Perspectives in Business Informatics Research

Enterprises operate in dynamically changing environments, consequently, information systems (IS) are a subject to continuous changes. The IS need to be adjusted to different customers, markets and run-time contexts affecting their design and delivery. Variability and customization of the information systems has become a serious challenge. Capability Driven Development (CDD) has been proposed as a new approach for dealing with variability. CDD allows delivering enterprise capability in dynamically changing circumstances - contexts. To model enterprise capabilities, concepts defined in the Capability meta-model are used. This paper discusses initial Capability modeling experiences. The main emphasis is put on the Capability design phase of the CDD approach. Several empirical cases are included to share the Capability modeling experiences, to validate the Capability meta-model as well as to discuss the difficulties of Capability modeling, open issues and future work.

Information technology (IT) is not only beneficial for the private sector but has a lot to offer for the public sector as well. However, most of the studies in IT outsourcing relationships consider only the private sector and do not pay attention to the public sector. In this context, the research has looked to determine the influential factors in IT outsourcing relationships in Swedish public organizations like are Swedish municipalities and classified them according to the importance. The research methodology used has included a survey among IT outsourcing decision makers from Swedish municipalities and a case study in a Swedish municipality. The survey has revealed that trust, cooperation, commitment, communication, and flexibility are the top five most important factors which are influencing the provider-recipient IT outsourcing relationship in Swedish municipalities. While the case study has revealed that all the factors that were identified during the literature review are influencing the provider-recipient IT outsourcing relationship in Swedish municipalities plus the identification of two new factors which are legislation and economy/money.

There is a need to adopt a situated design perspective in designing computer-based tools that support knowledge work to better understand what it means for users, developers, and stakeholders to approach and capture the tacit knowing within the work context. The design situation is characterized as explorative and iteratively interpreted, a pursuit of the vision of the future system guided by local circumstances. Formal engineering methods, reducing development work to engineering endeavors based on a rationalistic perspective, are not sufficient. The situated design perspective is presented as a conceptual model of the design practice, highlighting its constituent worlds, processes, and relations. The model depicts designing as an explorative and sense-making process, navigating between what is wanted or envisioned and what may be negotiated and discovered. It emphasizes the importance of the artifact being designed as a means to capture, communicate, and discover what is possible in the work context. The model makes clear that the design process is highly situated, that it cannot take place outside the work context because of interdependent relationships. It is designing within the living work context, not design for an objectified one.

Enterprise Models are an important tool for IT-Governance. Diverse stakeholders are working with such models. This work presents a contribution to the study of model understandability. The model comprehension of individuals having basic knowledge of business administration and computer science has been measured in an experiment. The level of detail (high/low) has been chosen for the independent variable of the experiment. The study bases on a model that has been derived from the ArchiSurance case study of the OpenGroup. This model is part of the Archi tool published by Bolton University. The results show a higher model understandability at a higher level detail and thus higher model complexity.

In the last years, new challenges have arisen for Information Systems (IS) due to the movement towards a society driven by collaboration, whereas Collaborative Enterprises are used as catalysts of competitive advantages. In this context, conceptual modeling can help in the understanding of complex entities and in the development of specific Enterprise IS for intra- and inter-organizational settings. Indeed, the understanding of the domain of analysis is a key-step in the development of IS. In particular, a challenge is posed by the performance management in inter-organizational settings. However, there are still few works that take into account performance related aspects for collaborative enterprises. The aim of this work is to provide a systematic review of literature in order to retrieve, classify, and summarize existing research on performance modeling and to identify areas and opportunities for future research.

Information is essential in our society and for organizations. But the flood of information affects enterprises as well as individuals also in a negative way. This problem is usually referred as Information Overload. This paper summarizes the developments of the past years and gives a prospect to future researches in this field using the method of systematic literature review. A special focus is put on the problems of enterprises with information overload and how these can be solved by using modern approaches.

