Information Systems Development

There is growing concern about the protection of user privacy on the Internet. Yet, through the customisation of systems to each individual user, the provision of personal information offers significant benefits in terms of usability. There would appear to be a conflict between privacy and personalisation and a need for a balance to be struck between them. This keynote argues that the apparent conflict is the result of a particular perspective on the problem, a perspective which assumes that the individual user is limited to a binary decision on whether or not to disclose items of personal information to all and sundry or to nobody. There are many reasons why this assumption is made. Investigation of these reasons indicates that they are not inescapable and reveals an alternative approach to the design of personalised systems in which the user can retain full control of what they disclose to whom.

Many methodologies, models, and standards have been developed to help organizations in achieving their process improvement objectives. However, when the organizations implement new processes present difficulties, depending on the process deployment strategy. A survey was conducted to analyze what the issues related to process deployment initiatives are. The result survey shows there are great differences among the centers depending on the process deployment strategy. It is a key factor to design and plan a deployment strategy very early with dedicated resources. The plan is needed to get management support. It is necessary to have a Process Asset Library (PAL) with easy access and ease of use by staff. The PAL allows knowledge sharing across the organization. The implementation of new processes in organizations is a change. It is necessary to consider the technical and human aspects. This chapter presents the elements of process deployment and the critical success factors to take into account in the process deployment and proposes a method of process deployment to be used in software projects. This highlights the importance of having an effective process deployment strategy with the objective that the process can be adopted, used, and institutionalized. The results of a case study on experiences of process deployment and the critical success factors are included.

This chapter addresses the interplay of IS development and IT operations in system development projects, as seen from the perspective of IT operations. The underlying perspective is that a well-performed interplay of the two domains is essential, both for the successful development of a new information system, as well as for its subsequent operation. In this chapter, we use alignment theory to analyse data from a Delphi study in order to investigate the interplay of the two areas. The chapter concludes that the two areas are often unsatisfactorily aligned and that improving their interplay must be a priority for IS development and IT operations alike.

Offhand, the agile and the disciplined software development approaches seem contradicting. More and more, software development organizations however strive at implementing an agile software development approach while still being compliant to a quality assurance standard. Researchers are discussing the combinability and compatibility of these two approaches. Through a review of the literature, the purpose of this chapter is to determine whether the agile and the disciplined software development approaches are combinable or just compatible, in particular to identify the main challenges of using an agile software development approach in a disciplined setting. The review shows that the agile and the disciplined approaches are compatible, but not combinable. It is possible to implement agile practices and principles in a development process compliant with a quality standard, but the regulations of the standard makes it impossible to implement a full agile software development process without compromising the agility. The main challenges, when balancing the agility and discipline in a project, are how to determine the right level of documentation and how to overcome the differences in the way requirements are handled.

Over two decades, we and other research groups have found that ethnographic and social analyses of work settings can provide insights useful to the process of systems analysis and design. Despite this, ethnographic and social analyses have not been widely assimilated into industrial practice. Practitioners still address sociotechnical factors in an ad hoc manner often after having observed that a system has become problematic during implementation. In response to this we have developed a lightweight qualitative approach to provide insights to ameliorate problematic implementations. We demonstrate that the analysis of

intentional

and

structural factors

to inform

system deployment

and

adoption

can provide actionable insights in a short period of time in a manner that is compatible with the ad hoc approach of industry. We evaluate our approach using a case study of a problematic enterprise document management system within a multinational systems engineering organisation. Our findings are of significance as we demonstrate an approach that informs a different phase of information systems development to typical social analyses and in doing so appears to provide a better fit with industrial practice.

One of the main contributions in order to create development in poor countries is to give people access to information and communication. Most people in poor countries cannot afford to buy their own computer equipment, and access has therefore to be facilitated by arrangements for public use. Today, Internet cafés and telecentres are the two main sources of public Internet access in developing countries. One area where information technology and public Internet access can be particularly useful for the development of poor countries is as a tool for promoting good governance through e-government systems. Generally, developing countries are lagging behind in e-government adoption, and in this chapter, with a focus on Tanzania in Africa, we investigate to which degree public Internet access points, like telecentres, are used for accessing e-government information and services today and how they can contribute to increased use, in order to support good governance in developing countries in the future.

