ENTERprise Information Systems

An organization cannot function without knowing how much it produces and how much each product costs. The Portuguese Air Force is no exception, and so, determining the Cost per Flying Hour is essential for decision-making.

Information concerning the Cost Factors included in the Cost per Flying Hour used to be stored in various Information Systems, but with the implementation of the Defense Integrated Management System in Portuguese Air Force, these Information Systems became obsolete, as the Integrated Management System now concentrates all the information about the Cost Factors. However it did not have the ability to calculate the Cost per Flying Hour because some of its modules were not yet implemented. Thus the Cost per Flying Hour began to be calculated using inflation. In 2010 a Model in which the Cost Factors were obtained directly from sources was proposed.

In this investigation work, it is recommended that the new Model start to use the Integrated Management System data, being the main source of information. Thus, it is defined and proposed a Calculation’s Model of Cost per Flying Hour, presenting its formula and the method of obtaining the information for it.

In the paper, we proposed a hybrid improvement heuristic for permutation flow-shop problem based on the idea of evolutionary algorithm. The approach also employs constructive heuristic that gives a good initial solution. Hybrid GA-based improvement heuristic is applied in conjunction with three well-known constructive heuristics, namely CDS, Gupta’s algorithm and Palmer’s Slope Index. We tested our approach on Reeves’ benchmark set of 21 problem instances range from 20 to 75 jobs and 5 to 20 machines. Subsequently, we compared obtained results to the best-known upper-bound solutions.

With Virtual Reality (VR) systems it is possible to visualize three-dimensional environments with a high level of detail and visual fidelity. The users can manipulate and interact with those virtual environments in an intuitive way, close to reality. The VR systems enable the access to digital services that can promote, amongst others, collaborative work, data sharing or e-commerce. In this paper, we present a multidisciplinary solution that can offer added value to users through a collaborative environment with an intuitive interface. This environment will use geo-referenced databases to replicate urban environments and represent real world problems in a virtual way, making possible a better and more flexible approach in order to solve them. It is also proposed an architecture and some digital services are illustrated to show its potential.

Information contained within documents is an essential ingredient of any office operation. A content management application (CMA) is an organization plan for the conception, use, retention, disposal and selective preservation of its data. Using an appropriate CMA framework can greatly help Macao Government agencies, for instance, that are increasingly using electronic means to create, exchange and store a major variety of records daily. By definition, a record is information, in whatever form, for government functions, activities, decisions and other important transactions. As expected, as the volume of electronic information increases, so does the complexity of managing electronic records. This project goal was to evaluate the software capabilities of the Alfresco

©

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) against a set of functional requirements, aimed by the Macao Government agency. Drawing on the results of this evaluation, the present analysis concludes that Alfresco

©

ECM is capable of supporting an entire agency needs related to the management of its records content.

The construction of a building has been traditionally supported on the timeline schedules of the construction activities established in each case, and on technical drawings of the project. A prototype based on Virtual Reality (VR) technology with application to construction planning, was implemented. This interactive virtual model intends to present the project in a three-dimensional (3D) way, connected to construction planning schedule, resulting in a valuable asset in monitoring the development of the construction activity, based on the construction planning designed. The 4D application considers the time factor showing the 3D geometry of the distinct steps of the construction activity, according to the plan establish to the construction. The 4D model offers a detailed analysis of the construction project. Additionally, VR technology is used and presented as an innovative visual tool. It allows the visualization of different stages of the construction and the interaction with the construction activity. This application clearly shows the constructive process, avoiding inaccuracies and building errors, and so improving the communication between partners in the construction process. This tool is an important support in project conception and application.

Advertisers struggle to reach effectively and efficiently to their customers, continuously seeking to influence them and simultaneously reduce the overall publicity costs. Business areas like the mobile devices industry, together with wireless technologies and interactive environments, bring an huge opportunity for marketing purposes, supporting the chance to turn advertising into a convenient and easily accessible source of information by letting marketers communicate with costumers in a more direct, personal and contextualized way. This paper presents some foundations for the development of a system that will allow context-aware personalized profile-based advertising delivery, by using Bluetooth technology to identify and communicate with customers in a given geographic area, through their mobile devices.

