Information Systems Development

For decades already, the field of information systems development is facing challenges for which it is not equipped. Examples are business process management, service oriented design, and model-driven engineering. Th

e only way o

ut is to broaden the scope from information system to enterprise. Enterprise Engineering is an emerging discipline, originatin

g from both

the Information System Sciences and the Organizational Sciences. This means a major paradigm shift.

On the para

digmatic basis that has been developed up

to now, the

notions of Enterprise Ontology, Enterprise Architecture, and Enterprise Governance are firmly founded. Next to broadening the scope towards enterprise engineering, there is an urgent need for scientific rigor. A first step in that direction is provided by the combination of three theories: the

f

-theory, the

t

-theory, and the

y

-theory. Together they are able to ban the bullshit from the discipline of information system engineering and to prevent it to creep into the discipline of enterprise engineering.

Information is the basis of our society, of our businesses and of our organisations. Once, information was marginal to organisations and then gradually information became central. Consequently, information systems development methodology, “…[the] recommended collection of philosophies, phases, procedures, rules, techniques, tools, documentation, management, and training for developers of Information Systems”, also became central (Avison and Fitzgerald

1988

). Over the last decade, the mobility and connectedness afforded by universal personal devices, systems and technologies have meant that the production, transformation, transmission, consumption, ownership, control, nature and significance of information have changed rapidly and dramatically. The consequences for information systems, for the development of information systems, and for the organisations that use them are still unfolding. This paper outlines in very general terms the impact of mobility and connectedness and asks about the effects on information systems and their development.

IT/business alignment is consistently rated as the #1 problem for CIOs of all kinds and sizes of companies. Although IS research has proposed a plethora of hypotheses and artefacts to explain and approach IT/business alignment problems, the large variety of goals and context factors seem to prevent effective solutions: Since companies face diverse challenges in achieving a high degree of IT/business alignment, a universal “one size fits all” approach seems not to be appropriate. IT/business alignment is therefore regarded as a class of relevant, important design problems that requires a situational solution approach. The conceptual foundations of situational problem analysis and artefact design are summarized, and a generic approach is proposed that transforms problem analysis into artefact design. The approach is then applied by decomposing the IT/business alignment problem into tangible qualities for business, IT systems, and IT governance. An explorative survey among 174 professionals is used to identify four clusters of IT/business alignment problems which each represent the current state according to certain qualities and also the priorities for future development. Using the proposed situational solution approach, four reference solutions are outlined.

Through quantitative analysis, previous researches had proven a significant preference towards a specific set of notations for modeling business processes. The drawn conclusion revealed a significantly correlated coefficient preference to Norm Process Chart for using easily recognizable symbols to intuitively elicit clear understanding in representing business process models. Further interpretative analysis to qualitatively enhance these findings will only prove and strengthen the above claimed beyond reasonable doubt. The approach is to measure respondent level of accuracy in interpreting 3 different case studies modeled using 3 different modeling techniques shown to respondents in three different randomized sequences. The analysis includes correlating the finding against the time taken as well as respondents’ level of confidence in interpreting these models. The significantly correlated results again confirmed beyond reasonable doubt Norm Process Chart being respondents ultimate choice. Further comparative analysis between results from an earlier investigation against the latter, revealed similar patterns in respondents’ responses despite respondents dispersed ethnicity and educational backgrounds.

Many modelling techniques focus on the later stages of requirements engineering and the design phase while not paying adequate attention to the earlier phases of requirements engineering. The

i*

framework is a conceptual modelling language, which can be used to model an information system and its bounding environment together with the rationales for a particular system-environment configuration. However, the

i*

framework has limited tool support for analysis. Alloy on the other hand is a modelling language that has tool support for automatic analysis. Combining the strengths of these two frameworks from the early stages of software development will provide better verification and validation mechanism. This paper presents the model transformation approach from

i*

to Alloy and demonstrates the synergy between these two frameworks by way of an example of a meeting scheduler.

Over the last decade, the efficient and flexible management of business processes has become one of the most critical success aspects. Furthermore, there exists a growing interest in the application of Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling techniques to automate the production and execution of models of organization. However, from our point of view, several connections between both disciplines remains to be exploited. The current work presents a proposal for modelling and enacting business processes that involve the selection and order of the activities to be executed (planning), besides the resource allocation (scheduling), considering the optimization of several functions and the reach of some objectives. The main novelty is that all decisions (even the activities selection) are taken in run-time considering the actual parameters of the execution, so the business process is managed in an efficient and flexible way. As an example, a complex and representative problem, the repair planning problem, is managed through the proposed approach.

Firms use Search Engine Marketing (SEM) to drive users to their Website. Some are prepared to pay for placement; others use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) hoping their result percolates up the organic SERP. Despite extensive SEM efforts, firms can only speculate over the first critical interaction between the first SERP and a user’s first click. This study sheds some light on users’ first click behaviour on Google and the early interaction thereafter. The research reveals that users evaluate the SERP from the top downwards, deciding instantly whether to click into each link, while first clicks are predominantly at the top of the SERP, especially towards organic links. For certain queries top sponsored links received almost as many clicks as organic links despite what users profess. Recommendations to firms include advice that strategies should be primarily SEO focused and that paid search campaigns should maintain a position in the top sponsored links section of the Google SERP.