The transition from a relatively stable goods-based economy to an intangible and highly turbulent service-based economy has necessitated the development of an appropriate theoretical perspective to explain value creation and sustained competitive advantage. Service science has been put forth in order to address this changing view and requires firms to fundamentally reconsider the means by which value is derived. Firms that foster the service logic are increasingly dependent upon Information Technology (IT) to enact their operations and deliver value propositions. Despite significant investments in service-oriented technologies, the prevailing research view regarding management of IT has not been in adherence with the principles of service science or the dynamism of the environment. The view on IT still follows a resource-based logic, in which a competitive advantage is seen as being a result of owning a unique bundle of resources. Literature to date has placed little attention on the IT-enabled capabilities that firms must develop in order to remain competitive in conditions of high environmental turbulence. Building upon this need of conceptually reframing the management of service-oriented technologies which is reinforced by recent calls of the IT management literature, we use service science principles to propose an alternative perspective of IT-enabled capabilities. We ground our developments on the Dynamic Capabilities (DCs) theory since it provides a theoretical basis for explaining resource renewal and competitive survival in highly turbulent environments. Hence, we propose four IT-enabled dynamic capabilities: IT-enabled sensing, IT-enabled coordination/reconfiguration, IT-enabled learning, and IT-enabled integration. We argue that these IT capabilities constitute the prime source of sustained competitive advantage for service-oriented enterprises operating in conditions of moderate to high environmental uncertainty.

The importance of sustainability in design became a major topic of interest in HCI research. Past research has shown how classical HCI design principles could be used to create values of the design through the open innovation concept. The scope of this paper follows from an earlier work of open innovation design principles that established the basis of open sustainability innovation since contributions from a dissimilar applied form of HCI could be promising. We in this paper have analyzed the concept of open sustainability innovation from the perspective of sustainable HCI. The paper outlines seven design principles for open sustainability innovation and has illustrated them in the form of a framework. The notion of open sustainability innovation and sustainable HCI are then revisited and the role of sustainable HCI for developing sustainable products, services, and initiatives using open innovation are clarified.

In m-tourism applications, the proactive recommendations are especially actual for two major reasons: (1) the highly dynamic nature of the problem situation (the user continuously moves, the transport situation and weather conditions change); (2) limited possibilities of mobile devices for explicit information entry and checking large amounts of alternative solutions, but rich possibilities for tacit information entry via various sensors. The paper proposes an approach and research prototype based on the technologies of smart space and proactive recommendation systems. The architecture is based on the smart space technology. The system implementing the proposed approach helps the tourists to plan their attraction attending schedule based on the context information about the current situation in the region, its foreseen development, the tourist’s preferences and previous behavior, using their mobile devices.

There is no broad agreement of the nature of capability in management, planning, engineering, and enterprise architecture literature. Definitions of the concept of capability ranges from being equal to the concept of process to be loosely defined as a collection of resources. This paper presents intensional aspects that are argued to be non-essential for the general concept of capability. Thus, this paper explores the concept of capability with a focus on what capability is not. By making non-essential aspects and distinctions visible we aim to making the concept of capability easier to understand and integrate for practitioners and researchers.

While the Agile Software Development (ASD) has been successfully promoted in the last 15 years, there is no agreement on how to determine whether a particular project is agile or not. Some practitioners consider agility as strict usage of a specific methodology, e.g. SCRUM, others consider agility as adhering to Agile Manifesto. The lack of common view on ASD prevents creating common guidelines on when the usage of ASD is appropriate. This paper presents a model of ASD that helps to differentiate it from the traditional, phase-based development, and more strictly defines the area of its applicability. The model has been built based on the knowledge transformation perspective, as the author considers it to be the most differentiating perspective when comparing ASD to traditional software development. For building the model, the ideas from SECI model of Nonaka have been exploited. The results, in the form of requirements to be fulfilled for successful employment of ASD, are demonstrated through analysis of completed ASD projects.

Organizations operate in increasingly dynamic and diverse environments. This leads to high variability within the organization, and the necessity to create context-aware information systems. As a part of these systems, context and business process metrics need to be monitored and acted upon. Capability Driven Development (CDD) addresses these challenges and integrates organizational development with IS (Information System) development. This paper integrates results from an industry survey and three industrial cases to define the key methodology goals for CDD.