The area of augmented reality in e-commerce has become a reality in some companies and has great potential to spread. This paper focus on providing augmented reality solutions for e-commerce. We show that it is possible to define a strong platform for marketing products and for advertising promotions. Our approach is based on introducing computer vision in a hands-free augmented reality setting. The proposed framework is prepared to operate in two different environments: personal computers and public street marketing places.

For modern airports that daily receive up to a hundred thousand or more passengers, visitors and workers, easy accessibility is key in order to become the preferred multi-modal hub. To achieve high-quality accessibility by means of all kinds of transport modalities, an Enterprise Information Subsystem (EIS) that measures the quality of the provided airport accessibility is a conditio sine qua non. This paper takes up the challenge for designing such an information system while taking the landside perspective. The main contribution concerns a

performance measurement framework

in which clients’ demands can be related to the transport services offered by means of a measurable set of accessibility indicators. Based on this, an overall picture on the airport accessibility quality can be created. To illustrate the feasibility of the framework, the results of three (partial) implementation steps towards an EIS are shown. The first one relates to client profiling; the other two to performance measuring dashboards. We finalize by reflecting on the use of the performance measurement system for improved decision-making and by drawing conclusions.

Open source event management systems such as OpenConf, Easychair and CiviCRM do not foresee the activities, resource allocation and costs management features necessary to each programmed event item. In this paper we present AEMS – an advanced event management system with project management like features. We present the requirements for such features, based on a case study carried out with a real-world customer. Then, we describe the development of AEMS and discuss its data model, architecture and the developed prototype. With AEMS, our customer will be able to manage all activities, resources and costs associated with an event. The results from applying our development to our real-world customer will allow us to derive AEMS to a generic software product.

This article describes the state of the art of cloud computing, focusing on its features and on the variety of services and applications that can be placed inside a cloud system, such as databases, processing, cloud gaming, storage and backup, etc.. This article also assesses and highlights the advantages and disadvantages of using cloud computing by companies and provides an overview of cloud computing trends and solutions currently available.

In these recent years, with the gain in popularity of online games, we are witnessing a progressive increment in the number of massive multiplayer online games available over the Internet. Given the scalability requirements imposed by a huge population of users over an extended length of time, game providers face the major challenge of long-term IT infrastructures dimensioning. In particular, the risks are over-allocation (wasting resource and money) or non-timely upgrades (loosing subscribers and revenues.) In this paper we advocate Cloud Computing as a viable solution to dynamically allocate resource for a massive game service infrastructure in order to satisfy users’ needs while minimizing maintenance costs. To this extent we envision a mid-term future where game provisioning will be performed by means of a three-tier architecture: the users, the game provider, and the cloud provider. We believe that many medium/small game providers may benefit from the on-demand resources allocation infrastructure offered by the cloud, due to shorter deployment time and reduced total cost of ownership.

In the last few years there has been a dramatic development in voice communications technology with a significant move towards Voice over the Internet Protocol (VoIP). Since the Internet was primarily designed as a besteffort technology, good quality conversation and intelligibility are not guaranteed. In this paper we address quality evaluation of voice communications in the context of modern enterprises using VoIP as an emerging technology with impact in their activity. Relevant factors for service providers and enterprises using VoIP technology are described, such as those related to measurement of intelligibility and evaluation of overall voice communications quality. Also, the most relevant voice quality evaluation methods recommended by the ITU-T are described along with the main features that can be used to improve voice communications. Fundamental concepts are presented, such as intrusive, non intrusive, objective, subjective and parametric methods. Mastering the concepts of such emerging technology, has recently lead to research and development of a model-based voice quality monitor for VoIP services. After its successful implementation, it is now fully operational in a Portuguese telecom operator.

In this paper anti-spam filtering is presented as a cumbersome service, as opposing to a software product perspective. The human effort for setting up, adaptation, maintenance and tuning of filters for spam detection is stressed. Because choosing the proper scores (relevance) for the spam filters is essential to the accuracy of the anti-spam system and one of the biggest challenges for the Apache SpamAssassin project (the most widely adopted anti-spam open-source software), we present a survey on single and multi-objective optimization studies for this purpose. Our survey constitutes a contribution and a stimulus for further research on this open research topic, with particular emphasis on evolutionary multi-objective approaches.