Business process management systems (BPMS) have the potential to reduce the effort required to provide technology support for business processes in an organization. Despite their relatively long history, however, there is currently no single development methodology recommended for their use in creating and maintaining process-aware information systems (PAIS). Instead, developers currently take a multimethodology approach, drawing from a range of available paradigms, methodologies, techniques, and tools. The purpose of this chapter is to consider whether an end-to-end methodology is needed for PAIS development or if multimethodology is sufficient. The discussion is informed by the specific experience of designing and building a PAIS for a telecommunications company in Ireland. This chapter describes the study and the lessons learned from it, concluding that while an integrated methodology has benefits, a multimethodology approach seems necessary until there is greater maturity in the BPMS field.

In the last years, the model-driven paradigm has been used in different areas of software development. One of these areas is Web engineering, which is commonly named model-driven Web engineering (MDWE). Although research groups obtained very relevant results in the application of this paradigm in Web development, the model-driven paradigm does not result friendly enough in enterprise environments. This chapter presents a tool, NDT-Driver, which implements the transformations of a model-driven approach called NDT. It analyzes how this tool is used in companies and how it facilitates the application of model-driven paradigm in enterprise environments.

This chapter introduces the trend to community-based work now increasingly found in business and government applications. Such applications are increasingly complex because of their continuing need to adapt to a changing environment. The chapter proposes that one way to manage complexity is to focus on relationships and provide ways to systematically manage change by managing the impact of change to one relationship on others. The perspectives improve understanding of the system by identifying the need for change from one perspective and seeing the impact on others. Change can then be initiated from any perspective using a model based on that perspective. The impact of the change can then be seen through the relationship of the change in one perspective on relationships throughout the system. It then proposes an open modelling approach to model relationships from different perspectives including activity, social structure, knowledge and organization and allows users to focus on the perspective using one model and trace its impact on other models.

This chapter presents a background in cognitive processes such as problem-solving and analogical reasoning for considering modelling from an object-oriented perspective within the domain of requirements engineering. This chapter then describes a research project and the findings from a set of four cases which examine professional practice from perspective of cognitive modelling for object-oriented requirements engineering. In these studies, it was found that the analysts routinely built models in their minds and refined them before committing them to paper or communicating these models to others. The studies also showed that object-oriented analysts depend on analogical reasoning where they use past experience and abstraction to address problems in requirements specification.

This chapter describes the development of a prototype knowledge discovery portal (KDP) for energy informatics. The research domain is Ireland which is increasingly challenged to achieve energy efficiency targets and to implement renewable energy systems (RES). The reason for undertaking this research is to provide a mechanism to disseminate information on energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies to a number of sectors: community, educational, industrial and research. The prototype KDP was developed using design-science methodology. This chapter integrates information both in the horizontal and vertical axes. In the horizontal plane, it provides information to community users, educational bodies and industrial companies. In the vertical plane, it allows deeper access depending on the requirements of the user: from technological overviews to detailed data from the energy system (solar collectors, heat pump and wind turbine). Future work will involve further development of the portal and extending the KDP for energy to other technologies and sectors.

We present an interpretive case study of web development in one particular organisation, the Gem Company, using qualitative data. The study explores how the social and organisational context influenced the design of the Gem Company’s website and the employees’ differing perceptions about appropriate technical work practices and the resulting effectiveness of the website. It shows how one group of employees’ shared meanings and assumptions about both the product and information systems development (ISD) process became embedded in the company’s website, leading to conflict with another group of employees which shared different meanings and assumptions. This chapter’s contribution is a rich, interpretive case study which adopts a socio-technical perspective to propose an explanation for the conflicts we observed, which is potentially transferable to other ISD situations.

Distributed agile development (DAD) projects require effective governance mechanisms to address challenges such as coordination, communication, culture, and technology as well as maintaining the agility of the project in order to enhance project outcome. Such effective governance requires having formal and social mechanisms to control as well as facilitate coordination in DAD projects. However, the coexistence of formal and social governance mechanisms in the system raises a paradox that makes applying such governance framework challenging. This study aims to investigate and explore potential benefits and challenges of adopting formal and social governance mechanisms in DAD projects. The scarce literature on real industrial case studies reporting on experiences of using effective governance in DAD projects makes this study to research in companies involve in DAD projects.

