Information Systems: People, Organizations, Institutions, and Technologies

The aim of this work is to delineate a possible reading in terms of the expansion and evolution of business-client relationships and to analyse the role played in these relationships by IT. The analysis will be conducted in relation to a specific sector, financial brokerage, and, within that, the principal player, the bank itself. This paper brings theory and practice together by synthesising the existing literature with real-life experience of an Italian bank.

In this article, we empirically investigate customer’s involvement in the new development of e-services within research libraries. Our conclusion is that the main roles that customers have in library e-services innovation and new development are customers as resources and as users; the library found it challenging to motivate the customers to become co-creators of e-services as for example in online review services.

New model for successful urban organization in the global age is emerging. Municipalities can survive the increasingly intense global competition by the local political arrangement, but how? The electronic dialogue between Public Administrations, citizens and enterprises represents the key element for the development of the public sector. This interactive communication is able to carry out a sharing of information and knowledge that is both an instrument and the main task for Municipalities in the Digital Era. The e-government is a complex and multidimensional issue. Cities of the Future will be built along “information highways”. These smart communities – in which each individual is part of the whole – promote the context for our lives and the fabric of our existence. If technology is a tool of transformation, e-government is a way to fulfill the conditions of good governance. The electronic government is not just ICT: it also includes rules and procedures, because the public administration cannot innovate without a normative drive. So it must operate under the Rule of Law, protecting general principles such as equality, administrative transparency, rights protection for all citizens. Democratic legal systems have to foster and promote civil and political rights also in the scenario of “electronic cities”. Technology has opened up domains of information which only some years ago were unthinkable, and everyone – including people who are disadvantaged due to limited re-sources or education, age, disabilities – should be able to enjoy the related benefits.

The focus of this paper is to provide a perspective on the next-generation of e-government services, by exploring what citizen needs are currently not covered and describe how these needs can be accounted for. We first describe certain e-government citizen adoption models, widely considered as the basis of development of the current generation of e-government services. Survey results are also presented, highlighting the level of user satisfaction relevant to the usage of such services. We then focus on certain new realities that affect adoption and further development of e-government services and describe how these realities can be addressed by a new service development model. The main properties of this model are presented and its differentiating characteristics are analyzed, from a systems theory perspective.

This article focuses on the case study of the web sites of the Italian regional governments who have agreed to take part in the DE.CI.DI. project which aims put into practice e-democracy in provincial Public Administration. We have assessed the level of e-democracy developments based on four different dimensions: transparency and interactivity. We conclude that the spreading use of Internet has raised expectations that it may be used to encourage a more direct citizen engagement and modify the ways in which public decisions are taken, however those expectations have not been fully met yet.

This paper perceives e-government evaluation as a field of social research where interdisciplinary inputs can enlighten not only the results, but also the process of implementing the e-services. Drawing on contributions from organization theory, we propose an interpretive key that assigns a dual role to e-government evaluation: valuable cognitive resource and tool of accountability for the policymakers. The preliminary reflections offered here, based on an exploratory case study, aim to provide further insights for the academic e-government community as a whole and help better inform public management praxis.

As e-service becomes increasingly pervasive in modern public organizations management, its influence on organization and individual preferences and competences is hard to ignore. This work addresses this issue by analyzing the different dimensions of the design and implementation of an e-service. It reviews the impacts on the integration of competences and preferences of the different stakeholders and organizations involved. The focus of the case study is a pioneering e-service initiative of the University of Catania known as the Spider Card.

Although electronic invoicing is considered one of the most promising instruments to improve the efficiency of economic systems, in Europe it has not yet achieved significant adoption rates, especially among Small and Medium Enterprises. The reasons for this missed diffusion have been largely discussed in the literature. In particular it has been stated that the penetration of e-invoicing among SMEs needs the cooperation of specialised Service Providers. The theme has gained relevance also in a Public Policy perspective: advanced e-solutions in the B2G context (e-Government high impact services) should enable a further propagation of similar innovations in the B2B context. Legislation-based approaches are often used in order to obtain a critical mass of users in a short time.This paper aims at achieving a deeper understanding on whether juridically enforcing the adoption of procedures, which have not achieved an established consensus under “normal” circumstances, can be considered a winning and legitimate strategy. This will help establishing a revised framework for further empirical research.

This paper sets the basis for a research project focused on collaborative social network’s genesis and dynamics. It introduces a research framework for the empirical investigation of a network focused on the design of a shared artifact, the so-called “Web services architecture.” Our hypothesis is that network artifact’s characteristics, seen as the final outcome of a collaborative process, influence and drive the genesis and the structure of the social network that is designing it. We embraced this view in order to avoid a limitation of the traditional perspectives that consider the network structure as exogenous and stable. Instead, in our perspective, we consider the reciprocal influence between the artifact and the social network structure, with a phase in which the desired artifact may shape the network genesis and a phase in which the emergent network’s structure may drive the artifact design.

The partnerships between research, public administration and ICT industry are considered the main ways to enhance development and competitiveness, but often they involve several organizations, stakeholders and actors. Groupware systems can support collaborative activities using the technology to assist group processes such as information sharing, problem solving, documents editing, decision making, planning, scheduling, etc. We have to understand more about collaborative processes in public administrations to enhance contacts and communication between experts, competence and research centers. So we have to define a model for CSCW governance in order to identify and introduce technological innovations in multi-organizational and highly innovative contexts and, afterwards, disseminate the best practices.

