support tools for SOA evolution could be a fruitful topic for industry-university collaboration. Such tools would be an enabler for the interoperable information systems needed to do business in the modern world.

Insurance industry undergoes major regulatory changes regarding risk management like Solvency II which require managing data quality. This paper reports an experience feedback about the development of an enterprise architecture and data quality framework suitable for Insurance Industry and COTS environments. The framework, inspired by TOGAF 9.1, is tailored to provide systemic views of enterprise organization, systems and data and to develop joint governance for enterprise architecture and data quality. The paper describes development approach and framework components including metamodel, repository, data quality, tools and governance. it may stand as a proposal for a TOGAF data quality extension.

The alignment of business and IT has been a persistent topic of discussion in the past decades. As information systems have evolved from an administrative support function to an integral part of business fabric, the classic “internal” perspective adopted by the bulk of alignment research falls short in accounting for the dynamic business network context and continuous evolution with the environment. The information systems planning and strategy discourse should transcend the notion of “alignment” and bring out the strategy-shaping role of IT. This paper presents a classification of business–IT alignment approaches vis-á-vis respective schools of thought in strategic management. Both disciplines are seen to co-evolve with the increasingly complex “strategic context”. The approach is meant to help contextualize extant and future work in terms of underlying assumptions and thereby make more conscious statements about the practical applicability of research topics, methods and results in varying contexts. As relatively simple, static and mechanistic conceptualizations of strategy and business-IT alignment render inadequate, concepts such as dynamic capabilities, co-evolution and organizational ambidexterity represent a more adaptive and more encompassing approach to make sense of the increasingly complex strategic context.

The reduction of greenhouse gases (GHGs), including carbon dioxide (CO₂ ), has become one of the most serious issues in the world today to build a sustainable world. Digital economy have several contributions to the reduction of GHG emissions. Among them, Carbon credits is one of themost important and effect approach to reducing the amount of GHG emissions, where carbon credits are generated by the reduction of CO₂ emissions in sponsoring projects, which increase CO₂ absorption, such as renewable-energy, energy-efficiency, and reforestation projects. Although carbon credits themselves do not reduce the amount of CO₂ emissions around the world, they are important incentives for GHG reduction projects.

Establishing customer trust on an e-commerce website possibly requires the provision of an environment in which customers can overcome their fear and reluctance about shopping transactions by forming trust and positive perceptions about the online vendor. This research concentrates on color as a central factor in the design of web pages that enhance users’ positive emotional reactions as well as trust states and behaviors. Drawing on existing theories and empirical findings in the environmental psychology, human-computer interaction, as well as in the marketing and information systems research literature, a research model is developed to explain the relationships among background and foreground colors of a webpage, induced emotional responses in users, and users’ trust toward the website as mediated by users’ emotional states. A laboratory experiment was conducted to test the model and its associated hypotheses. This permitted assessment of the influence of background and foreground colors on user emotions and trust under varying brightness and saturation levels. Sixteen different graphic charts were evaluated based on various contrast ratios. We use the PAD (Pleasure Arousal Dominance) scale from Mehrabian and Russell (1974) and find that color can increase arousal, leading to stronger trust. Color leads to higher trust levels when arousal states are present at a high level. Our empirical findings provide valuable theoretical and practical implications regarding the effect of websites color on trust.

Agile philosophy emphasizes constant interactions and close collaboration between team members. This emergent management philosophy relies on a set of practices that aim at creating an environment in which teams are able to respond rapidly to customer’s needs and to deal effectively with changing situations. From this perspective, agile practices can be viewed as a way to enhance knowledge creation and knowledge sharing between team members. However these emergent practices necessitate an environment that facilitates communication and coordination mechanisms. The present paper aims at analyzing how large organizations, characterized by distributed and cross-functional teams, can cultivate an agile environment where inter-individual knowledge exchanges are encouraged. Even though mutual adjustments and face to face interactions are not easily achieved in large and distributed organizations, the contributions of agile practices in such contexts remain significant. These practices can foster knowledge development and collective learning processes and subsequently improve organization’s adaptability.

These last years, main IT companies have build software solutions and change management plans promoting data quality management within organizations concerned by the enhancement of their business intelligence system. These offers are closely similar data governance schemes based on a common paradigm called Master Data Management. These schemes appear generally inappropriate to the context of complex extended organizations. On the other hand, the community-based data governance schemes have shown their own efficiency to contribute to the reliability of data in digital social networks, as well as their ability to meet user expectations. After a brief analysis of the very specific constraints weighting on extended organization’s data governance, and of peculiarities of monitoring and regulatory processes associated to management control and IT within these, we propose a new scheme inspired by Foucaldian analysis on governmentality: the Panopticon data governance paradigm.

Organization design can be a fruitful inspirational source when doing research on contemporary organizations. The star model’s first version was adapted so it matches the evolution of firm strategy. These adaptations far from signaling the star model’s weakness show the real strength of a systemic framework where some of the firm’s essential components and design evolutivity are built-in. Since the 1980s the increase in close collaboration between formally independent firms and legally autonomous actors poses challenges for our thinking about organizational design. If Meta-organizations involve multiple firms as well as communities of non-contractually linked individuals, an emphasis on intrafirm design may be incomplete. Because firms have partially moved from stand-alone organizations to meta-organizations, we propose to include meta-organization design enabling firms to collaborate.

The essence of a business model defines a transaction structure that involves stakeholders. This article examines the transactional features that exist between stakeholders, such as relationships and form. We also introduce the new concept of “symbiont” and analyze the aggregation of the focal firm’s and stakeholders’ business models. By proposing this innovative concept, we seek to bridge the gap between the macro Business Ecosystem and micro Business Model, and as such expand our ideas about business models. The concept of “symbiont” in the business model that we have created provides a shared coordination system for different business models under the same business ecosystem, making direct comparison between them possible. Moreover, it allows us to analyze a focal firm’s business model from a micro perspective, which may clarify how to precisely and scientifically restructure or reform the focal firm based on the anatomic picture of the company. To explain this theory, our research focuses on China’s E-commerce industry.