The structure and dynamics of a modern business environment are very hard to model using traditional methods. Such complexity raises challenges to effective business analysis and improvement. The importance of applying business process simulation to analyse and improve business activities has been widely recognised. However, one remaining challenge is the development of approaches to human resource behaviour simulation. To address this problem, we describe a novel simulation approach where intelligent agents are used to simulate human resources by performing allocated work from a workflow management system. The behaviour of the intelligent agents is driven a by state transition mechanism called a hierarchical task network (HTN). We demonstrate and validate our simulator via a medical treatment process case study. Analysis of the simulation results shows that the behaviour driven by the HTN is consistent with design of the workflow model. We believe these preliminary results support the development of more sophisticated agent-based human resource simulation systems.

Teaching and learning rely on assessments. They help to measure performance and to keep track of learning success. Manual assessments are very time-consuming for teaching personnel. Therefore, e-learning and in particular e-assessment systems are introduced by higher education institutions to reduce recurrent work. Currently, available systems offer assessment with simple examinations only and do not support tasks that require higher-order cognitive skills (Heywood 2000) to be solved.

Currently, the object-oriented (OO) paradigm is the most common approach for modeling software systems. This includes object-oriented programming languages, methods, and modeling languages. Among all OO notations, UML (OMG 2010a) is the most used one, despite the many well-known issues observed both in theory and practice, such as ambiguity (Beneken et al. 2003) and lack of defined semantics (André et al. 2007, Dobing and Parsons 2006).

Conceptual modelling is a key skill in IS design. It requires substantial expertise, which is largely restricted to IT professionals. Nevertheless, many systems are developed by or with nonexpert modellers, including end users who use products such as FileMaker and Microsoft Access. The results are often disappointing, in part, because of poor modelling. Training would help, but there is also a case for making modelling easier. In this study, ideas from psychology were applied with the goal of making the modelling process easier for nonexperts, particularly by using more understandable model representations. The resulting guidelines can help in formulating modelling techniques for use by nonexperts.

The agile approach to software development is now standard practice in many organizations. In innovation diffusion terms, its uptake seems to be well into the majority adoption phase, with a large number of organizations now claiming some level of agile activity. Confirming adoption progress requires appropriate periodic surveys of industrial practice. The purpose of this chapter is to present and comment on the results from such a survey, performed in Northern Ireland in 2010, with 37 software development companies. The work is distinctive in aiming to provide comprehensive coverage of the region. This chapter describes the design of the survey and comments on the insights it has provided. The results show that approximately 50 % of companies are now running agile projects routinely, with over 80 % of those using Scrum as their agile framework. The wider extrapolation of the results is also discussed.

Many information system developers face high cost in adopting service-oriented architectures because of the high cost of locating appropriate services to customise and integrate into their system. This chapter aims at reducing this cost by automating much of the composition and service selection effort. It illustrates the use of a peer-to-peer multi-agent system (MAS) to facilitate service selection with multiple quality of service properties. The system will use semantic enrichment of services in order to facilitate their identification and composition. With semantic-driven composition, services can be shared between teams of developers and across multiple organisations connected via the Internet. In this chapter, we focus on a conceptual framework for peer selection with a preliminary mathematical model and a selection process, so as to enhance the P2P-based service coordination system and its components.

This chapter focuses on two initiatives that are capable of bringing business benefits to small companies, that is, enterprise architecture and software process improvement. More importantly, utilisation of synergy of both approaches is proposed. Firstly, the role of enterprise architecture and current status of its adoption worldwide and also in the Czech Republic is stated. Then TOGAF, the most accepted EA framework recommended by the author for use in small companies, is briefly described. Furthermore, the ISO/IEC 29110 standard “Lifecycle Profiles for Very Small Entities” is presented as an example of software process improvement initiatives focused on small companies. The main contribution of this chapter consists in outlining the relationships of enterprise architecture and software process improvement and proposing EA framework for SMEs.