Business Process Modelling is a much-researched field as it concerns the need to analyse and improve business process. The topic of BPM is particularly timing given the need for clarifying process structures and their improvements in the context of SOA, the service oriented architecture. However not much emphasis has been placed on the relationships among BPM methodologies, techniques and tools. In this work we propose a framework in which these three BPM elements are positioned within the cyclical process of continuous improvement. This framework suggests the adoption of different BPM techniques depending on the objective to be reached: the IT industry has developed flexible and dynamic tools for process modelling called “Business Process Management Suites” (BPMs), they are composed of different tools and adopt different methodologies and techniques for supporting all the phases of the continuous improvement.

Despite the exponential growth of information systems for supporting public administration requirements, we are still far from a complete automatic e-government system. In particular, there exists the need of automatic or semi-automatic procedures for the whole flow of digital documents management, in particular regarding: (1) automatic information extraction from digital documents; (2) semantic interpretation (3) storing; (4) long term preservation and (5) retrieval of the extracted information. In addition, in the last few years the textual information has been enriched with multimedia data, having heterogeneous formats and semantics. In this framework, it’s the author’s opinion that an effective E-Government information system should provide tools and techniques for multimedia information, in order to manage both the multimedia content of a bureaucratic document and the presentation constraints that are usually associated to such document management systems. In this paper, we will describe a novel system that exploits both textual and image processing techniques, in order to automatically infer knowledge from multimedia data, thus simplifying the indexing and retrieval tasks. A prototypal version of the system has been developed and some preliminary experimental results have been carried out, demonstrating the efficacy in real application contexts.

Open Source software is becoming very common in many business activities. In particular, the software development sector can take advantage from this development model and modifying the way software is produced and commercialized. The worldwide rising interest in Open Source is pushing companies to use and produce it. Some companies have to use it because the market requires it; others invest in this sector because they perceive it as a potential profitable area. Therefore, even with a free exchange of source code and/or the free availability of a program on the web, a company has the possibility to compete in the market and make money. With the growth of Open Source, market niches came up, new strategic areas have been found and new business models are emerging. Such models are creating new possibilities to offer products and services to customers, thus to generate revenue. We conducted an empirical study to investigate the current situation related to Open Source in 14 small software companies. The main research question was how much the Open Source model has been applied inside a company and how they behave in their market.

Recent studies have affirmed the necessity of a discontinuity in the method of investigating the value produced in organisations by IT. Existing studies have in common a prevailing (when not exclusive) attention paid to the private sector, as testified by the frequent use of income or financial indicators to measure benefits. These approaches however cannot be directly applied to public utility organisations like Public Administrations. Taking into account this scenario, the present exploratory work looks at the analysis of IT investments in the public sector by identifying a viable approach to research in this domain. To move towards this objective, procurement management has been taken as the field to be observed, and an Italian public Local Healthcare Agency which has managed several e-procurement projects has been analysed. This case represents a valuable context for examination and discussion because the outcomes of each project were evaluated in detail. A rich IT Value Model devoted to the private sector has been adopted and discussed, and later some resulting adaptations are suggested, together with some hints and limitations.

Organisations are facing an incredibly increasing amount of content to be efficiently captured, organised and archived. As a result, Enterprise Content Management (ECM) has emerged as a top business priority during the past years. However, only a few academic reports present common guidelines for evaluating and justifying the choice for a certain ECM solution in terms of economic benefits. This paper is based on the perception that such guidelines particularly should take an organisation’s business process structure into account, since an ECM adoption causes significant changes in work procedures. Consequently, we consider an established business process-oriented framework for profitability analysis of IS and apply it to the context of ECM. An application example serves as an illustration of the concept.

The adoption of Open Source in industrial applications has increased in the last years. In this context the need to provide answers to high levels of Maintenance arises. Therefore it is critical to select Open Sources components to be integrated in a software system according to their Maintenance characteristics. The work presents a Metric Model and its related Decision Model for OS Governance and in particular for selecting OSs according to their Maintenance Level. The Metric Model was obtained individuating some automatically calculable measures from a group of projects available on the Web. The measures were validated on several OSs used in industrial projects. The results are of interest and encourage future research.

The work proposes an approach based on the use of Knowledge Per­formance Indicators and Knowledge Experience Base aiming to support and correlate KG and KP activities. The proposed approach has been adopted in the SERLab laboratory for transferring innovations from academic to industrial contexts. The preliminary results are described and discussed. The proposed framework needs to be further validated in industrial context in the way to test and to improve it.

Preserving data privacy is becoming an urgent issue to cope with. Among different technologies, the techniques of perturbation and data swapping offer many advantages, even if preliminary investigations suggest that they could deteriorate the usefulness of data. We defined a set of metrics for evaluating this drawback and carried out a case study in order to understand to which extent it is possible to enforce data security, and thus protect sensitive information, without degrading usefulness of data under unacceptable thresholds.