Nowadays, several web services composition approaches, each considering various aspects of the composition problem, are known. Consequently, a lot of attention shifts to the performance issues of web service composition. This paper presents an effective QoS aware composition approach. Our work focuses to its performance, which is studied also in dynamically changing environment, where new services are deployed, some services are removed, or the QoS characteristics change in time. We analyze the impact of the need to manage these changes to the sojourn of the composition query in the system. The experiments show that the proposed composition system is handling these changes effectively and the sojourn time is not significantly affected.

The predicament in which we find ourselves today is that many professionals lack a sufficient grounding in formal methods, tools and techniques to enable them to make an appropriate selection for different kinds of problem. This can mean that complexity remains unrecognized and ambiguous problem situations are addressed as if they were clear and straightforward, resulting in inadequate solutions that are not experienced as useful by clients. We are thus faced with a circular dilemma. Those who attempt to use, e.g. SSM are unable to do so effectively through lack of understanding. They are thus driven back to the need for formal methods, and the disadvantages inherent in these approaches which SSM was originally created to address. Thus, there is a need to reintroduce into the agenda of soft and Agile methods an understanding of the skills and tool sets offered by hard/formal approaches. New professionals require a comprehensive

education

in use of tools and techniques, including their complementarity. This will not be delivered by training individuals in application of particular methodologies in a piecemeal and fragmented way, but by thorough and rigorous examination of whole methodologies in use. Only then can they engage in practice in the real world and develop their own tool sets, from which to select in an informed way those most appropriate to a problem situation.

The extent of outsourcing information systems (IS) activities has been significant and the trend seems likely to continue in the foreseeable future. IS outsourcing relationships bring challenges that need to be understood and managed. The client–IS supplier relationship as such is one of the less frequently examined topics in IS outsourcing research. This paper contributes to the IS outsourcing relationship literature by describing conditions influencing client–IS supplier interactions during IS outsourcing. The paper sets out from the interaction approach as it contributes new insights to IS outsourcing relationships. The interaction approach is complemented with elements to increase the description of IS outsourcing relationship interactions. The elements are composed of viewing the client firm and the IS supplier firm as being comprised of business, process and IS level and the dimensions contract and management. The conditions influencing client–IS supplier interactions are presented in the form of a conceptual framework which when adopted can contribute to a better understanding of the features of IS outsourcing relationships and facilitate for firms in their decision-making of IS outsourcing.

In today’s systems development environments, object models are becoming increasingly important. However, given the complexity of UML, it is difficult to create quality object models; further, while current CASE tools can aid in drawing object models, they do not provide much support for enhancing the quality of object models. To this end, we developed a prototype of a knowledge-based system designed to facilitate the creation of quality object models by novice analysts. Using a design science approach, we provide a description of the design objectives, the system architecture and implementation details, and discuss results of an initial evaluation of the systems’ efficacy. The analysis of the system demonstrates its ability to reliably extract relevant information from use case descriptions, and can lead to significantly more correct classes, attributes, and relationships being identified; however, the analysis has shown that the tool has not prevented novice analysts from adding incorrect elements to object models.

Cost associated with the maintenance and scale of custom services presents one of the most significant barriers to entry for information providers. One solution proposes pushing computation into the cloud where providers like Amazon maintain a scalable, world-wide platform for virtualization. While this avoids certain hardware maintenance costs, service providers must still maintain clusters of virtual machines. To address this, contextual services like Flickr provide a complete solution; unfortunately, this limits information providers to the available services and look-and-feel. We propose a compromise solution that combines existing services and applications. Such a solution decreases development and maintenance costs by providing standardized services with third-party maintenance, while allowing customizable functionality and look-and-feel. We present a specific example of this type of blended solution in our MetaMorPic system, which provides photo archiving and presentation capabilities using third-party software and services.

In e-health, data warehouse systems have become an important strategy to integrate heterogeneous data sources. Data warehouse technologies are required for telecare, drug interaction for patients with multiple symptoms, electronic prescriptions and emergency datasets, in which a massive monitoring of the processes in real-time enables proactive response to exceptional and time-sensitive critical situations. However, current data warehousing and business intelligence technologies do not directly address time sensitive monitoring, real time data processing and the adaptation of data to analytical requirements. Typically, a data warehouse (DW) is designed and built on the basis of historical information. In this paper a new information system design is described for a real time adaptive data warehouse architecture that covers the process of predicting and responding to e-health requirements in order to decrease the time of reaction and enable active responses from e-health actors and operative systems.

Market changes have forced telecommunication companies to transform their business. Increased competition, short innovation cycles, changed usage patterns, increased customer expectations and cost reduction are the main drivers. Our objective is to analyze to what extend transformation projects have improved the orientation towards the end-customers. Therefore, we selected 38 real-life case studies that are dealing with customer orientation. Our analysis is based on a telecommunication-specific framework that aligns strategy, business processes and information systems. The result of our analysis shows the following: transformation projects that aim to improve the customer orientation are combined with clear goals on costs and revenue of the enterprise. These projects are usually directly linked to the customer touch points, but also to the development and provisioning of products. Furthermore, the analysis shows that customer orientation is not the sole trigger for transformation. There is no one-fits-all solution; rather, improved customer orientation needs aligned changes of business processes as well as information systems related to different parts of the company.