The proliferation of social networking and sharing of all kinds of information, including location information, triggered the emergence of new services, including location-based services. In this paper we enhance location-based services by adding a temporal component, allowing information about past and future locations to be considered.

Such services may be important for those who want other know their locations, for personal or professional reasons, for example allowing others to have knowledge of ones agenda, including locations and times, without need to establish personal contact.

We defined an architecture that provides location-based services to users of social networks, including information about time and space, which can be accessed through the social network or a mobile application.

To assert the validity of the proposed framework, we defined case studies to evaluate the system, where real situations were considered.

Urban problems, such as holes in the pavement, poor accesses to wheelchairs or lack of public lighting, are becoming pervasive. Despite the fact that most of these problems directly affect life quality and sometimes even safety, not everyone has the readiness or initiative to report them to the proper authorities. This fact makes these “black spots” difficult to identify and the repairing process slow. Citizens@City is an Android mobile application that allows the general population to play a more active role in the identification of these problems by reporting them to the proper authorities in a simple and fast way. Moreover, citizens will have the possibility to follow the identification and repairing processes, and know at a given moment its status (e.g. identified, repairing scheduled, solved). Additionally, it will also allow the proper authorities to identify and manage the reported problems, from their identification until they are solved.

The increasing search for applications that enable the sharing of experiences and the absence of applications that motivate the sharing of local knowledge prompted the development of Visit-M. It is a mobile application that allows residents and visitors of a city to share their experiences and knowledge as a community. Visit-M stimulates a strong social participation, enabling contributions of users alongside with contributions of local authorities. This paper presents a mobile and collaborative digital agenda for local events, places and routes capable of triggering a “social network” effect, generating continuous interest to create a dynamic community. To assess the integration of the developed application into the local community, local authorities were involved and potential users were invited to test the application with encouraging preliminary results.

Mobile devices are growing on a pace without precedents. It is estimated that by 2013 there will be about 1.1 Billion Smartphones on use. This quick growth on Smartphone numbers and the appearance of marketplaces where mobile applications can easily be bought or downloaded is turning mobile development into a big market. As the number of users grows in a fast pace, so does the demand for new applications, leading to faster development cycles in order to produce faster results. In many cases, mobile applications are connected to pre-existing systems and it is necessary to find a quick, but stable, secure and light way to establish a communication between the mobile application and the pre-existing background system. This article aims to show how restful Webservices, combined with JSON, may help developers to fill this gap while keeping security, stability and speed.

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is a field of Software Engineering. Its focus is on helping software engineers integrate existing applications at a sensible costs, so that they can easily implement and evolve business processes. EAI solutions are distributed in nature, which makes them inherently prone to failures. In this paper, we report on a proposal to address error detection in EAI solutions. The main contribution is that it can deal with both choreographies and orchestrations and that it is independent from the execution model used.

Small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) are greatly affected by cost escalations and overruns Reliable cost factors estimation and management is a key for the success of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems adoptions in enterprises generally and SMEs specifically. This research area is still immature and needs a considerable amount of research to seek solid and realistic cost factors estimation. Majority of research in this area targets the enhancement of estimates calculated by COCOMO family models. This research is the beginning of a series of models that would try to replace COCOMO with other models that could be more adequate and focused on ERP adoptions. This paper introduces a feed-forward back propagation artificial neural network model for cost factors estimation. We comment on results, merits and limitations of the model proposed. Although the model addresses SMEs, however, it could be extended and applied in various environments and contexts.

Wireless communications, e.g. Wi-Fi, have been increasingly important in the context of networked and virtual organizations and enterprise information systems. Performance is an issue of fundamental importance, resulting in more reliable and efficient communications, therefore improving enterprise information system yield. Security is equally important. Laboratory measurements are made about several performance aspects of Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11g WEP point-to-point links. A contribution is given to performance evaluation of this technology under WEP encryption, using available access points from Enterasys Networks (RBT-4102). Detailed results are presented and discussed, namely at OSI levels 4 and 7, from TCP, UDP and FTP experiments, permitting measurements of TCP throughput, jitter, percentage datagram loss and FTP transfer rate. Comparisons are made to corresponding results obtained for open links. Conclusions are drawn about the comparative performance of the links..