A transaction is a bilateral exchange between two parties in which goods are delivered in return for payment. In virtual enterprise environments, transactions are the principal means of collaboration among the enterprise members, as well as the mechanism with which the enterprise provides its products to its external clients. In this paper we examine the concept of transactions in virtual enterprises. We define transactions as recursive processes (similar to supply chains), and we formalize the concept of transaction cost. We then examine transaction failure and transaction risk, which lead us to the concept of transaction expected loss. The overall goal is to allow enterprise members to launch those transactions that minimize their expected losses. We also discuss how initiating redundant transactions can further reduce expected losses.

The Semantic Web is an extension of the traditional Web aimed at facilitating information and knowledge sharing. In this context, RDF has been conceived as a means for a simple representation of any kind of data and metadata, according to a graph-based, lightweight model and a straight XML serialization. Although RDF has the advantage of being general and easy to use, it cannot be adopted as a storage model, since it can be easily shown that even simple data management operations yield serious performance problems. In this paper, we present a novel approach for storing, managing and processing RDF data in an effective and efficient way. The approach is based on a logical organization that is particularly suited for RDF constructs, but it can be easily extended to other RDF-based languages, such as OWL.

In this paper, we present iCoord, a reference architecture for knowledge coordination in open, multi-knowledge information systems. iCoord is a peer-oriented architecture where each node represents a single agent (e.g., an enterprise, a peer) which performs knowledge design as a consequence of or in order to collaborate/interoperate with other external partners for knowledge sharing. A key aspect of iCoord is the capability to support knowledge design not only with the traditional “from scratch” approach, but also by enforcing (re)use through alignment and/or assimilation of externally harvested knowledge chunks.

Collaboration in distributed systems have experienced more and more interest over the time. Traditional distributed systems are featured by resource sharing among a fixed/limited number of different partners, with a-priori knowledge about each other, mainly obtained through mediator-based architectures. Recently, the collaboration paradigm evolved towards collaborative P2P distributed systems, with an increased number of enterprises, acting as peers on the network, looking for possible partners that can provide relevant knowledge in a given domain, without a-priori knowledge about each other. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive framework for networked collaboration in P2P environments based on service sharing and discovery. In particular, we consider two meaningful scenarios in which peers search for other peers providing similar or additional functionalities and discuss a framework that supports these scenarios.

Data mining has proved to be a valuable tool in discovering non-obvious information from a large collection of data, however in the business world is not as widely used as it could be. Common reasons include the following: (1) Data mining process requires an unbounded rationality; (2) potential end users may not be available to inform developers on what problems they are interested in or what their requirements might be; (3) high costs in the use of dating mining experts; (4) the actual result of data mining may be irrelevant or simply cannot be used. The paper presents a methodology and a system to facilitate the use of data mining in business contexts using the following approach: many models are automatically generated and stored in a database; when the end users specify some features of the model they are looking for, a search engine then retrieves any relevant models.

Web services are rapidly becoming the key technology for enterprises to enable IT development and modernization. By now, organizations have experienced the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) technology by developing and using simple internal applications or by searching for information provided by external services, thus enabling the interactions among different organizations. SOA is also an appropriate platform-independent approach to implement cooperative business processes. In this scenario, the service is a unit of work provided by a service provider and offered to the other organizations involved in a common network. In order to share services and knowledge, organizations have to standardize their own process descriptions and model them through services using the same approach and principles. The paper proposes a methodology to support the designer in the identification of services to produce by considering the initial process flow. The adoption of the presented approach would guarantee a homogenous description of services and their interaction along the enterprise network and thus facilitate the collaboration.

In this paper we present our main current research activity in the Italian co-funded FIRB Project NeP4B (Networked Peers for Business). In particular, we provide an overview of our P2P query routing approach which combines semantics and multimedia aspects in order to make query processing effective and efficient.

For a Geographical Information System, it is wanted to design a permanent architectural component which is committed to select relevant information from large databases and network of sensors, and useful in the wide range of applications that such system is destined to. This component allows the system to reach an optimal performance with savings on data acquisition costs and computational resources. The component is based on Data Mining technology and uses feature extraction algorithms to rank the relevance of the dataset features. In all applications reducible to a classification of geographical objects, the feature ranking procedure highlights the features with higher class discriminatory power. Features Ranking is also a cognitive strategy, and produces models of interest toward an artificial intelligent system. The GIS is a Decision Support System (DSS), whereas the feature ranking component supports a within processing decisional activity. A prototype of this component has been assembled and tested on several geographical dataset with promising results at current research stage.

Security project management must take into consideration the business requirements of the enterprise, the extension and complexity of its networked information system and the evolution of attack techniques. The efficiency of such project presumes a thorough cost-benefit analysis of the structure and dynamics of the IT components as well as the assessment of human and organisational parameters. Managers are more and more concerned with how security costs are planned, monitored and controlled. To this end, managers need a cost model including cost representation and risk parameters and capable of adapting company operational procedures, resource management, and corporate strategy to the evolution of digital risk. However, we have noticed a lack of security cost models in the project management literature. Only cost factors related to the technical task of security project have been addressed. This paper discusses the limits of the available technical cost models and proposes additional cost parameters including organizational, human and managerial aspects that must be considered and assessed in order to provide a more accurate estimation of security project cost. Our attempt is to provide two general cost models integrating these parameters. To conduct an accurate estimation of the involved parameters, a methodology is described based on expert intervention and decision making.