Process models contain a lot of information. However, even created with the goal of enhancing the understanding of complex processes by making them transparent in an easy human-readable form, it still remains to be a hard task to analyze them in an automated computer-based way. While service-oriented architectures offer a technical base for service-management, the question of mapping business requirements to a design that remains maintainable is still in discussion. In this paper a new approach to ease the analysis of complex models is presented. It heavily relies on a new convolution theory that allows to generate ratios, which can be used to determine the applicability of a service candidate for its use as a real service within a SOA.

QuEF (Quality Evaluation Framework) is an environment to evaluate, through objective measures, the quality of Model-Driven Web Engineering (MDWE) methodologies. In this paper, this environment is presented and is used for the evaluation of the Maintainability in terms of various characteristics on MDWE. Given the high number of methodologies available and proposed over recent years, it has become necessary to define objective evaluation tools to enable organizations to improve their methodological environment and to help designers of web methodologies design new effective and efficient tools, processes and techniques and find out how it can be improved and how the quality improvement process could be optimized in order to reduce costs. This evaluation is applied to the NDT (Navigational Development Techniques) methodology, an approach that covers the complete life cycle and it is mainly oriented to the enterprise environment.

Many Information Systems are viewed as underperforming by failing to meet expectations or deliver value to customers. In order to try and understand why these problems occur we apply narrative methods in the IS domain, taking into account the stories that different groups of actors tell regarding their experiences of the development and use of new information systems. This paper presents the perspectives of multiple actors regarding success/failure and problems encountered in developing and using information systems from their experiences. Qualitative approaches are followed to gather, analyze and interpret the rich, multi-voiced and incoherent generated stories of stakeholders involved in software systems. It is shown that the antenarrative approach that is employed in this study can produce deeper insights into the experience world of involved actors.

Services play an increasingly important role in most industry sectors, including IT. Recent emergence of Cloud Computing and the general acceptance of different forms of outsourcing as a mechanism for increasing effectiveness of organizations necessitate a revision of basic SOA concepts to take account of extensive use of externally provided services. A key pre-requisite for this revised SOA architectural framework is the unification of service definitions so that different types of services can be treated in a consistent manner. The unified service definition needs to contain attributes of internally and externally provided services as well as attributes of business and IT services and be customizable to allow its application in different usage scenarios. In this paper we discuss the concept of a service as interpreted in both business and computing literature and propose a concise service definition based on a set of attributes that can be specialized for a particular service delivery scenario. We illustrate using a simple example how such service definition can be used to construct instances of services.

Dynamic evolution is beneficial and important to certain classes of distributed applications where shutdown is not always viable requiring modifications to such applications while they are executing. This paper describes Continuum, a process-oriented approach to address analysis and design aspects of dynamic evolution in software development, leveraging the flexibility of composition-based applications—like component-based and service-oriented ones—to facilitate dynamic changes. The approach begins with analyzing and extending the application lifecycle of an application to accommodate dynamic changes (i.e. while it is still executing). Then, the design of runtime modifications is carried out to progressively realize the changes, in terms of what to perform (i.e. transformations), who performs the transformations (i.e. transformation agents), and how the transformations are performed (i.e. transformation steps). A hypothetical electronic product catalogue application is used to illustrate Continuum.

Regulated Open multi-agent systems are composed by heterogeneous and autonomous agents which may need to coexist in a complex social and legal frame work that can evolve to address the different and often conflicting objectives of the many stakeholders involved. Of the ways in which agent behaviour can be regulated in a multi-agent system, contracts seem to be the most appropriate for industrial environments. This paper analyzes the open challenges in the development of these kind of systems. It also proposes an architecture and a designing method which face up to these challenges by means of the integration of open multi-agent systems, service-oriented architectures, e-contracting and regulation enforcement mechanisms.

Rapid changes in business environment result in necessity to introduce new agile modeling methods, which effectively support evolution of information system specifications. Service-oriented paradigm can be applied for achievement of this goal. Conceptual models of service interactions are important as a natural principle for the separation of crosscutting concerns of various information system architecture dimensions. This paper presents a modeling method for systems analysis and design, where service orientation is used for integration of information system conceptualizations. Goals, problems and opportunities represent pragmatic aspects, which are considered as a driving force of design process. It is a starting point for reasoning about changes of computation-neutral specifications of service architectures across organizational and technical system boundaries. The presented method is used for bridging pragmatic and semantic dimensions of information systems specifications.

Feature Modeling is a technique that uses diagrams to characterize the variability of software product lines. The arrival of metamodeling frameworks in the Model-Driven Engineering field (MDE) has provided the necessary background to exploit these diagrams (called feature models) in information systems development processes. However, these frameworks have some limitations when they must deal with software artifacts at several abstraction layers. This paper presents a prototype that allows the developers to define cardinality-based feature models with complex model constraints. The prototype uses model transformations to build Domain Variability Models (DVM) that can be instantiated. This proposal permits us to take advantage of existing tools to validate model instances and finally to automatically generate code. Moreover, DVMs can play a key role in complex MDE processes automating the use of feature models in software product lines.