Consistency is a quality required by many approaches to the design of systems. In our practice we have found that keeping the business models consistent is one of the most difficult and critical tasks in corporations. Therefore we decided to explore this issue and its causes in a qualitative study. This paper discusses approaches to mutual consistency between business models, and proposes original concept of weak and strong mutual model consistency, independent on modeling language. The consistency is studied in one large corporate business process model and its evolution through the years by a case study and ethnographical observation methods. Relevant model types and its important consistency relations are described. Then an influence of various factors to consistency is narrated as a result of observations. Three factors with impact to mutual consistency are drawn: complexity, relation between evolving business and stagnant model, and modeling purpose.

Organizations that implement BPM are constantly trying to improve and effectively manage their business processes. Taking into consideration that every business process involves a reasonable amount of social interactions, i.e., simple or complex collaboration between people that occur internally (within organization boundaries) and externally (as suggestions, feedbacks to consumed services or products, and other interactions); it is necessary to provide means for incorporation of social interaction into business processes. While the need of incorporation of social interaction in business processes is well recognized, there is a lack of simple supporting guidelines for supplementing traditional business process development approaches with incorporation of social software. Iterative and incremental social software integration approach proposed in this paper provides a set of methods and concepts that are organized across well known iterative incremental development approach. The proposed approach can be used as guidelines in social software incorporation into business processes for introduction of social interaction.

The paper introduces generic components to BPMN that reduce modelling efforts and ensure higher quality of specifications. The idea is transferred from task models to business process models. Some of the introduced components can be considered as patterns. Therefore, the paper discusses different views on patterns and their relations to reusable generic component. Additionally, different strategies for adaptation like design time adaptation and runtime adaptation of components are discussed. Parameter substitution is supported best by tools. Requirements for such support are finally collected and discussed.

Recent research has described software development projects in terms of the economic principal agent theory. These models mostly describe the customer as the principal, whereas the supplier is the agent. Our study shows, that regarding gaps in software requirement specifications, the supplier is in a principal situation, and the customer plays the role of an agent. Specifications are incomplete due to systematical reasons. Therefore, the customer must work on closing the gaps during the design and development phase of the project. From this, behavioral uncertainties arise. An empirical study supports our theoretical argument. We discuss consequences from these findings and derive suggestions for practitioners in software development projects.

Separation of concerns is an important topic in Business Process Modeling. One sort of concerns is cross-cutting, like security, which are repeated in many business processes. These concerns make the models more complex, since concerns are repeated in many process models. The repetition of realization of concerns in process models makes the maintenance cumbersome. Aspect Oriented Business Process Modeling is an approach to address these concerns, which has been investigated recently. However, no set of requirements are defined for such modeling proposals, which makes the evaluation of and comparison between these approaches impossible. Therefore, this paper introduces a set of requirements for the aspect oriented business process modeling, which are used to define an evaluation framework for assessing these modeling approaches. The framework is used to evaluate existing aspect oriented business process modeling proposals. The result shows a comparison between different modeling proposals by clarifying their strengths and weaknesses. It also shows the gap in the area, which can be used as direction for future research.

Automatic discovery of process models from event logs is an important and promising area in Business Process Management. Process models document how business processes should be performed, so they capture different concerns related to business processes. Some of these concerns are not limited to one process model, and they are repeated in many others as well, called cross-cutting concerns. Although many works have been done to enable discovering different process models, there is no investigation about how models with cross-cutting concerns can be discovered from even logs. Therefore, this work proposes an approach to enable discovering these models from event logs. The investigation is performed based on a case-study from the banking domain. The result shows how these concerns hinder existing process discovery techniques, and how the proposed approach can solve the problem.

Business Models play a pivotal role in organizations, especially in building bridges and enabling the dialogue between business and technological worlds. Complementarily, while Use Cases are one of the most popular techniques for eliciting requirements in the design of Information Systems, Business Goals and Business Rules associate with Business Process Use Cases to compose a Business Model base structure. However, methods for relating Business Processes, Goals and Rules (PGR) are scarce, dissonant or highly analyst-dependent. In this sense, we propose a two-step method to help in guiding the elicitation of Business Goals and Rules from Process-level Use Cases, and their mapping to a Business Model representation. As a result, a solution Business Model generated by aligning the resulting trios (PGR) with a Business Model Canvas is presented to the organization stakeholders for review, validation and further negotiation.