To manage the complexity of the development of an Information System (IS) a systematic partitioning of its models is needed. In particular, the system conceptual domain construction requires a structured approach. Our research on conceptual modelling in software engineering conducted us to propose a concern-oriented analysis approach aimed to construct the domain model of an information system as a composition of multi-facetted views. The method uses the concerns of various stakeholders of an IS for partitioning the system conceptual domain in stakeholder-oriented sub-domains. For each concern a high level description includes both the problem associated with it and the role of the stakeholder who manifests the concern. Mental representations descriptions of stakeholders’ beliefs and knowledge related to each concern are identified and on their basis a domain ontology is created. We propose the creation of UML ontological models based on this ontology. Such a model is constructed from the IS ontology preserving the semantics of involved concepts. Then facets of the future IS are created by composing UML ontological models of the stakeholder’s beliefs and knowledge. We applied this in the case of an IS that provides the registration of a new trading company using the services provided by the public administration institutions.

The Lucania – Medici in Rete (LuMiR) project aims to support the changing environment in the Italian National Health Systems, embodying a shift from organisation-centric to patient-centric services in the Basilicata Region. The primary objective of the LuMiR project is to foster collaborative, cross-organizational and patient-centric healthcare processes, supporting them with a suite of e-services for patient related clinical information communication and sharing among active stakeholders. It also aims to provide ICT support for other business activities. In the paper the methodology adopted in the LuMiR system design and development is described. It is a three-phased development process adopted to comply with institutional constraints and to better support a gradual change in the daily working practice of healthcare professionals called to use ever more sophisticated healthcare applications. The LuMiR system realization is in progress and its current state is also presented.

Most of the major successes in IS field have occurred outside the scope of academic research (and of consulting activities). The central thesis of this paper is that such a “crisis of relevance” of IS research is (also) due to the quaint epistemological status that the discipline inherited from social sciences. Two epistemological approaches, in fact, are being put in practice in IS field research today: positivism and interpretivism. These are glorious and consistent approaches, but they are both rooted in a nineteenth-century, old-fashioned vision of science (the former to carry on its tradition, the latter to criticize and subvert it). Furthermore, positivism and interpretivism, by their own basic assumptions, deny validity to each other’s outcomes, and this results in a sort of “epistemological apartheid” that causes further damages to the discipline.

Is a different epistemological approach possible? A new one, seeking to better receive the extraordinary amount of complex, original contributions that the last century has supplied about the question “how do we know?” The paper attempts to trace some essential lines of a proposal, and gives some very brief, but concrete examples about a new, “eco-humanistic” approach to IS research.

There is a not yet resolved, ongoing debate concerning the character of technology. After synthesizing the main strands in this theoretical contention, the paper draws on Don Ihde’s ‘soft’ technological determinism to discuss appropriate strategies of organizational learning on the part of IS vendors. A case is presented concerning the design and evolution of the competence center of the financial division of a large Italian software house. The description and discussion show that an early, persistent, and extensive involvement of human resources in the project, the lean structure of the center, and its promotion of knowledge exchanges both within the division and with clients, suppliers, and regulatory bodies allowed for improved division capabilities. An interorganizational ‘learning ladder’ was thus established so that technologies and contexts could be more flexibly and effectively addressed and managed.

The pervasiveness of the network and the versatility of multimedia tools have profoundly changed the way the academic world performs its primary functions: Transmission and Construction of Knowledge. These are functions which are continuously subject to exploration by didactic researchers with the purpose of overcoming standard formulas, because the “super-speed” of our time implies a premature ageing of the scientific literature, and because it is also continually necessary to outstrip the relativity of cognitive path. In this paper we will illustrate two case studies (“Criminal Procedure” and “Art and Surroundings”) very different one from the other as far as the didactic design, educational objectives and content fruition are concerned. Although very different, those two multimedia learning paths could be considered as a possible interpretation of the concept of ‘simulation’; the concept itself might be finally considered on an interpretative line moving toward the concept of ‘representation’ and must be understood as:

“Schematically simplified view” of real environments.

Content “figurative representations”. The two case studies that will be explained in this paper might therefore be identified as multimedia experimental projects that have implicitly altered theories and cognitive models, in order to generate new semantic features.

The aim of this paper is to analyse some ethical issues concerning the development of P2P systems. Some scholars consider them to be the key to a new social paradigm, others express alarm about how these systems undermine crucial elements of our societies. The result is often the ban of P2P technologies, like those on some campuses in the U.S. where Capitol Hill still debates on whether to impose more. Hence, by stressing why there is “ethics among peers,” the idea is to strike a fair balance between the principle of precaution and the principle of openness, so that threats arising from P2P systems should not be a pretext to limit freedom of speech, research, or “the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community,” according to the phrasing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Abstract Beginning with the initial premise that as the Internet has a global character, the paper will argue that the normative evaluation of digital information on the Internet necessitates an evaluative model that is itself universal and global in character [1]. The paper will show that information has a dual normative structure that commits all disseminators of information to both epistemological and ethical norms. Based on the dual normative characterization of information the paper will seek to demonstrate: (1) that information and internet information (interformation) specifically, has an inherent normative structure that commits its producers, disseminators, communicators and users, everyone in fact that deals with information, to certain mandatory epistemological and ethical commitments; and (2) that the negligent or purposeful abuse of information in violation of the epistemological and ethical commitments to which it gives rise is also a violation of universal rights to freedom and wellbeing to which all agents are entitled by virtue of being agents, and in particular informational agents.