For many users online profiles displaying other people’s skills are increasingly important, e.g., when contracting freelancers or finding candidates for a job opening. However, current profiles found in information systems offer either unstructured free text that is hard to handle efficiently or simplistic rating schemes that do not convey meaningful information. In addition, it is unclear how trustworthy the information on the profile is. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to online skills profiles based on users’ confirmations and the SkillRank credibility ranking and describe its prototype implementation. As spadework, we set forth six basic requirements for online skill evaluations which should generally be reflected in corresponding IS design.

User participation in requirement analysis (RA) is necessary for IS quality and user acceptance. A prerequisite for meaningful user participation is that the coming users also understand the requirements. This understanding is made difficult by abstract and “technical” modelling languages and notations which require learning and experience. The Business Rules Approach (BRA) builds on a notion of Business Rules (BR) formulated in natural language sentences aimed at the business audience; hence BRA should make user participation easy. This is tested in a workshop with a vaccination expert (VE) in a project on designing a BR oriented, digital service for health care workers (HCWs). The results indicate that natural language BRs in RA really are easily understood and intuitive for the VE and that quality checking BRs requires no special learning.

The system ISTechnology and lessons learned of its use in the business modeling and development of information systems are analyzed in the paper. The system consists of the meta-model and applications. The meta-model enables to define a platform independent business model of the organization. The applications provide the definition and interpretation of the business model. Interpretation of the business model provides functionality of the information system in the selected platform. The lessons learned confirm that the development and maintenance cost of information systems can be significantly reduced by use of the ISTechnology.

Nowadays, there are more than 50 different ontology development and management tools (ODMT), since domain ontologies become used more and more often in the development of knowledge based information systems (IS). A number of authors propose their criteria to assess ODMT. However, the earlier proposed criteria of ODMT assessment concentrate on the modelling capabilities of the structure of an ontology and user interfaces mainly. In this research, we are interested in the ODMT capability of modelling axioms. Therefore, this paper presents an investigation of ODMT according to the modelling of axioms. We define necessary criteria for the assessment of ODMT and perform an evaluator case study.

The capabilities of classic web forms written purely in HTML become these days insufficient. The missing type control, no support for validation, or tight coupling of data and presentation layers limit their usage. So the

XForms

technology, the new generation forms based completely on the well-known XML format, was created. It includes all mentioned features and no other scripting language is needed. There are several studies of how to automate the process of creating XForms if there exists a schema against which the form will be validated. This paper presents a new method of

semi-automatic transformation

from an

XML Schema

to

XForms

using a simple subset of the XHTML as the host language for generated forms. The proposed algorithm is based on traversing the input XML schema and generating the XForms form in two phases. We prove the feasibility of this concept with the implemented XForms editor.

In this paper we have highlighted five existing approaches for introducing personalization in OLAP: preference constructors, dynamic personalization, visual OLAP, recommendations with user session analysis and recommendations with user profile analysis and have analyzed research papers within these directions. We have provided an evaluation in order to point out (i) personalization options, described in these approaches, and its applicability to OLAP schema elements, aggregate functions, OLAP operations, (ii) the type of constraints (hard, soft or other), used in each approach, (iii) the methods for obtaining user preferences and collecting user information. The goal of our paper is to systematize the ideas proposed already in the field of OLAP personalization to find out further possibility for extending or developing new features of OLAP personalization.

Non-Functional Requirements (NFR) have been for too long overlooked during the development of software systems, leading in numerous cases to failure, an over budget or even cancellation of projects. In this paper, we propose a solution to integrate the modelling of NFRs into the UML diagrams. Our framework is inspired by several proposals in this critical area, but it is the first time that a unified process, allowing possible integration of NFRs in necessary UML diagrams, is proposed.

It has been assumed that information technologies and public information systems like e-government and e-health would bring substantial positive effects. The current results of public information systems are not too optimistic as there are barriers due to an improper setting of legislative and related processes, especially of (personal) data secirity rules and processes. The processes in fact almost completely exclude the computation of open information from sensitive data

open information and sensitive data

. We show that it has substantial negative effects but it still does not assure required personal data security

personal data security

. The undesirable effects are not only important, but sometimes they are fatal. This problem is frequently underestimated and often overlooked. The current practices substantially limit the applicability of the concepts of artificial intelligence, knowledge society, and semantic web. We propose solutions enabling to change current undesirable practices like massive data deletion. The solutions are based on the combination of processes performed by a trusted body. We discuss technical solutions enabling implementation of our proposals and specifying ways of changing current legislative to enable them. It must be based on the change of social and legislative conditions like prejudices of public (Big Brother hysteria).

A company or an organization may have a number of business processes depending on its size, represented in a particular business process modeling language such as BPMN. They may have inter-operating relationships, i.e. one process may depend on other processes by exchanging messages in order to achieve its objective(s). One of the process improvements is to optimize its processing time, e.g. by parallelizing some tasks within a particular process. Optimizing processes individually without considering any inter-operating relationship between them will potentially produce a process which is not consistent with the original one w.r.t. the pre-defined business rules. This paper introduces a novel approach of optimizing process portfolio both locally and globally by considering inter-operating relationships between process models as well as taking into account the minimal change strategy.