One of the most important aspects of IT service management (ITSM) and government is configuration management, more specifically, within ITIL framework. It is considered as a basic process as it gathers, manages, and links vital information to the rest of the processes. The key to implement this process is the configuration management database (CMDB). However, commercial tools that implement CMDB are always oriented to large organizations; they are not flexible and difficult to adapt to small companies or to those that need a major flexibility in its service management. In this chapter, we present a simple, comprehensive, versatile meta model, based on business services, from which you can generate CMDB models adaptable to the needs of both small and large organizations and those that need greater flexibility in managing their services.

Nowadays, there are many and different model-driven Web methodologies which are being applied with success in real environments. However, as new ones are frequently appearing in this changing time, methodology designers have to change and update them constantly. Furthermore, concepts and terminology are different in many cases, and the need of quality assessment of this type of methodologies arises every day. QuEF (quality evaluation framework) is a framework that helps to analyse, control and evaluate the quality of model-driven Web methodologies in order to control them and make quality continuous improvements. This chapter describes a tool support useful to implement QuEF.

IT service management (ITSM) was established based on modern international standards such as ISO/IEC 20000 and ITIL. One objective of good management of IT services must be to

provide adequate quality management

. Currently the application of appropriate models for government and IT management is one of the priorities in the area of IT in organizations, and in this sense, the use of action frameworks, for example, ITIL, is essential. In its implementation it is necessary to consider, among other things, improving the quality of the processes that must be measured not only with tools or methodologies own IT but also with those used in the organization in order to measure processes in general. But how, exactly, do you measure fitness for use or purpose? In this sense, this chapter addresses the measurement of quality of processes in the implementation of ITIL in an organization using the EFQM model, in order, first, to make a proper correlation of ITIL processes and criteria EFQM and, second, to explore possible deployment scenarios that maximize the results of evaluations conducted by EFQM.

The recent years of rapid development of mobile technologies create opportunities for new user groups in the mobile workforce to take advantage of information systems (IS). However, to apprehend and harness these opportunities for mobile IS, it is crucial to fully understand the user group and the mobile technology. In this chapter, we deductively, from previous research on aspects on mobility, synthesize a tentative analytical framework capturing factors accentuated in mobile IS design. We evaluate the framework based on criteria of completeness, distinctiveness and simplicity. Eventually, these two steps develop the framework towards a theoretical contribution as theory for describing handheld computing from a designer’s perspective. Thirteen semi-structured interviews were made and the tentative framework was elaborated and confirmed.

Incomplete or inefficient elicitation, comprehension and transmission of client requirements are all sources of information system (IS) failure rates. Requirements may be missed, misunderstood or miscommunicated for the lack of a single, consistent, informing theory. Structured requirements elicitations techniques impose time delays. Cursory techniques can fail to reach any mutual understanding with the stakeholder. Formal methods can fail to cope with non-functional requirements and coder-oriented methods can put the cart before the horse, delivering something other than required. Agile methods can deliver hasty product, cobbled to meet first-cut requirements, perhaps justified by a notion that users

cannot

reach stable conclusions.

This chapter introduces the Activity Theoretic Software Architecture (ATSA) method (formerly known under the working title ‘5S’), which deploys Activity Theory (AT) as it’s informing theoretical framework to address complex human ‘doings’ in a non-burdensome way, to elicit requirements and generate feasible specifications with some confidence as to fidelity and consensual agreement.

Dominance of relational DBMS technology is being challenged by rapidly advancing requirements of new types of applications that need to manage massive amounts of complex data. The latest challenge is to provide effective data management for cloud computing environments. A number of non-relational data stores have been implemented and deployed to run over thousands of commodity servers and to process petabytes of data. Proponents of the NoSQL movement argue that relational databases are being superseded by more advanced database technology designed to take advantage of cloud infrastructure. In this chapter, we give a balanced discussion of the relative advantages and drawbacks of RDBMS systems and NoSQL data stores and describe research efforts to extend the relational databases so that they can operate effectively on cloud infrastructure.

Agility has increased in popularity in software development. It is believed to reduce time to market, improve product quality, and increase customer value. After some years from adoption, organizations start questioning how they are doing in the application of agile values, principles, and practices. Have they really obtained the benefits the agile approach promises? How could they improve their agile processes? For these kinds of situations, several agile maturity models have been suggested. This chapter makes a comparative analysis of eight agile maturity models, based on criteria such as purpose, domain, conceptual and theoretical backgrounds, approach, structure, use, and validation. We also discuss how the models could be further developed.