Ethical analysis within Health Technology Assessment (HTA) – a comprehensive form of health policy research that examines the short- and long- term consequences of the application or use of technologies (in a broad meaning) – aims at analysing the moral questions raised by the technology itself and by the consequences of implementing or not a health technology as well as ethical issues that are inherent in the HTA process. The work intends to assess, within a HTA process, the ethical consequences of implementing the Electronic Medical Diary (EMD) in health care systems. The EMD is a device for supporting the daily registration and collection of clinical events related to a certain patient. The storage of these patient-specific clinical data constitutes the patient database (PDB) that may be connected with the many online tools which can improve the flow of information within the hospital information system. Such devices should be able to replace the traditional paper record.

In today’s digital society, ongoing concerns about the privacy and security of personal data are ever increasing, especially in health care. While we gradually need higher electronic access to medical information, issues relating to patient privacy and reducing possible security breaches increase. In this paper, we focus on identifying the general rules and the regulations that are currently in place to protect the privacy and security of medical data, and more specifically information contained in electronic health records (EHR). This review is particularly important since EHRs are expected to become nationally adopted in the US by the next decade and are already underway in many European countries. Based on this legal overview, unresolved challenges are identified.

This paper deploys case study research to examine the ethical issues arising from the design and use of “best practice” incorporated in enterprise packaged software, specifically a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. CRM like other Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) e.g. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) are global phenomena, increasingly influencing the strategic direction of a diverse range of organisations. Whilst the research on EIS continues to grow in a number of specific areas, there have been relatively few studies to examine the ethical issues associated with the design and use of such Information Systems (IS). This research reflects on MacIntyre’s ideas in virtue ethics (MacIntyre A. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (2/e). 1985: Duckworth, London), particularly his notion of “practice” to assess how such issues affect individuals in organisational life? For the purposes of scope we restrict our focus to the ethical issues arising from changes in task allocation and autonomy, and some of the associated issues in performance setting, monitoring and surveillance.

Italian (and EU) legislation in force does not appear to address the protection of minors in ICT networks in a completely satisfactory manner. Such conclusion especially arises when one considers that no liability is attributed on providers which only transmit information generated by a recipient of their service, or which merely give access to a communication network, with only a few specific exceptions.

To have access to legal information is a fundamental requirement for a variety of communities: ordinary citizens, scholars and legal professionals. Users of legal information belong to different categories and have various requirements and competencies. They use legal information for various purposes, and differences exist in the way such information is disseminated. To ensure access, commercial publishing is insufficient. In particular in the context of legal information the Internet promises to effect a radical transformation in the existing system of legal material. Legal producers and providers have made a great progress in placing legal materials on the web; these efforts have almost been too successful, as the legal researcher must now deal with an enormous amount of information spread across different servers. This huge amount of available legal information does not correspond to an enlargement of the right to access such sources as contents are not easily searchable. Therefore some ICT tools able to facilitate the retrieval of legal documents are to be adopted. This paper presents some semantic strategies, tools as well as methodologies developed within some EU and national Projects for specific types of legal information.

There is a crisis discussed in the discipline of Information Systems. Those who perceive such a crisis to exist are by no means agreed, as to its nature and origins. Our inquiry shows that there are a three distinct “crises” being debated. The first of these relates to the substance and boundaries of the discipline itself and if it is even a discipline at all. Another “crisis” relates to higher education and a fall in demand for IS courses from new students. Commentators perceive this to threaten the existence of IS departments in Universities, and to have potentially serious consequences for both research strategies and career paths of academics. Thirdly, there is perception of a crisis in the wider world, characterised by fewer vacancies in IS-relevant occupations whilst, at the same time, employers complain of a shortage of suitably skilled applicants for the vacancies available. This paper examines evidence for the three “crises,” real or imagined, suggested above, in the Information Systems field.

Digital forensic investigators experience a need for support in their everyday struggle to overcome boundary problems associated with cyber crime investigations. Traditional methods are socio-culturally and physically localised and dependent on strict and historically prescriptive political management. The new internet-worked cyber-world creates unprecedented difficulties for digital forensic investigations. This is directly linked with the inherently complex uncertainties and ambiguities related to a constant need for framing and re-framing of problem spaces under investigation. As such, in this paper we propose the recruitment of the discipline of Informing Systems in the context of digital discovery. Early findings of such an exercise indicate that informing systems approaches can assist the investigation process by offering means for structuring uncertainty. As it is accepted that uncertainty is an inherent element in a crime scene, not least in a cyber crime scene, we consider the contribution of Informing Systems vital for the effectiveness of digital forensic investigation practices.