Usability and security are often portrayed as though they are competing priorities in information systems development. Given that both are essential to the design of an effective system, it is important that these two prerogatives should be reconciled. In recent years, there is growing concern with the rising incidence of on-line impersonation, theft and other types of fraud. It is therefore important that an information system must have a secure and rigorous way of authenticating a user’s identity. This paper reviews the sources of literature on interactive design guidance for on-line user authentication, and then compares the actual practices of a purposefully selected sample of twelve Websites against the recommendations from the literature. Alarmingly, the findings of this study are that many Websites have user authentication processes which contain basic design flaws that are potentially open to exploitation by Internet criminals.

Requirements engineering is highly challenging particularly when designing innovative software products. This is so because there are no corresponding products, ultimate needs of actors are difficult to capture, the products may have unforeseeable impacts on the actors’ behavior, and it is hard to find out how value-added and competitive the product actually is. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for intention-driven requirements engineering of innovative software products, which combines technological, social and business viewpoints. We illustrate its use with a short example related to the domain of web mapping services and augmented reality.

With the increasing mature of hardware technology and the continuous reduction of RFID production cost, the

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)

technology has been widely used in many fields. This paper proposes a real-time event stream framework for RFID system and develops a retail supermarket management system for the purpose of commodity monitoring and tracing. An event-centric architecture for the RFID real-time

Event stream processing

is designed, which can support both real-time event queries over event streams and history event queries on event databases. Event types of retail supermarkets are analyzed in details, and the event relation diagram among them is given. Based on the framework, an event filtering method using a hash table to remove redundant data and an improved SASE method to process complex events are presented.

This research looks at the customer focus of agile software development teams. The study is part of a larger study examining how the twelve principles of Beyond Budgeting are operationalised in the context of an agile development environment. Using two case study sites and a semi-structured interview approach the customer focus of agile teams operating within two large organisations is examined. In these organisations the direct customer is not the end user of the product; rather they are another group within the organisation downstream of the agile development team. The results suggest that while organisations may espouse to have a customer focus the structures may not be in place to enable sufficient sharing of customer knowledge and utilisation of customer feedback. Emergent themes from the study suggest that customer identification, customer characteristics, customer location and the teams’ experience of the customer and their domain may have an impact on the customer focus of an agile team.

When errors in software modelling activities propagate to later phases of software development lifecycle, they become costlier to fix and lower the quality of the final product. Early validation of software models can prevent rework and incorrect development non-compliant with client’s specification. In this paper we advocate the use of ontologies to validate and improve the quality of software models as they are being developed, at the same time bridging the traditional gap between developers and clients. We propose a general ontology-mediated process to validate software models that can be adapted in a broad range of software development projects. We illustrate this for Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) development providing early evidence of the soundness of our approach. We successfully validate and improve the quality of MAS models for a real-life development project, illustrating the ontology-mediated models validation in a commercial setting.

The paper presents the design and implementation of an original integrated media content management system. In this very fast developing area where numerous changes occur even in a year’s time it is really hard to foresee future trends and successful directions. The primary goal was to develop an example of a Collaborative Media Content Management System where different media types and other online contents can simply be stored integrated in one system and can easily be managed and shared by users and communities as well. Right at the beginning, we were aware of the fact that the project would last one year. Therefore, it was not enough to include the then newest features in the plan: it was also necessary to predict future trends and requirements, so that by the time the project is finished, it would still be innovative. The functional design of the application was based on the observation of new internet user generations who are heavily involved in real-time messaging and community portals. Based on our innovative ideas the system has been finished and besides our successful project many similar solutions have been appeared all over the world. The paper presents the most important features of our approach and the outcome: a Collaborative Media Content Management system, called simply Media-store, and emphasizes the innovative services of the system (visual tagging, mediashow, mediablog, common media arrangement).

This paper discusses a problem of managing resources by utilizing the Workflow Management System taking into account the properties of WfMS participant. The paper shows a problem using architecture according to Workflow Management Coalition—no distinction is made between participants of Workflow Management System with the same role. The possible solution lies in the modification of the process definition. The paper shows how to use the Workflow Management System for setting up dynamic properties of profiles of WfMS participants which significantly supports the solution for more precise managing resources in Workflow Management System. This modification of the Workflow Management System also enables other ways for the analysis of the business process. The solution can also improve assigning participants of Workflow Management System to task.

In principle, information systems should be tuned to provide optimal support for the business processes of the organisation in which they are used. In particular, this means maintaining alignment between information systems and business processes as an organisation evolves. Where this strategy becomes difficult, however, is when an organisation reaches a point where a ‘step change’ in information system support is required. This paper examines how such step changes can arise and considers the factors involved in realigning the organisation when encountered. The discussion is illustrated through an industrial study in KTL, an Irish telecommunications service company. The analysis of the situation uses Soft Systems Methodology.

Trust is an important aspect of any software development team, but particularly with self-managing teams as team members are very dependent on one another. Agile teams are considered to be self-managing and they employ many different

agile practices

to function as an agile team. While there have been many studies of trust in software development teams few have examined trust in an agile context with even less focus on how specific

agile practices

may contribute to trust. The purpose of this study is to examine how three agile practices—the

daily stand up

,

iteration planning

and

iteration retrospective

—may support and facilitate trust in an agile team. An exploratory case study of one agile team was conducted. The findings indicate that while factors such as environmental conditions and personal characteristics of team members must be considered,

agile practices

can also contribute to building trust among team members. They may also highlight the existence of a lack of trust.

