Structured modeling group support systems: a product design theory

Structured modeling is critical to the design, development, and implementation of many systems including computer software, business processes, and data networks. Since the creation of structured models relies on the knowledge of many organizational stakeholders, groups often accomplish this task. Group support systems (GSS) focus on the support of group processes and would appear to be useful for structured modeling; however, GSS usually only provide textual or decision related output rather than the structured models needed for many design processes. This paper proposes a class of systems, structured modeling GSS (smGSS), which adds support for the development of structured models to standard GSS. Since past research has shown that research results may be difficult to compare across studies when the system under investigation is not well defined, this paper develops a product design theory that defines the required characteristics of and testable design propositions for an smGSS as derived from existing theory and empirical investigations.     

A formal representation for context-aware business processes

A business process is a set of activities performed in a coordinated manner within an organizational and technical environment that is aimed toward a business goal. The flexibility of a process is related to an understanding of the unexpected events that occur when people, systems and resources interact and require adjustments. Thus, business processes must be designed to respond to information about different events and their specificity. This information defines what the literature calls “context”. To broaden the perception of context in the case of a business process, this work proposes an approach to characterize the context of a business process activity in a given domain through conceptual models structured in layers. A case study was conducted to evaluate the proposal, which provided evidence of the applicability of the model.     

Agile business process development: why,how and when—applying Nonaka’s theory of knowledge transformation to business process development

The traditional way of business process development is via creating a detailed model of a business process in question, acquiring an IT-system to support it, and then implementing it in the organizational practice. Acquiring a system can be done via designing and manufacturing it by the business itself, or via commissioning it to somebody else. Alternatively, a generic system can be bought and configured according to the business process model created. The traditional approach has a number of risks that become visible only during the latest phase of introducing the system in the organizational practice, e.g., when it becomes clear that the system does not fit the business and/or people who work in it. These risks could be mitigated by using an agile approach to the development of business processes. In agile approach: (a) the phases of process modeling, IT-system design, and manufacturing are merged into one, and (b) instead of using one big cycle, a series of smaller development cycles is used. The paper discusses what is needed to implement the agile approach, and in which business situations the agile approach is the most appropriate. Examples of tools to support agile development are presented and analyzed. The results presented in the paper have been achieved based on the knowledge transformation perspective along the lines suggested by Nonaka in SECI model. The modification of this model has been used to understand the risks and requirements connected to a particular process development strategy.     

Building ontology based knowledge maps to assist business process re-engineering

Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) is being used to improve the efficiency of the organizational processes, however, a number of obstacles have prevented its full potential from being realised. One of these obstacles is caused by an emphasis on the business process itself at the exclusion of considering other important knowledge of the organization. Another is due to the lack of tools for identifying the cause of the inefficiencies and inconsistencies in BPR. In this paper we propose a methodology for BPR that overcomes these two obstacles through the use of a formal organizational ontology and knowledge structure and source maps. These knowledge maps are represented formally to facilitate an inferencing mechanism which helps to automatically identify the causes of the inefficiencies and inconsistencies. We demonstrate the applicability of this methodology through the use of a case study of a university domain.     

B-SCP: A requirements analysis framework for validating strategic alignment of organizational IT based on strategy,context, and process

Ensuring that organizational IT is in alignment with and provides support for an organization's business strategy is critical to business success. Despite this, business strategy and strategic alignment issues are all but ignored in the requirements engineering research literature. We present B-SCP, a requirements engineering framework for organizational IT that directly addresses an organization's business strategy and the alignment of IT requirements with that strategy. B-SCP integrates the three themes of strategy, context, and process using a requirements engineering notation for each theme. We demonstrate a means of cross-referencing and integrating the notations with each other, enabling explicit traceability between business processes and business strategy. In addition, we show a means of defining requirements problem scope as a Jackson problem diagram by applying a business modeling framework. Our approach is illustrated via application to an exemplar. The case example demonstrates the feasibility of B-SCP, and we present a comparison with other approaches.     

Information technology,the organizational capability of proactive corporate environmental strategy and firm performance: a resource-based analysis

The study of the relationships between information technology (IT), environmental organizational issues and firm performance is a cutting-edge research topic for the information systems (IS) community. However, at present we know very little about these relationships. Drawing on the perspective of IT-enabled organizational capabilities and the literature on organizations and the natural environment, our study introduces conceptually the construct organizational capability of proactive corporate environmental strategy to the IS field. We propose that IT capability may enable the implementation of a proactive environmental strategy and that this strategy could play a significant role in determining the business value of IT. Using structural equations modeling with data collected from 63 firms, we find that IT capability is an enabler of proactive environmental strategy and that this strategy plays a significant role in mediating the effects of IT on firm performance. Our study provides initial evidence on the role of IT in the implementation of proactive environmental practices. Our results suggest to IT executives that their decisions matter in shaping environmental sustainability, which in turn will generate business value from IT.     