An innovative technique for formation of collaborative consortia of enterprises in virtual organizations (VO) is considered. The technique is based on semantic integration of relevant enterprise information systems (EIS) in the VO specification treated as a subject mediator over the EISs involved. The paper explains how the canonical model for the VO specification is synthesized. Main part of the paper is devoted to the presentation of the process of EIS resource information models semi-automatic mapping into the canonical one assisted by the Heterogeneous Information Model Unifier. It is important to note that the Model Unifier is a universal tool that assists in development of mapping of various kinds of information. The process of mapping includes construction of a compiler from a resource model into the canonical one with the help of metacompilation tools. The mediation technique presented is applied in the astronomical Russian Virtual Observatory (RVO).

The article presents perspectives of how future directions in the development of the Internet could look like and how agents could support this evolution. The article describes recent Internet trends, discusses some ideas how future developments of the Internet might look like, presents some basics of agent technologies and discusses how agent technologies can contribute to the further development of the Internet.

This article aims at improving the information systems management support to Risk and Compliance Management process, i.e. the management of all compliance imperatives that impact an organization, including both legal and strategically self-imposed imperatives. We propose a process to achieve such regulatory compliance by aligning the Governance activities with the Risk Management ones, and we suggest Compliance should be considered as a requirement for the Risk Management platform. We will propose a framework to align law and IT compliance requirements and we will use it to underline possible directions of investigation resumed in our discussion section. This work is based on an extensive review of the existing literature and on the results of a four-month internship done within the IT compliance team of a major financial institution in Switzerland, which has legal entities situated in different countries.

A research project in the domain of enterprise interoperability is presented. The first goal of this project was to make a proof of concept and to show the benefits in terms of interoperability that could be obtained from a model driven engineering approach applied to a collaborative information system design. The system architecture is built around a new concept: a mediation information system having in charge to manage heterogeneity between partners. The flexible model driven engineering of this mediation information system is made by adapting the configuration of an enterprise service bus technology. It is proposed to be the key factor to put interoperability into practice.

Existing limitations and problems in the current life-cycle of software applications will encourage new development paradigms. New technological trends, aiming at responding to current needs, such as flexibility, dynamicity, scalability will certainly drive the envisaged changes. In this paper, possible solutions for innovative enterprise information systems (IS) development and maintenance are outlined. In particular, it will be argued about business process driven approach to information systems development, and how, through the support of new and emerging technologies, it can address nowadays requirements and overcome current limits. Business process driven approach to IS development is here characterized by: (1) business process modelling for representing the business logics; (2) enhanced SOA paradigm for business process execution; (3) business rules based approach to software applications maintenance and evolution.

Semantic technologies are usually considered as a key factor for dealing with the huge amount of data available today (also called “Data Deluge”). However, there are analysts who say that the availability of massive data volumes gives boost to statistical analysis in a way that will make semantics (as well as theories in general) useless. This paper is a brief refutation of this point of view. Meanings are important, and there is not a statistical way to capture their essence. On the other hand, the slow progress of the Semantic Web and the success of semantic-less engines like Google, support semantic scepticism someway. This paper argues that semantics is not an easy matter, and most of computer scientists have not taken it seriously enough so far. Nonetheless, semantics is there and plays a crucial role. More focused research can help leveraging few but important things that we know about meanings, to drive the development of better information systems at the age of the Data Deluge.

Traditionally, organizations have faced the dilemma between ­outsourcing and insourcing, both of which have shown a certain amount of problems. In between the two of them a new concept arises. This is the use of internal markets as a buffering mechanism for organizations, which create an intermediate society between the main organization and the market. This article shows two cases of organizations from different environments in which the sourcing process involved the creation of an intermediate organization to act as the described buffering mechanism. Both processes were related to the IT function. The first case was that of a Public Spanish University that decided to create the buffer society as a way to outsource certain IS/ICT functions while retaining a good level of control over workers and over management of these functions. The second case was that of an Italian SME which decided to create a buffer company in order to manage the implementation project of an ERP System. The study of the two cases has helped us identify and confirm empirically a number of features achieved by this internal mechanism use.

Please Coordination is intended as managing dependencies between activities such as, in particular, decision-making support, decisional decentralization and reduced centralization of information power, internal communication and collaboration and sharing and divulgation of knowledge. By improving all these activities, enterprises are able to create efficient and effective coordination mechanisms and consequently reduce costs and organizational complexity. The research question of this study aims at verifying if Business Intelligence Systems (BISs) are actually able to strengthen the existing coordination mechanisms, i.e., make them more efficient and less costly. The research method is an empirical research of 30 cases of enterprises with a large number of users of a BIS. Early findings reveal that BISs are mainly considered as technological tools, with little relevance being attributed to their potential in terms of facilitators of coordination mechanisms between actors.

This paper reports the findings of a research into change during the constitution of an IT Group. Our main findings show that when an IT company acquires two similar companies, IT becomes a central part of the change program, differing from other change cases where IT is considered a peripheral component. We use the scaffold metaphor by Orlikowski [1] as a framework to interpret the case study. Our study is a primer in the use of socio-materiality as framework for interpreting IT-driven change and shows that this framework can highlight the most common characteristics of change while remaining practical and synthetic.