This article deals with some of the basis of the reasoning behind conceptual normalisation and briefly describes how relational and object normalisation can be derived from it. This contribution is only an introduction to this very interesting, serious and infrequently discussed issue. Nor is it a comprehensive paper covering all particular problems and questions and offers precise mathematical proofs of authors’ theses presented herein. The idea of this contribution is to create a proper starting point for the discussion of this issue in the frame of an international expert community engaging in conceptual, object and data modelling.

Development of Web-based Geographical Information Systems (WebGIS) is mainly done by Small Enterprises which usually employ Open Source Software (OSS) components. The number and complexity of requirements for these Information Systems has exploded during the last years due to the technological advances. In addition, enterprises working on WebGIS must carry out intensive software development within short time frames. This situation is claiming for an improvement of their software development processes so that both the time to market and costs can be reduced. In this paper, we present the situation of a research-in-progress performed by one of these SMEs working on WebGIS. Software Product Line approach has emerged as a promising solution to face the problems due to the situation in the WebGIS domain. We have also detected that modeling tools can help WebGIS developers to reduce the time to market and cost of their developments and, at the same time, offer a quality warranty and more robust ISs. We have started a Software Process Improvement and its first steps have been taken whose results are presented here.

We provide a different view on the problem of Web Information System (WIS) adaptation, looking from perspective of organizations that are interested in an adapted Web Information System for their needs if a unified system to support similar business processes is used. We propose an adaptation architecture for WIS. Two levels of adaptation are introduced—coarse grained adaptation for the organization level and fine grained adaptation for the user level. The architecture supports also the situation, when users can work with many instances of the system adapted for different organizations, which are integrated into one instance for a particular user.

In change work we have the ambition to improve or enhance different activities within a specific situation or context. We can think of e.g. changes in society, in organisations or in family life. In this case the focus will be on change work in organisations; private companies as well as in public services. Change work implies a purposeful growth and development of organisations. This development work can be performed by operating in networks (inter-organisational change) or accomplished by undertaking individual measures (intra-organisational change). By information systems development (ISD) we mean analysis, design and implementation of useful IT systems in companies. ISD is nowadays regarded as an essential and vital part of change work in organisations. This paper presents ten lessons learned from working with information systems development in a change work context.

This paper presents findings from a study of the implementation of an enterprise system in an organization. The implementation process is viewed from a dialectic perspective, which means thinking in terms of contradictions. This paper raises the following research question: How can we understand contradictions in enterprise system (ES) implementations? To answer this question, an interpretive research approach was chosen. The empirical part is a longitudinal case study. The system was in this case an innovative combination of collaboration and information management technologies. The main contradiction studied in this case was between an as-is implementation of standard software, and an implementation fulfilling the organizational requirements of solution integration and user experience. To understand the issues involved in this dialectic of adaptation, three different perspectives are applied. These are (i) considering ES vendor challenges, (ii) exploring contradictions in the chartering phase, and (iii) understanding contradictions in the project phase. This paper contributes to understanding how the dialectic of adaptation may emerge, and presents three perspectives for understanding contradictions that may occur as an enterprise system is implemented. This understanding may help to constructively deal with dialectics in future enterprise system implementations. Implications for both research and practice are outlined.

More recently, Internet has experienced a complete makeover and has developed into an always-connected and device-independent environment. Under the influence of new technological trends, including Web 2.0, service-oriented architecture (SOA), software as a service (SaaS), and cloud computing, there has been a shift in the approach to the development of Web applications. Static Web pages that used to be designed for passive recipients of information have been re-placed with dynamic applications that enable participants to actively contribute in creating knowledge repositories. Owing to their features, collaborative editors, as examples of SaaS, have a potential to be used for both educational and professional purposes. This chapter presents the results of our research into the perceived quality of collaborative editors in which two complementary methods were used: the retrospective thinking aloud (RTA) method and a questionnaire. Through analysis of collected data, advantages and disadvantages of collaborative editors were obtained. In addition, the guidelines for their improvement and further development of similar types of applications are proposed.

The healthcare is a knowledge-based profession where ideally decisions are based on formal evidence. But the challenges faced by healthcare decision makers are to apply these generic and population level evidence to the specific situation of an individual patient. In this paper we argue for a knowledge-based approach to medical decision-making. Such an approach is grounded in general population level interventions, based on the evidence that informs and is specialized to the specific context of a particular patient. We propose task-based knowledge management (TbKM) as a theoretical construct to implement the knowledge-based approach to medical decision-making.

In this paper, we deal with agile and lean support and maintenance of IT services. Agile approaches are considered as software development approaches mostly, but the usage of agile principles and techniques also brings a lot of benefits to the support and maintenance. Common support and maintenance standards, recommendations and methods are process oriented and omit human aspect. Paper takes a critical viewpoint of process-orientation. We define agile and lean support and maintenance principles and control framework for improvement and implementation of these principles in IT services. The described approach was piloted in 13 IT services. Achievements are enclosed as verification of practical results and benefits.

The paper presents a framework for building theory from ISD practices. The framework locates ISD practices in a learning loop that is situated in a development context. The framework recognizes that ISD practices are related to their learned rationale that may come from previous experiences, i.e. observed impacts of practices, or from existing theory. These concepts recognized by the framework are needed for building theory from ISD practices, for designing research approaches for studying ISD, for evaluating existing research on ISD practices and for evaluating ISD methods. The framework is also used in the analysis of three recent studies on ISD practices and a discussion about the uses of the framework in research and in method development is included along with a set of possible research paths in the future.