Enterprise applications are used to execute business processes. Users usually have some degree of freedom to select a process execution variant most suited for her/his needs. This chapter develops a simulation model for representing adaptive enterprise applications, where adaptation is aimed at discovering the most efficient ways for business process execution. The simulation model uses process execution productivity as the adaptation criterion. The results obtained show that adaptation allows users to identify the most productive ways for process execution and that the most appropriate process execution configuration depends upon process characteristics. The simulation model is to be used to evaluate alternative solutions for improving productivity of enterprise applications.

Getting meaningful information from empirical data is a challenging task in software engineering (SE). It requires an in-depth analysis of the research problem, the data obtained and to select the most suitable data analysis methods, as well as an evaluation of the validity of the analysis result. This chapter reports research with three data analysis methods that were used to analyze a set of empirical requirements techniques data. One of the major findings is that it is possible to get better analysis results if several data analysis methods are combined. The way to examine the validity of the results is also explored.

Business analysts, software engineers and indeed anybody concerned in any way with the software development process refer to models in documents and conversations with colleagues. Often the nature of the conversation will be to make assertions about the model which they deem capable of being true or false. For example, it is not uncommon for an analyst to refer to a symbol on a diagram and state, ‘this is external to the system’ or even refer to another symbol and say, ‘this is the system’. Such statements do not appear to cause the analyst any pause for thought, and more often than not, this shared linguistic practice does not present problems and will likely be the basis of a successful conversation.

Metamodeling systems are used to facilitate development of modeling systems. Each metamodeling system provides a metamodeling language that is used to specify modeling languages. The abstract syntax of a metamodeling language can be specified by using a meta-metamodel. In this chapter, we discuss how to perform ontological analysis of metamodeling languages by using a foundational ontology. We investigate whether the results of the analysis give language designers sufficient information to improve the quality of metamodeling languages. As an experiment, we analyze two metamodeling languages based on the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) and suggest how to improve one of the metamodeling languages.

The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) (Bray et al. 2008) is currently one of the most popular meta-formats for data representation on the Web. To enable data exchange, it is crucial to restrict structure of the exchanged XML documents by a set of rules, so that each communicating party is able to understand them. This restriction is achieved via XML schemas.

Static structure, processes and other aspect models give the details of different concerns of information system (IS). This is one of the reasons of model consistency conflicts. Consistency issue is very important for IS design, model transformation and, finally, code generation tasks. In order to improve ensuring consistency of IS model, expressed in UML, in design phase, the method of checking consistency of IS model is proposed. The method is based on rules among different aspect models and one aspect model defined for metamodel.

This chapter is aimed on the data flow diagram and its contribution to the process of an information system development. This chapter places this tool in the context of other substantial views on the information system and recovers its substance – conceptual view on the information system functionality. Besides the Business System Conceptual Model which describes the existential aspects and the Business Process Model describing the behavioural aspects, the IS Functional Model represents the third main dimensions of the information system – the dimension of existential aspects of the information system functionality.

This chapter 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 chapter 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 (1) considering ES vendor challenges, (2) exploring contradictions in the chartering phase, and (3) understanding contradictions in the project phase. This chapter 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.

Requirements are the heart of Information Systems Development and represent major failure reasons of these projects, especially if its social nature is admitted. In this chapter we present recent trends of research original from social sciences and propose a web-based focus group method to overcome many of the well-known problems. This method is well suited to the requirements elicitation problem because it promotes collaboration and consensual resolution of incoming conflicts. The proposal was evaluated with two real-world experiments whose results reveal the potential of the method. In fact, results demonstrate that dominant users are avoided and limitations of gathering people at the same place and time are eliminated.

A business process consists of a set of activities that are performed in coordination in an organizational and technical environment (Weske 2007). The base of business process management systems (BPMS) is the explicit representation of business processes with their activities and the execution constraints between them. Compliance rules represent a natural step to include requirements between business functionality and data. For the design of a whole business process management (van der Aalst et al. 2003), it is necessary to design the model of activities and define the causal and temporal relationships between them (Walzer et al. 2008). Compliance rules can help to complete this information, since they can be used to validate business data (Chesani et al. 2008).