Role of obligations in multiagent coordination

Carrying out distributed business processes over networks is rapidly shifting the nature of application architectures from the simple command and control client-server model to complex peer-to-peer models supporting dynamic patterns of social interaction and behavior among autonomous, proactive, goal oriented agents. Trusting agents to autonomously make decisions and execute actions on behalf of humans, as part of global business processes, requires both understanding and modeling of the social laws that govern collective behavior and a practically useful operationalization of the models into agent programming tools. In this article we present a solution to these problems based on a representation of obliged and forbidden behavior in an organizational framework, together with an inference method that also decides which obligations to break in conflicting situations. These are integrated into an operational, practically useful agent development language that covers the spectrum from the definition of organizations, roles, agents, obligations, goals, and conversations to inferring and executing coordinated agent behaviors in multiagent applications. The major strength of the approach is the way it supports coordination by exchanging constraints about obliged and forbidden behavior among agents. We illustrate this and the entire system with solution examples to the feature interaction problem in the telecommunications industry and to integrated supply chain management.     

Big Data Initiatives: Minimizing Risk and Maximizing Value with Governance

Abstract

Big Data Analytics can be a fantastic business opportunity for many organizations. Already organizations are using advanced analytics to streamline production processes, optimize back office activities, market more effectively, and better satisfy customer demand. That said, it goes without saying (as recent headlines can attest) that sometimes enhanced analytics capabilities can introduce risks such as erosion of privacy, overly-intrusive knowledge about customers, etc.

Given this dichotomy, making the decision about when, whether, how much, and how to invest in big data analytics initiatives can be a challenge. Invest too soon and you may obviate existing investments or disrupt business activities; invest too late and you may find that competitors gain advantages that make the market landscape asymmetric.

This article outlines how and why applying “tried and true” governance principles can help make this decision easier. For those that have formalized governance structures in place, how they might inform the decision an organization makes in this regard – and for those that don’t have a formalized governance program – how they might co-opt some of those principles to help make this decision more approachable.     

The effect of governance on global software development: An empirical research in transactive memory systems

ContextThe way global software development (GSD) activities are managed impacts knowledge transactions between team members. The first is captured in governance decisions, and the latter in a transactive memory system (TMS), a shared cognitive system for encoding, storing and retrieving knowledge between members of a group.ObjectiveWe seek to identify how different governance decisions (such as business strategy, team configuration, task allocation) affect the structure of transactive memory systems as well as the processes developed within those systems.MethodWe use both a quantitative and a qualitative approach. We collect quantitative data through an online survey to identify transactive memory systems. We analyze transactive memory structures using social network analysis techniques and we build a latent variable model to measure transactive memory processes. We further support and triangulate our results by means of interviews, which also help us examine the GSD governance modes of the participating projects. We analyze governance modes, as set of decisions based on three aspects; business strategy, team structure and composition, and task allocation.ResultsOur results suggest that different governance decisions have a different impact on transactive memory systems. Offshore insourcing as a business strategy, for instance, creates tightly-connected clusters, which in turn leads to better developed transactive memory processes. We also find that within the composition and structure of GSD teams, there are boundary spanners (formal or informal) who have a better overview of the network’s activities and become central members within their network. An interesting mapping between task allocation and the composition of the network core suggests that the way tasks are allocated among distributed teams is an indicator of where expertise resides.ConclusionWe present an analytical method to examine GSD governance decisions and their effect on transactive memory systems. Our method can be used from both practitioners and researchers as a “cause and effect” tool for improving collaboration of global software teams.     

Applying semantic Web technologies to drug safety determination

Ensuring drug safety is of paramount importance to the life sciences industry. It's critical that drugs are able not only to achieve the desired result but also to do so without harmful side effects. By identifying problems as early as possible in the drug discovery and development process, life sciences companies can avoid drug safety sagas, such as a recent example that concerned COX-2 inhibitors. Unfortunately, drug safety problems are often revealed only during clinical trials or occasionally after marketing. These challenges are becoming more acute as medicines are targeted to defined patient populations. The life sciences industry can use semantic Web technologies to integrate data more effectively across all drug discovery and development business units, thereby providing a more supportive environment for the early detection of safety-related issues. Effective integration would enable genomic data and patient profiles to be more easily related to safety, thus providing: 1) a simpler framework for determining risk-benefit for individual patients in particular treatment regimens, 2) a better mechanism to distribute new data relating to safety throughout the organization, and 3) a better decision-making environment to determine which drugs to pursue. Furthermore, semantic Web inferencing capabilities enable an intelligent decision support system or autonomous agent to reason about combined domain-specific and industry-specific knowledge and act on the conclusions drawn from this inferencing process.     