To transmit fidelity the information, at long distances, was from the beginning, a great human dream. The information signal, when transmitted from the emitter to the receiver, suffers attenuation and distortion. Then, it is necessary to use frequently a regenerator to restore the original amplitude and also to retime the bit original period. The amplitude can be restored with an amplifier with AGC (Automatic Gain Control) and the bit duration can be retimed with a synchronizer with AFC (Automatic Frequency Control).

This paper focuses on decision points, which are a feature of knowledge-intensive processes; in particular, task selection and data selection are addressed. Task selection occurs when the same business entities can be handled with different tasks, and a choice has to be made; data selection takes place when the entities to be acted on have to be selected from among those available. A notation called Task-Oriented Modeling of business Processes (TOMP) is presented with the help of an example showing a number of decision points. This paper also discusses the impact of decision points on to-do lists.

The scope of this work covers the study of models developed for assessing critical aspects of consumer use and acceptance of technology-based products and services. We used the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), and the Index of Readiness for the use of Technology (TRI) as theoretical references. We carried out field research on Internet banking users in order to: (1) evaluate the differences between the groups in terms of predisposition towards technology using the TRI model; and (2) test whether the influencing factors of this model could be antecedents to the main construct of the technology acceptance model (TAM). The analyses showed that for proposal (1), three of the four dimensions, - optimism, insecurity and discomfort, - presented significant differences between the groups; and for proposal (2), the factor ´optimism‘, a positive view of technology, was observed to be a significant antecedent of the intention to use on-line services.

Motivation is a key factor that influences individual effort, which, in turn, affects individual and organizational performance. Nevertheless, motivation at work depends on the organizational rewards and incentives, according to individual goals. This paper reports on the development of an instrument designed to measure the motivation of Information Technology people at their workplace. Psychology theories and work addressing intrinsic and extrinsic motivation have been studied. Some motivation instruments were reviewed and analyzed. Specificities and special characteristics regarding IT workers were evidenced and combined with other more general motivation factors. The instrument has been developed according to the five dimensions of the Worldatwork framework, resulting in a set of 30 scale items addressing 23 variables. Besides measuring the IT motivation levels, the tool may also help any organization to understand the weaknesses and strengths regarding incentive policies, and therefore, assist on the definition of new ones.

We do believe that it is possible to describe the people work in an organization and its relationship with Information Technology. For this purpose we build an analysis of the people work, using some principles derived from the Activity Theory and the Structuration Model of Technology. We propose an analytic framework and a method that allows us to watch work made by people and understands how Technologies is used in organization and how the organization can influence the use of technologies. The analytical framework and the method cover the different functions people play in the work, how changes in the work occur over time, and the role played by information technologies after each change. It is our faith that this method can increase the alignment between people, their work and the information technologies in an organization. To test the operational effectiveness of the method and analytical framework, these were applied to a case study. The example chosen is the work within a recruitment organization specialized in finding experts to technological areas. The description was obtained through interviews and on the observation on the work performed by people.

Organizational theory is in a poor state today. Supporting this claim, an article in

Nature

in 2011 listed the top challenges, including at fifth, the inability by social scientists to aggregate individual data to group, organizational and system levels. We have proposed that this failure derives from treating interdependence as a hindrance to experimental replications rather than the primary characteristic of social behavior. Recent studies have shown that bistability can be used theoretically to explain states of interdependence common to group debates preceding a decision (e.g., interdependently speaking and listening, and reacting). The goal of this study is to investigate interdependence in groups in the laboratory when specific parameters are placed on debate outcomes. Participants are instructed to engage in debate with one another over various topics (i.e., business, abortion, and race) and placed under one of two decision rules as instructed: consensus or majority rule. The degree to which participants remain “engaged” in the debate is of particular interest in this study. Prior to the test trial each participant completes a pre-discussion questionnaire designed to ascertain personal beliefs regarding each of the topics discussed. Participants complete a similar questionnaire immediately following the test trials. In addition, galvanic skin responses (GSR) and utterance counts over time are being obtained from randomly selected participants as a measure of autonomic arousal. We plan to analyze with time series. We expect that time-series data from groups, teams and organizations can augment self-reported data collected from individuals. Preliminary findings will be reviewed.