This chapter is concerned with understanding the complex nature of service network environments with particular attention on exploring business transactions across supply chains. Although business transactions have been traditionally well documented throughout literature, what becomes apparent is that these approaches fail to capture the dynamic complexity of modern service supply chains. To address the problem, this chapter introduces a method to model supply chain behaviour which is of particular interest at the network design time and offers a conceptual view of extracting network analysis and process metrics. We introduce a business transaction language (BTL) to gain insight into the business transactions while we also explore the application of social network analysis (SNA) to model the dynamism of service networks. In doing so, the research sets out to generate greater service network intelligence and extend the service network ontology while visualising the transactional interaction landscape.

Price promotions (also called discount promotions), i.e. short-term temporary price reductions for selected items (Hermann 1989), are frequently used in sales promotions. The main objective of price promotions is to boost sales and increase profits. Quantitative evaluation of the effects of price promotions (QEEPP) is essential and important for sales managers to analyse historical price promotions and informative for devising more effective promotional strategies in the future. However, most previous studies only provide insights into the effects of discount promotions from some specific prospectives, and no approaches have been proposed for comprehensive evaluation of the effects of discount promotions. For example, Hinkle [1965] discovered that price promotions in the off-season are more favourable, and the effects of price promotions are stronger for new products. Peckham [1973] found that price promotions have no impact on long-term trend. Blattberg et al. [1978] identified that different segments respond to price promotions in different ways. Rockney [1991] discovered three basic types of effects: effects on discounted items, effects on substitutes and effects on complementary items.

The term ambient intelligence (AmI) is still a vision of the future of consumer electronics in which the computational power is embedded in everyday appliances and physical objects to turn environments into sensitive places able to understand users’ needs and to automate their daily tasks (Weiser 1995). In the context of AmI, task automation is central and raises many challenges since the system must adapt to each individual’s specific needs. These challenges become even more critical when the domain is characterized by the presence of many actors, every one owning different institutional roles, responsibilities, skills, and motivations (Cook et al. 2003). In addition, since users’ preferences may change in time, it is also important that the developed system provides evolution facilities for adapting to new requirements; otherwise, the system may become useless, obsolete, or perceived as intrusive by final users. It is therefore of paramount importance to use requirements engineering techniques for the analysis of users’ needs and for involving users to participate in design and development choices (Rolland and Salinesi 2009, Van Lamsweerde 2003).

Modern information system development faces the problem that applications may have to run on a large number of platforms with vastly different capabilities and resources, often ranging from mobile devices to desktop computers and further. This is particularly true of information systems based on object database technologies which nowadays are used at both ends of the spectrum with embedded systems as well as massive scientific databases among their target domains.

This research reports on a longitudinal field study focusing on the implementation process of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) in a public institution of Norway. Findings illustrate how the organization gradually breaks down technical and organizational silos by creating a cross-silo mindset among the employees in the organization and the system developers in particular. We describe how the organization under study achieves integration by transforming organizational structure and system development practices and by introducing governance principles. We argue that a SOA program as such is a complex, risky, and enterprise-wide initiative, which requires a technochange management approach.

The process of information systems development (ISD) has been studied before to enhance generated information systems. It has been recognised recently that the use of knowledge management (KM) methodologies in ISD, so-called knowledge-based information systems (KIS), supports the acquisition and representation of knowledge, both from application domains and development processes. This is important when huge amounts of data from application domains require processing and massive knowledge is buried in the processes. A particular example of this problem lies in the wind industry, where offshore wind farms collect a massive amount of data, yet there is a lack of knowledge about the processes generating the data, which is overwhelming operators. However, there is a gap between KM and ISD, which still needs to be closed.

This chapter will attempt to bridge this gap in a step-by-step manner to analyse information to create knowledge in the following way.

Firstly, within the framework, we consider an organisation as a complex intelligent agent to handle internal and external information.

Secondly, we consider how the KM methods can be integrated with ISD, through those intelligent agents or multi-agents, to handle the domain and process knowledge.