A continental philosophy perspective on knowledge management

Abstract.  Knowledge management is the computer's contribution to management 'science' and claims to be the successor of various trends in the business world, including, but not necessarily limited to information resources management, business process reengineering, management information systems and organizational memory. A number of definitions have been proposed for it. The very concept of knowledge used by knowledge management writers, however, is based on a dubious epistemology. This paper looks at the concept of knowledge from a continental perspective. With this perspective, we question whether what is being managed is, in fact, knowledge, and whether management will get business what it wants anyway.     

Process-aware approach for managing organisational knowledge

Knowledge is currently considered an asset for organisations. In this new paradigm, Knowledge Management (KM) is emerging as an unavoidable activity for organisations. Information and communications technologies, together with business policies, become a tool par excellence for supporting the creation of KM platforms that provide access to organisation knowledge resources such as workers, technical reports, software applications, and business documents. In spite of the benefits provided by current KM platforms, most of them were designed to manage a single type of knowledge (tacit or explicit) without considering either the form in which organisational areas need knowledge to be provided (reactive or proactive) or the integration with business processes. This work presents a process-aware approach to develop KM platforms linked to business processes with semantic capability to manage knowledge objects with natural language content as well as to support social interactions and ad hoc working groups. To this aim, a comprehensive analysis of influencing-KM factors to be addressed by technological solutions is considered by a set of technological requirements. Based on these requirements, a model that provides the main components to be addressed by KM approaches is specified and implemented by a technological platform. This platform goes after a balance between technological and social aspects that support and promote collaboration and communication among organisation members.     

Principles for organizing semantic relations in large knowledgebases

Defines principles for organizing semantic relations represented by slots in frame-structured knowledge bases. We organize slots based on the knowledge-level semantics of relations and the symbol-level function of slots that implement the representation language. The symbol-level organization of slots depends on the inferencing and expressive capabilities of the knowledge representation system. At the knowledge level, two entirely different organizational schemes are identified: one based on linguistic similarities and differences, and another based on the types of concepts being related     

基于代理和BPEL4WS的Web服务合成与实现

Web服务的交互和实现被推荐通过软件代理来实现.Web服务目前还不能很好地支持动态、自适应的服务组合和分布式业务流程.软件代理在建模、知识表达和交互等技术上的优势,能够强化Web服务的交互和动态应用能力.基于代理和面向流程建模的BPEL4WS,可以实现Web服务面向业务应用的合成与执行,支持多个协同的业务流程及其动态配置.系统分析了代理、BPEL4WS和Web服务整合的技术与实现方案,利用JADE平台开发了相关的测试模型,并且以网上拍卖为案例,验证了所提方案及实现.     

Commodity or competitive advantage? Analysis of the ERP value paradox

A true e-business enabled firm needs the support from a well-tuned enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for providing real time data. However, many companies complain that after their huge investments in ERP systems, they found the ERP systems do not bring them new orders, new profits, or competitive advantage as ERP vendors claim. Academic studies also found mixed results regarding ERP’s payoff. In line with resource based view (RBV), the study proposes an integrated model to shed light on the ERP value paradox. We try to answer “With what organizational resources and by building what firm specific capabilities, the investment in ERP systems may bring firms competitive advantage”. Using a sample of 150 ERP and e-business adopters in the US, we found that (1) organizational resources such as managerial skills and organizational change management play a more important role than IT resources (ERP, e-Business technologies) in generating business integration capability. (2) However, neither IT resources nor organizational resources directly provide firms with competitive advantage. Instead, business integration capability built from the two resources plays a mediating role through which business achieves competitive advantage.     