Despite its importance to temporal issues, research into the temporal impacts of information technology in organizations is still limited. On the other hand, organizational culture research shows that the way time is perceived and collectively organized reflects assumptions that are an expression of the specific organizational setting, underscoring that cultural assumptions are an important contributory factor to the strength and direction of organizational change. In this contribution, we have investigated the role ICT can play in promoting changes in the temporal dimension of organizational culture, and sought to assess whether temporal assumptions can affect the way a new system is used, thus facilitating/hindering the achievement of the expected results. Our case study covered the four types of ‘temporal performance’ management expected to see thanks to the introduction of a workflow system and showed that, after its introduction, the temporal dimensions of the organizational culture of the departments involved showed some significant changes, which confirm hypothesis 1 of the study, but also some contradictory effects that seem to confirm hypothesis 2.

This paper examines the positive connection between change management, behaviors and training and the effectiveness of e-learning platform in order to facilitate organizational change. To this aim, we first point out the relevance of behavioral capacities in managing successful adaptation to change. In this context, the aim of training does not consist in giving key people ready-made solutions. It rather involves a multi-stage process where each individual gets a one-to-one support through which he/she learns how to cope with exceptional or novel circumstances, while capitalising on their own potential and accelerating their self-development. In particular we claim the effectiveness and benefits of training platforms tailored around the managerial population and the new trends of modular multimedia learning programs. Finally this work will present a research in progress regarding the real contribution and role that technology can offer to those who undertake a learning cycle aimed to the development of the value of accountability. The analysis is based on an on-line training platform developed in a big firm operating in the telecommunication industry.

RFId systems show great potentials enhancing supply chain performances. Some of the major retailers in the World (Wall Mart, Metro Group, Tesco) made sounding campaigns promoting the benefits they were able to attain. Despite the increase in the number of researches on RFId benefits, a study investigating their measurement in the supply chain context is still lacking. This paper aims at identifying and measure RFId benefits by designing three tools: (1) an RFId oriented Performance Measurement System for the identification of all RFId related supply chain performance indicators on the base of the SCOR Model. (2) A benefits-processes-measures matrix linking the benefits identified in literature with SCOR model process to identify supply chain measures impacted by the RFId system implementation. (3) A reference framework summarizing benefits measures.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are still more and more common in companies, not only in large ones but also in small and medium enterprises. Although virtually nobody really doubts their importance for running business, there is a sentiment regarding their implementation – both in terms of time and cost. We focus on the latter in this paper. The research question is to what extent do ERP system implementation costs exceed the planned costs in European context, which is characterized by fixed price policy. The questionnaire research, which focused on this issue, was conducted in Slovakia and Slovenia. The dependent variable was a percentage of actual ERP system implementation costs vis-à-vis the planned ones. The independent variables were the country, company size, information strategy, and representation of the IT department on board level. According to the collected data, companies with information strategy, and small companies as opposed to large ones, are more likely to stay on budget. Overall, 68.5% of companies stayed on budget and companies, on average, spent 106.0% of what they originally planned to.

The development of interactive visual applications is a complex work, usually performed with the help of advanced visual programming environments. Starting from the GUI’s visual specifications, the programming environment generates the corresponding code that implements the interface. In most cases, designers and developers have no tools to keep control over the usability and the maintainability of the resulting applications. In fact, the success of an information system depends on the accessibility and usability of its interface. The evaluation of visual environments is traditionally performed by means of expert-based evaluations or by testing with end users. In this paper, we describe a methodology to design, specify and evaluate interactive visual applications, based on the SR-Action Grammars formalism. We describe how it is possible to assess the usability metrics of consistency, completeness and user control by means of checks performed at high abstraction level of the visual language. In particular, we improve the formalism of the SR-Action Grammars (Cassino et al. (2003): SR-Task Grammars: A Formal Specification of Human Computer Interaction for Interactive Visual Languages – 2003 Symposium on Visual Languages and Formal Methods (VLFM ‘03) – IEEE Symposia on Human-Centric Computing Languages and Environments (HCC’03)) to specify visual languages, so to perform usability checks by the management of the production rules. TAGIVE (Cassino et al. (2006): A Methodology for Computer Supported Development of Interactive Visual Applications – WSEAS Transactions On Information Science and Applications Journal.) is the tool that allows to design interactive visual environments and to generate the related formal specification in automatic manner. Thanks to the controls performed at formal level, the system guides the designer in the correct development of the application.

This paper is focused on the importance of collaboration during the parallel phases of a design process. A User Centered Design (UCD) chain is usually led jointly by interaction designers and software developers teams. In order to make this chain efficient and effective, both teams must share a common view of the project, allowing to keep parallel processes, aware of each other’s needs and aims. A study is reported here, aimed at pointing out stages and features that can reinforce and improve the effectiveness of groups of designers coming from different backgrounds at work. The objective was to apply UCD in a critical way, in order to give to some concepts a more precise meaning and to increase its power.

This paper describes the experience in designing and developing the CET system according to user-centred and participatory approaches. CET is a web-based system used by industries and experts of the regional government that monitor air quality. With CET, industries can officially declare their pollutant emissions in the atmosphere, while air quality experts can easily visualize how the industries are distributed in the regional territory, the type and quantity of emissions coming from their production processes and other important information to support their decision-making process. The experience provides hints about proper user involvement for designing successful systems.