Finally, we define a conceptual model of a KIS to support the ISD to derive enterprise-wide knowledge, experience and decision-making in a data-intensive and complex wind farm management. We develop a prototype KIS model and implement it on working wind farm data to evaluate and validate the proposed approach.

For many business organizations, Web sites are an important tool for attracting new customers or to advertise or sell their products and services. Therefore, any problems in Web site usability can directly influence a company’s bottom line. Nevertheless, despite this importance, examples of poorly designed Web pages abound, and often, such poor design is blamed on not having paid attention to thorough usability testing. Whereas even a few tests are better than none at all, especially smaller organizations lack the resources to perform multiple rounds of in-depth user studies. Recently, crowdsourcing has become a popular way of recruiting an on-demand workforce for a variety of tasks. Our study demonstrates how crowdsourcing can be used as a relatively easy and inexpensive way to recruit participants for usability tests and suggests ways to overcome the lacking possibility to observe participants during the testing process. Further, we demonstrate that the crowds were able to detect at least as many usability problems as experts asked to evaluate the same sites.

Although a lot of effort is invested in describing software processes of high standard, the application of the documented processes in practice is often insufficient. One reason is the use of process definition languages which are not familiar to software developing practitioners. The modelling language UML on the other hand is intensively used in software development. This chapter describes the outcome of an analysis of Siemens AG regarding the suitability of UML 2.0 for describing Siemens software processes.

Most large-scale service delivery settings involve complex collections of interdependent services. The services of interest, in this context, could be web services or business services – much of the discussion below applies in either case. Consider the services that would be offered by an airport (the focus in this example being on business services), such as passenger check-in, baggage handling, passenger security screening, customs, cargo handling, food courts, lounges, aircraft refelling, aircraft maintenance and air traffic control (to name just a few). There are several aspects of service delivery settings such as these that make it necessary to define specialized machinery to support the design and redesign of service collections. First, the number, scale and complexity of the services on offer are large. Second, most of these services are interdependent (both in terms of design and execution).

The composition of web services is a promising approach enabling flexible and loose integration of business applications. Numerous approaches related to web services composition have been developed usually following three main phases: the

service discovery

is based on the semantic description of advertised services, that is, the functionality of the service, meanwhile the

service selection

is based on nonfunctional quality dimensions of service, and finally, the

service composition

aims to support an underlying process. Most of those approaches explore techniques of static or dynamic design for an optimal service composition. One important aspect so far is mostly neglected, focusing on the output produced of composite web services. In this chapter, in contrast to many prominent approaches, we introduce a data quality perspective on web services. Based on a data quality management approach, we propose a framework for analyzing data produced by the composite service execution. Utilizing process information together with data in service logs, our approach allows identifying problems in service composition and execution. Analyzing the service execution history, our approach helps to improve common approaches of service selection and composition.

There is a fundamental contradiction between the requirements of offshore outsourcing and the use of agile methods in IS development. While agile methods call for extensive, frequent interaction between client and developer, outsourcing unavoidably hinders this interaction on several levels. Research to date has not specifically addressed this mismatch; the issue is either dismissed as less important or skirted by assuming the existence of an onshore team to conveniently collaborate with the client. There is no doubt that some nominally agile offshore projects can be conducted successfully without the usual level of client interaction, and in others the permanent presence of an onshore team is feasible; anecdotal experience reports describe such projects. However, in the general case of agile offshore development, client collaboration is central, and this issue cannot be avoided. This chapter examines the nature of the mismatch between agility and offshore outsourcing with regard to client collaboration. The aim is to expose the underlying issues with clarity, to assist in further research designed to formulate improved ways of addressing the client collaboration gap in agile offshore projects.

Three different phenomena, data, information, and knowledge, are relevant in business process modeling. However, business process modeling notations currently do not provide an opportunity to clearly distinguish between them. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze the existing notations to learn from their capabilities and drawbacks in order to arrive at modeling tools that can clearly distinguish between data, information, and knowledge.