This paper discusses the importance and urgency of developing educational and training programs in the areas of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) with a sustainable development vision and service to society focus. We suggest the development of ICT curricula emerging from a framework that includes those disciplines, that in our view, constitute a comprehensive educational platform aiming to provide ICT students with the necessary skills, empowerment, insights and vision to face the challenging requirements and complexity of a globalized and converging world.

The confluence of education with the evolution of technology boosted the paradigm shift of the face-to-face learning to distance learning. In this scenario e-Learning plays an essential role as a facilitator of the teaching/learning process. However new demands associated with the new Web paradigm require that existent e-Learning environments characterized mostly by monolithic systems begin interacting with new specialized services. In this decentralized scenario the definition of a strategy of interoperability is the cornerstone to ensure the standardization communication among systems. This paper presents a definition of an interoperability strategy for an e-Learning environment at our School (ESEIG) called PEACE – Project for ESEIG Academic Content Environment. This new interoperability model relies on the application of several coordination and integration standards on several services, controlled by teachers and students, and included in the PEACE environment such as social networks, repositories, libraries, e-portfolios, intelligent tutors, recommendation systems and virtual classrooms.

The relationships existing between a business process and the supporting software systems is a critical concern for the organizations, as it directly affects their performance. The research described in this paper is concerned with the ALBIS Environment – ALigning Business processes and Information Systems, designed to support software maintenance tasks. In particular, the proposed environment allows the modeling and tracing between business and software entities and the measurement of their alignment degree. An information retrieval approach is embedded in ALBIS based on two processing phases including syntactic and semantic analysis. The usefulness of the environment is discussed through a case study.

The software development using dynamic and creative teams has become a strategic advantage to improving the performance of software projects. Faced with the problems noted on team management, organizations are seeking less expensive solutions and suitable for the rapidly changing market requirements. The present study aims to identify these challenges related to the management team on software projects and evaluate which and how these challenges can be addressed by promoting continuous improvement of the management of organizations. The adoption of Scrum practices in the studied project proved to be a positive solution, providing greater scalability in terms of manageability and development projects of the organization.

ITIL is considered a framework of Best Practice guidance for IT Service Management and it is widely used in the business world. In spite of this, ITIL has some gaps in Risk Management specification. This paper approaches this problem in ITIL and compares IT risk management in ITIL to other IT Governance Frameworks. Despite ITIL stating that risk should be identified, measured and mitigated, it is not clear on how to proceed (no concrete process is defined on how to deal with risk). To solve this, we propose to map the M_o_R risk management framework in ITIL, mapping every M_o_R process in ITIL, therefore adopting a strong risk management in ITIL, based on concrete guidelines, without changing the framework. Here in this paper we will summarize the necessary guidelines. Finally, we will show a planning for future work.

Technology is changing society, organizations, and interactions between service organizations and customers at a fast pace. Moreover, technology is transforming the nature of services and, in academia, multidisciplinary research is trying to make sense of these changes and leverage the opportunity of service innovation in different fields. After a brief review of the literature focused on services, we found that the term “service” is often used to mean many different things. This paper explores the meaning and scope of services in technological and managerial domains. As a final result, we summarize the concepts of services in the broad areas of management and technology that we found in the literature. Management refers to the concepts that are often used in the fields of marketing and operations management, whereas technology includes the service-like concepts from the fields of software engineering and information systems.

The paper presented here addresses the management of IT human resources available in the companies for the development of Enterprise Information Systems, mainly under the social aspect of the conflict between generations that comprise the business population, showing how to get through awareness and training, ensuring confidence in new technologies and overcome the natural resistance to changes. It compares the main positive and negative characteristics of each age group and how to take advantage of the unique strengths of each generation.