Maps provide people with the ability to visualize and analyze the world as they perceive it, in terms of geographic objects and relationships among them. However, when maps are delivered on mobile devices, where viewing a wide portion of the map may conflict with displaying features in a detailed manner, a complete and exhaustive evaluation of a region may become difficult. In the paper, we describe a visualization technique, named Framy, which exploits an interaction metaphor for painting frames, to provide hints about off-screen objects, in a mobile GIS application. In particular, we explain how Itten’s theory of colors has been taken into account to improve user’s visual perception of items on the mobile device interface.

This paper presents the design rationale of a notification system based on a peripheral display, able to deliver information with different levels of severity, coming from multiple sources. Though originally conceived for a telecommunication management system, the design exhibits a level of abstraction allowing applicability in different contexts, provided that information to be notified satisfy a few basic requirements. The system include a visual coding technique and transitions such that low severity alarms are associated with a few data conveyed in a subliminal way, whereas more urgent alarms are associated with notifications requiring focal attention and technical intervention.

This work presents the visual user interface of the On-TIME system, a task-centered information management system, whose aim is to actively participate to and support the user tasks. One of the key challenges that needs to be addressed for the success of On-TIME, is the design of a user friendly interface. Being On-TIME based on the use of a so-called Personal Ontology to provide a semantic account to user’s personal data, the interface has to allow the user to easily browse the ontology. On the other hand, it has to address the management of tasks. This requires to both suggest tasks that the user might be willing to perform, and to support her while executing tasks. We present a typical user scenario in order to illustrate a possible interaction with the On-TIME interface, and discuss some preliminary user evaluation.

In the design of computer systems, human diversity and their specific needs have been neglected in the past, possibly because engineers were developing products for end users who were very much like themselves. The large impact that computer systems have nowadays on the increasing number of different users brings to consider traditional Human-Computer Interaction topics, such as user-centered design, usability engineering, accessibility, information visualization, very important also for Information Systems, since they influence technology usage in business, managerial, organizational and cultural contexts. People would like computer systems that can be tailored to their individual needs and working practices. To this aim, systems must be developed whose user interfaces is flexible, i.e., it permits end users to modify or add new functionalities, still being simple and easy to use, not requiring any programming knowledge. In this paper, we discuss an approach that gives end users the possibility to tailor presentation as well as functionalities of the system they use, thus supporting users to participate in the design of their tools.

Interest of scientific research on Open Source software and its development process is frequent. The number of articles available and the number of tracks or workshops on this topic in most relevant IS Conferences is high. The usability of Open Source Software has been scarcely considered until few years ago, probably due to the particular role that the user has in such a development environment. In Open Source software development, users and developers are not so different. Anyhow, the diffusion of the Open Source software outside the development community contributes to sharpen the distinction among these two groups that are no longer equivalent. This circumstance has contributed to increase the interest on usability of Open Source software. Nevertheless, studies on end-users in Open Source contexts are still young. This paper introduces a pilot study on end user’s perception of Open Source software. The aim of this pilot study is to identify how the end user perceives the Open Source software (in terms of Usability, Functionality, Reliability, Efficiency and Quality in Use).

The purpose of this paper is to study how IT can play a strategic role in retail business through a case study research approach of two Swedish companies. The main focus in this research approach is looking to examine: (1) how IT supports business and organizational strategies and (2) how business-IT strategies can be aligned. For this purpose we have applied two evaluation frameworks through which we have analyzed the business, organizational and IT strategies and compared business-IT alignment maturity. Finally, we have concluded with a discussion and suggestions for (a) successful relationship between three business, information and organizational strategies and for (b) improving business-IT strategic alignment that will help the IT decision makers in these retail companies to understand in which areas they should act in order to improve the strategic use of IT resources.

Research and practices have focused on IT related project execution techniques for a long time and have produced very promising results in specifying methodologies for the inclusion and involvement of people and organizational factors into technical change processes. The methodologies that have had the biggest impact can be briefly resumed by the English born tradition of sociotechnical change (e.g. [1, 2]) and the Scandinavian born tradition in participatory design (e.g. [3]). Despite the extreme value in IT project management of these techniques – and their derivates – there continue to be severe problems in getting business results from pervasive IT-related “technochanges.” Technochange [4] refers to big, technology-driven, technology-dependent change seeking significant strategic benefits and requiring significant organizational change. From the management point of view these projects differ from smaller scale ones for their strategic dimension expressed in a need for alignment between technical and organizational changes and need for coordination across multiple projects active at the same time. The feeling is that while sociotechnical and participatory techniques are apt to confined projects – this can be evinced from the settings from which these techniques evolved – for technochange projects other techniques should be used. At the same time looking at which IT projects are undertaken by both large and medium corporations today we see a predominance of large scale projects like ERP implementations, BRP initiatives, integrations initiatives connected with mergers, etc. Sometimes the failure is acute, visible and public, as reported in the press: e.g. Socrate project in France [5], Taurus project at the London Stock Exchange in UK [6], more often the failure is chronic and may drag on and drag down business performance undetected for years.