This paper deals with the role of the concept of services in the area of Business Process Modeling and Management. It describes the process of the business processes system design which is the part of the Methodology for Business Processes Analysis and Design—MMAPB. The design technique covers the whole process from identification of the basic activities over the design of key and supporting processes as late as the building resulting infrastructures. The very significant tool for the structuring of the processes is the principle of services. It allows discovering of basic supporting processes in bodies of key processes, their clarification with the exact definition of the interfaces between processes, and, finally, exact definition of the needs and possibilities of supporting infrastructures. The paper argues for the idea that thinking in terms of services is much more useful and general principle to be limited to the area of technology and software systems development only.

Current information systems tend to be distributed into networks of quite autonomous, but cooperative, components communicating asynchronously via messages of appropriate formats. Loose binding between those components allows to establish and destroy their interconnections dynamically at runtime, on demand, and according to various aspects; to clone the components and to move them into different contexts; to create, destroy and update the components dynamically at runtime; etc. Modelling of the dynamics and mobility of components brings many issues that cannot be addressed by means of conventional architecture description languages. In this paper, a metamodel

metamodel

for modelling of component-based systems

component-based system

with mobile architecture

mobile architecture

is proposed.

Before an outsourced software project officially begins the contracting or supplier organization has already expended effort. Although project start and start-up effort impact on project success in most cases these are undefined concepts. There are no clear definitions of project start, start-up or the activities that should be completed before project start either in the literature or in practice. Ambiguity around project start sets up risks to the profitability of a project and therefore makes the real success of a project not only uncertain but difficult to measure. A vague project start also makes comparisons between projects and between organizations unreliable. In this paper, we describe a pilot study that reviews project start, project start-up, and project start date, and then investigates what the key activities of the supplier are normally performed by the end of the project start-up phase. We use interviews with software supplier practitioners to define those key activities.

Reuse is a common discipline for decreasing software development time and for improving overall quality, independent from the domain. As business processes represent a fundamental asset of an organization, several concepts for enabling reuse during process modeling have been proposed. However, only few concrete examples for reusable process artifacts have been discussed so far. In this paper, we present the concept of process fragments and an example collection of process fragments for illustrating our reuse concept and for showing that it can actually be applied in practice for an easier and faster development of process-based applications. The fragment examples demonstrate different characteristics such fragments may exhibit. We also argue that this work will encourage reuse of process logic in terms of fragments, since it also provides an opportunity to design and develop a process fragment library for collecting process logic explicitly. As technical enabler for the approach we present a prototype called Fragmento.

Automating user behaviour is one of the most important challenges in Ambient Intelligence. Most of the proposed approaches to confront this are based on machine-learning algorithms. Using them, user routine tasks are inferred from user past actions and then automated when needed. However, these approaches present the cold-start problem, i.e. they cannot infer routine tasks until they gather sufficient user actions. We improve this problem by using a modelling approach. We propose two models to specify the routine tasks known at design time and a software infrastructure that automates them when needed by interpreting these models at runtime. Thus, we achieve to automate user routine tasks from the very beginning. Furthermore, we complement this infrastructure with a model-based API that allows these models to be modified at runtime. Thus, we provide a high-level repository for user behaviour information and an initial background to improve behaviour predictions.

The new kind of applications being currently developed deserves more attention in the user interface development area. This paper takes into account slightly different needs of new applications such as Web 2.0 and considers new approaches in their development cycle. Namely, the development is more based on user comfortability needs and the paper stirs the processes needed to accomplish this successfully and early in the development phase. Thus, minimizing the bucket demands which is critical for project managers. The paper outlines also future steps to reach even better results.

In past, various models have been proposed to address problems posed by advanced transactions, but only a few of them are eventually used in commercial products. In this paper, we present a model which fully integrates Workflow Management System into existing Database Management System to facilitate advanced transactions. The integration can be gradual and seamless. Furthermore, we make the case that the model can be implemented by means of generally available software tools. We have designed a prototype built on Microsoft platform. Finally, we show how issues related to long-duration transactions and distributed databases can be tackled with help of the model. The experience recounted in this paper has been assembled over one elapsed year of work with Windows Workflow Foundation.

The goal a of this study is to investigate issues connected with implementation strategy in enterprise system (ES) adoption. Drawing from the experience of a few dozen ES adopters, this study examines how different implementation strategies exist in practice, what project characteristics are connected with the choice of an implementation strategy, and how implementation strategy influences ES adoption outcomes. In doing so, this study employs various success metrics which include three-dimensional project success measure and user satisfaction. The results demonstrate that project duration time is the main factor deciding about the implementation strategy adopted. They also suggest that various risks are connected with implementation strategy choices. In particular, phased method is connected with longer adoption time and the risk of exceeding the planned time, while parallel method runs the risk of exceeding the planned financial budget. On the basis of the research, recommendations regarding the implementation strategy choice conclude the study.