The practice of Records Management in organizations is becoming a subject of research as organizations increasingly face the dematerialization of their processes. Standards and requirements have emerged in order to assist organizations to manage digital records with the purpose of streamlining their processes and ensuring accountability and evidence of their actions. However, there is still no guidance on how to embody these requirements into the organization’s Enterprise Architecture. As a result, this paper explores and analyzes a requirements specification for records management (MoReq) from the perspective of an enterprise architecture framework (TOGAF). It intends to give the basic insights about how to incorporate such requirements into the development process of building an Enterprise Architecture by matching them with the corresponding architecture specification element or domain.

Nowadays, the strategic alignment of information systems has become a priority in most large organizations. It is a question of aligning the information system on the business strategies of the organization. This step is aimed at increasing the practical value of the information system and makes it a strategic asset for the organization. In the literature several approaches have been developed to solve the problem of alignment. For example the approach of alignment between architecture and the business context, the approach needs oriented, approach alignment between process and information system...etc. In this paper we propose a detailed study of each approach (benefits and limitation) and we propose a comparison between these different approaches.

Nowadays, the business IT alignment has become a priority in most large organizations. It is a question of aligning the information system on the business strategies of the organization. This step is aimed at increasing the practical value of the information system and makes it a strategic asset for the organization. Many works showed the importance of documentation, the analysis and the evaluation of business IT alignment, but few proposed solutions applicable to the strategic and functional level. This paper aims has to fill this gap by proposing a simple approach for modeling enterprise strategy in the context of strategic alignment. This approach is illustrated by case study of a real project in a Moroccan public administration.

There is much evidence that top management support is the single most important determinant of IS project success. This is especially the case in complex and large-scale IS projects. Surprisingly however, despite its crucial importance there is only limited knowledge of the types of behaviour associated with top management support and the reasons for low support levels. This research aims to address this gap by focussing on two questions: (1) Which types of behaviour constitute the top management support for strategic IS projects? and (2) Why do managers sometimes fail to provide this support? To answer these questions, we analyzed the top management support during enterprise system implementations in five different organizations. We conducted cross-case analyses to determine the range of behavioural approaches associated with this concept. Based on our research questions, we propose a taxonomy that includes six categories of supportive behaviour of top management, from which potential reasons can be derived to either support or non-support strategic IS projects.

IT governance is a discipline of corporate governance. Standard ISO/IEC 38500 set the basis for implementing IT governance. Nevertheless, IT governance is based in a set of best practices. There have been attempts to implement IT governance from different perspectives, none based on processes. This paper defines a process framework to implement IT governance in organizations, regardless of their size and type.

Increasing use of current and developing information technologies (IT) within business and production processes is a required transformation to survive in the market. However, IT should be well-managed to be adapted by an organization as a whole. This study proposes a new model for the assessment of IT use in organizations. The aim is to assist decision making processes in information technology management through exploring strength and weaknesses of organization on IT tools and applications. The model has been developed upon a three-folded structure including

academic studies

in technology management,

best practices

which are developed for control over operations and processes including COBIT, CMMI and ITIL, and

standards

about IT management and IT security. The study assists to reveal benefits and deficiencies of IT use in organizations. It also provides information for decision-makers about IT value within companies, and demonstrates the effects of best practices and standards over IT use.

The global competitiveness and the organizations ability to make effective use of information technology and to focus on innovation and creativity are recognized as being important. The perspective of using creativity techniques or some adaptations, to help innovation in the area of information systems seems to be promising.

In this article we propose a strategy for the introduction of creativity in the information systems planning in order to build more agile and efficient information systems, allowing therefore more competitive business.

Information Systems (IS) play a critical role in modern organizations. They are nowadays a necessary condition for organizations survival within an unstable and continuously changing economic and technology environments. Indeed, organizations need IS which help them reaching various difficult and often conflicting goals. To support innovation processes and, short time-to-market constraints, organization’s IS must be agile and flexible. The concept of IS urbanization has been proposed since the late 90’s in order to help organizations building agile IS. Nevertheless, despite the advantages of this concept, it remains too descriptive and presents many weaknesses. In particular, there is no useful approach dedicated to urbanized IS construction. In this paper, we propose a development approach of software solutions which is compliant with the IS urbanization rules.