Great number of publicly accessible and available Web services is found on the Web through Web sites, repositories or catalogues managed directly by service providers. Recent surveys proved that those services are poorly documented or annotated with semantic information. Consequently, using those services is still quite a challenge. Besides, reusability is a tenet of SOA implementation that can bring interesting return on investment. We would like to tackle the issue of public Web service reusability by allowing their end users to socialize them based on their usage experiences. We then propose a mechanism to express this socialization process and exploit resulting data to promote the reuse (usage, discovery, selection, recommendation and composition) of public Web services, in a supporting system.

System design and development initiatives are mostly ill-structured strategic collaborative decision-making situations, with outcomes that rely on the rich contextual knowledge that each has. Despite the cooperation and collaboration among the agents who are involved in such situations, these agents still have to satisfy different and most likely conflicting strategic goals and constraints (internal and external) that they have. In most cases, the agents adopt an option (set of requirements, design, architecture) that considers only the needs and realities of few agents and ignore or suppress others’ needs and realities. This leaves many collaborative strategic software implementation initiatives fail or be challenged (see the CHAOS reports by the Standish group, e.g.). In such initiatives, the agents’ preferences are usually not clear, or hard to validate, and that agents’ options/moves are hard to completely capture. Nevertheless, most dominant modeling and analysis tools, such as decision and game theoretic methods, assume predetermined agents’ preferences, or utility functions, and predetermined set of alternatives to evaluate. This leads to a lack of applicability of such models to model and analyze real-life strategic conflicts (Keeney 1992, Raiffa et al. 2002).

Today in the Information era, business’ communication with their customers strongly depends on how quickly, responsively and accurately a business is able to respond to customers’ queries, needs and demands. Conducted case study analysis of five small to medium enterprises (SMEs) identifies that SMEs require a system that would allow them to keep a record of their customer contact details; monitor communications they have with their customers about orders, products and services offered; and track and act upon customers’ queries and feedback so that they can maintain a strong link with past customers and through these data develop knowledge about how best to market to the new ones. Based on the analysis of the SMEs requirements and the data available about the existing customer relationship management (CRM) systems, we have developed a prototype SME–CRM.

Low-cost carriers (LCCs) market their flights as low cost and, so, aim to garner as much additional revenue as possible from ancillary services such as baggage and priority boarding. The airlines therefore encourage purchase of these services by their customers. As a result of this and other practices by airlines, the European Union has introduced legislation to deal with various areas of concern in order to protect the consumer. Airlines have responded to the legal requirement that all optional extras should only presented to the consumer on an ‘opt-in’ basis by using ‘grey’ Web design patterns such as the ‘must-opt’ presentation of optional extras, whereby the user must choose to accept or reject the item before continuing with the interaction. This study examines user perceptions of the level of compliance of two airlines with the relevant European legislation.

Local health integration networks (LHIN) are not-for-profit organisations created by the Ontario government in 2006 for planning, identifying, integrating, and funding health services and priority programmes for their regions. This chapter discusses an information systems development initiative in 1 of the 14 LHINs with the objective of facilitating healthcare service navigation by users. These healthcare services are provided by 88 member agencies of the LHIN consisting of hospitals, long-term centres, assisted living services, community support services, community care access centres, mental health agencies, addiction agencies, and community health centres. Using the proposed service-oriented architecture for the LHIN as a basis of our framework, we suggest an ontology-based requirements elicitation model for developing an automated and interactive tool capable of supporting automatic service discovery, automatic service composition, and dynamic composition.

Numerous studies over the years have shown that information systems development (ISD) projects often run over budget or fail entirely. Such failures are not restricted to certain industry sectors or project types; rather they occur with some regularity in systems development projects and organisations of all types and sizes. Cost estimation has long been a difficult task in systems development, and although much research has focused on traditional methods, little is known about estimation in the agile method arena. This is somewhat ironic given that the reduction of cost and development time is the driving force behind the emergence of agile methods. This study looks at how classical problems which adversely affect cost estimation in traditional ISD are managed within the agile paradigm. A qualitative approach was followed, based on data collected from four companies. Amongst other findings, the study revealed that estimation inaccuracy was a less frequent occurrence for these companies. A number of recommendations can be drawn from the research: estimation models are not a necessary component of the process; fixed-price budgets can prove beneficial for both developers and customers; and experience and past project data should be documented and used to aid future estimation efforts.