Data warehouses tend to evolve, because of changes in data sources and business requirements of users. All these kinds of changes must be properly handled, therefore, data warehouse development is never-ending process. In this paper we propose the evolution-oriented user-centric data warehouse design, which on the one hand allows to manage data warehouse evolution automatically or semi-automatically, and on the other hand it provides users with the understandable, easy and transparent data analysis possibilities. The proposed approach supports versions of data warehouse schemata and data semantics.

Change management is an important process enabling the definition of a successful enterprise strategy and operations—especially in a turbulent environment. A number of methodologies are available for change management; however none of those is designed specifically for fractal systems. Taking into consideration self-similarity; self-organization, goal-orientation, and dynamics and vitality of fractal systems, change management in such systems obviously requires organizational procedures that take account of the distinct properties of fractal systems. The purpose of this research is to define a change management methodology that would allow administering change management in fractal systems in general and apply it to a specific change situation when the primary object of the change is an information system of a fractal enterprise.

Government to citizen (G2C) service provision is demanded to fit for purpose for users. A process of finding services from a G2C system involves understanding of the user’s request, selecting the relevant services, and deciding amongst the candidate services to meet the user’s needs. Some current approaches, such as benchmarking methods, are capable of measuring the service quality in the quantitative manner. However, G2C services also have intangible features which can be measured qualitatively. In this chapter, a method is described to model the requirements of G2C services and their provision. To facilitate a service provision process, a set of criteria is identified and used to ensure the quality of the resultant services. An ontology model developed represents requirements of service provision in a web service environment that involves service consumers, service providers, and service advisor. Interactions between these stakeholders are defined by norms which generate workflows for executing the functions in the techniques. An experiment using DEA is carried out in this paper based on quantitative criteria to validate the method and its techniques, i.e.

articulates, derives

and

pre-selects

. The pre-selected services as the candidates are further evaluated with the contribution of the qualitative features of the services by using analytical hierarchical process (AHP) to decide for winning services.

This study reviews the use and advantages of open source software licensing and examines how the use of similar arrangements could increase productivity and innovation in other industries where intellectual property rights (IPR) protection has relied on proprietary measures and where rapid technological innovation is important. We observe that a reliance on proprietary, closed source protection of intellectual property in agricultural biotechnology has hindered product development and resulted in spiraling research and development costs. Reduced research productivity and increasing costs are of serious concern to practitioners, academicians, and policy makers. We show that lessons learned from the open source initiatives in software technology are directly applicable to agricultural biotechnology.

Today, doing business is complex and dynamic due to rapid changes in technology and globalization of the market. Organizations require complex business structures which include: a business model, strategies, operations, etc as well as well-managed business processes (BP) which are continually improved and evaluated. However, sustaining BP is difficult due to non-alignment between information technology (IT) and other organizational components. This chapter presents a business goal-driven requirements engineering approach for IT to better understand system requirements, as requirements are generated from the business goals and provide assistance for analyzing business goals quickly.

Calculating similarity measures between schema concept terms has turned out to be an essential task in our requirements engineering research. The reason is that automatic integration of source texts and terms in the requirements engineering domain presupposes decisions about the similarity and the conflict potential of linguistic units, i.e. by default words. After shortly discussing several WordNet based similarity measures, we propose the Lesk algorithm as the most suitable choice for the integration task. Our test results show that both the Lesk algorithm and the underlying lexicon (i.e. WordNet) can be optimized for engineering purposes. We describe in detail how Lesk and WordNet can be applied for term conflict recognition and resolution during the engineering workflow.

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) has been extensively used in the systems engineering domain. It has become a commonly accepted standard. However, not all expectations of system engineers have been met by UML. Therefore, a new language, based on UML but strongly supplemented by notions specific for the systems engineering field, has been proposed by the International Council on System Engineering (INCOSE) and Object Management Group (OMG). New types of diagrams specific for the technical spheres of systems engineering have been proposed and included in a standard set of 9 types of SysML diagrams. While they are successfully used in systems engineering, systems analysts have gone the opposite way—they have experimented with the appropriateness of SysML diagrams for applications in business and administration organizations. In this chapter, a case study of inventory control systems in industrial and commercial organizations, originating from business principles, theory of prognosis and operations research, is used to verify the usefulness of one of the leading and most characteristic SysML diagrams, i.e. the Parametric Diagram. Following the Introduction, the role of SysML in the development of inventory control systems is outlined. In Sect. 3, a Block Definition Diagram as a basis for parametric analysis is specified. Section 4 provides selected case study results. The chapter is finalized with Conclusions.

To provide high quality healthcare service, all relevant information of a patient is paramount. Most of the patient healthcare information is stored in disparate electronic medical record (EMR) systems of healthcare providers such as general practitioners (GP), specialists, hospitals etc. Integrating the existing heterogeneous EMRs for data sharing is crucial. All existing integration solutions need the numerous EMR software vendors to update their software to follow ever-changing messaging standards, provided interfaces or other criterions. The cost and efforts of the enormous amount of time required to negotiate with the large number of project participants for upgrading existing systems is extremely high. Almost exclusively, software today provides a graphical user interface (GUI) as the only method for users to access the functionality of the software. In this chapter, we propose a model for automating the procedure of operating the GUI based EMR and exchange information with them without the need of updating the existing EMR systems. The model is called parameterized GUI state model (PGUISM) which depicts the intrinsic logic of GUIs and enables the automated process of writing and reading information to and from EMR systems.