An integrated system for knowledge sharing among heterogeneous knowledge derivation systems

Solving problems in a complex application domain often requires a seamles integration of some existing knowledge derivation systems which have been independently developed for solving subproblems using different inferencing schemes. This paper presents the design and implementation of an Integrated Knowledge Derivation System (IKDS) which allows the user to query against a global database containing data derivable by the rules and constraints of a number of cooperative heterogeneous systems. The global knowledge representation scheme, the global knowledge manipulation language and the global knowledge processing mechanism of IKDS are described in detail. For global knowledge representation, the dynamic aspects of knowledge such as derivational relationships and restrictive dependencies among data items are modeled by a Function Graph to uniformly represent the capabilities (or knowledge) of the rule-based systems, while the usual static aspects such as data items and their structural interrelationships are modeled by an object-oriented model. For knowledge manipulation, three types of high-level, exploratory queries are introduced to allow the user to query the global knowledge base. For deriving the best global answers for queries, the global knowledge processing mechanism allows the rules and constraints in different component systems to be indiscriminately exploited despite the incompatibilities in their inferencing mechanisms and interpretation schemes. Several key algorithms required for the knowledge processing mechanism are described in this paper. The main advantage of this integration approach is that rules and constraints can in effect be shared among heterogeneous rule-based systems so that they can freely exchange their data and operate as parts of a single system. IKDS achieves the integration at the rule level instead of at the system level. It has been implemented in C running in a network of heterogenous component systems which contain three independently developed expert systems with different rule formats and inferencing mechanisms.Database Systems Research and Development Center, Department of Computer Information Sciences, Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Florida     

A knowledge-based supplier intelligence retrieval system for outsource manufacturing

Knowledge management is to promote business success through a formal, structured initiative to improve the use of knowledge in an organization, in which an effective organizational memory information system plays an increasingly important role. Unlike the past, the performance of an enterprise now depends much on the performance and relationship of its customer–suppliers in the value chain. Good customer–supplier relationships are important for an organization to respond to dynamic and unpredictable changes. This paper describes a knowledge-based supplier selection and evaluation system, which is a case-based reasoning decision support system for outsourcing operations at Honeywell Consumer Products (Hong Kong) Limited in China. As a result, collaborative suppliers are identified quickly during the new product development process. By using the system, the cumulative performance of suppliers is constantly updated automatically according to past practice. This means that the knowledge of suppliers can be retained, categorized, retrieved and managed effectively.     

A knowledge based decision support system for computer performance management

Computer systems managers make decisions about hardware and software selection, performance evaluation, capacity planning, and other resource variables on the basis of factual data, accounting data, subjective judgements, and assumptions about the resource consumption of the jobs being run. The importance of computer resource planning calls for effective support methods. A Knowledge-Based DSS (KBDSS) will be able to assist managers in making these policy decisions by utilizing knowledge of the existing configuration and its capabilities, the organizational computing environment, available external resources, and their suppliers. Combining procedural and declarative methods, such a KBDSS may provide early warning of possible bottlenecks, forecast growth of hardware usage, and employ knowledge based inferencing to suggest suitable remedial actions to the systems manager. This paper presents a KBDSS for supporting computer resource planning decisions using a procedural/declarative framework, and illustrates the system's usage aspects.     

Achieving dynamic capabilities with cloud computing: an empirical investigation

Cloud computing enables convenient and on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources. While cloud computing‘s ability to improve operational efficiency has gained much attention in the literature, there has been limited research on how it can help organizations achieve dynamic capabilities. Drawing from dynamic capabilities theory, we conducted a field study using a multiple case study design to examine the following research question: How do organizations achieve dynamic capabilities by using Cloud Computing? We develop a framework that explains how organizations respond to market dynamism by developing sense-and-response strategies that enable them to achieve dynamic capabilities using business process redesign, business network redesign, and business scope redefinition. We discuss how these transformations, in turn, improve organizational outcomes such as service effectiveness and efficiency. Our study also identifies factors that support and hinder the development of dynamic capabilities. Our study contributes to the literature on dynamic capabilities by examining how IT capabilities like cloud computing may accelerate the ability of an organization to achieve dynamic capabilities. We also identify transformational changes of business processes and inter-organizational networks that are enabled by cloud computing. Further, we identify how the essential characteristics of cloud computing support sense and respond strategies.     

Case-Based Knowledge Management Tools for Software Development

Modern software development is a knowledge-intensive activity. The proliferation of development tools, rapidly changing technology, and increasing complexity and diversity of application domains all increase the cognitive burden placed on software developers. General purpose programming languages and CASE tools offer little relief from these problems. Knowledge management tools are needed that can effectively capture and disseminate software development knowledge that applies to the domain-specific needs of an organization. This knowledge is not static, but evolves with technology and the changing needs of the organizations development practices, customer base, and business milieu.This paper presents an infrastructure that supports evolving knowledge through case-based techniques and domain analysis methods that capture emerging knowledge and synthesize it into generally applicable forms. The approach is less concerned with the veracity of knowledge in its repository than evolving the knowledge toward answers to problems that fit the organizations technical and business context. Implications of this approach go beyond supporting software development to other knowledge-intensive professions where knowledge management tools can be used to support an organizational memory.