Context-awareness is a feature of more and more applications, which adds further requirements to be taken into account in the implementation process. Though accepted approaches for software development exist, no accepted way for the inclusion of context has been established yet. An essential part of developing context based systems is to analyze and conceptualize the elements of the specific context required for the application under development, including their dependencies and mechanism of use. This activity of context modeling forms an important part of the system’s specification, since it identifies relevant aspects of the application environment in a representation adequate for the modeling purpose. Within this paper we aim at closing this gap by introducing an approach for context modeling for the utilization in context-aware applications, providing a structure guiding through the process and illustrating it by examples as a reference for further projects.

To implement Business Process Management several best practices can be distinguished. This paper provides an overview of the best practices that can support BPM practitioners to develop business process maturity. Various common BPM practices are derived from a literature survey and interviews with process architects. Practices are assessed through questionnaires and final best practices selected through Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchical Process are presented. The study has been carried out among process architects in 3 large telecommunication companies in Denmark. Although every organization has different needs, the best practices identified in this paper are believed to have a wide applicability across various telecommunication organizations. The overall conclusion is that the framework is indeed helpful in supporting BPM application improvement and can be put in practice by the BPM practitioner community.

The paper discusses a business case when customer’s deployment of the Enterprise Resource Planning solution (ERP) is integrated with third-party’s software. Customer’s change management highly depends on vendor’s information about changes between ERP versions. The problem is that the vendor cannot predict the impact of implemented changes on every customer’s business. In the suggested conceptual customer-oriented solution, the conjoint assessment evaluates the size, the scope and the essentiality of ERP changes in order to provide data on changes for a particular customer. The resulting difference model could be enhanced with results of analysis of collected access statistics for customer’s ERP packages. The solution uses a unified data format for data interchange. The final model of ERP changes and their essentiality for a particular customer could be visualized for the further application.

Large amount of routine work necessary to perform comparative analysis of university courses possess the importance of the automation of this task. Possibility of effortless detection of similarity between different courses would give the opportunity to organize student exchange programmes effectively and facilitate curriculum management and development. The application of smartly adapted machine learning technologies in long term could reduce the manual course comparison effort. The goal of this paper is to present the application of earlier proposed inductive learning based classification system (accompanied with interactive capabilities) to directly and indirectly compare study courses semi-automatically. The evaluation of the proposed system has been carried out in 4 consecutive experiments which proved the ability to decrease the number of misclassified instances if uncertain classifications are detected and passed to the expert’s review.

The losses from suboptimal interoperability in IT supported design, production, and operation of health care facilities are tantamount. In these years new built of hospitals in Scandinavia could be realized in a more efficient and innovative way if using information standards. This paper inquires into whether computerized information standards enable or constrain innovation in public procurement of buildings. In architectural and engineering design of public buildings the project based product development tends be done in constellations of firms in interorganisational contracting, which do not provide stability or room for innovation. A large hospital project was investigated through interviews, documents and observations. The effects of implementing building information standards are both inter- and intraorganisational. The building client claims to have saved money, through better structured building component data that gave considerable positive effects during tendering. The IT-suppliers develop IT-tools, and the AEC companies can commence develop services preparing for new markets.

In performance measurement systems that are built on top of a data warehouse, the information requirements in natural language are different performance indicators that should be stored and analyzed. We use the requirement formalization metamodel to create a formal requirement repository out of information requirements in natural language. In the course of this research we tested the compatibility of the existing requirement formalization metamodel applying it to a set of over 150 requirements for the currently operating data warehouse project. As a result, we extended the formal specification of information requirements with some additional classes like themes, grouping, and requirement priorities, and relationships discovered in this case study. We discussed benefits of requirement prioritization and advantages of transferring requirement priority values to schema elements with and aim of detecting schema elements to be incorporated into dashboards.

The prehospital process is complex and covers a wide range of locations, healthcare personnel, technologies and competences. Enabling high quality holistic training is hence a challenge. Process models are efficient tools for representing reality, but no single modeling approach can cover the complexity of prehospital care. In our research, we have investigated the possibility to combine various process modeling techniques in order to identify training components and as many perspectives of the prehospital process as possible. Results show that combining different approaches and adapting them based on the need at hand is a successful strategy for enabling an of the prehospital care process from multiple perspectives, including identification of holistic, realistic and engaging training components. Future work can utilize our results to build training scenarios that can be implemented in training using for example simulation.