Information technology and the search for organizational agility: A systematic review with future research possibilities

Organizations are increasingly turning to information technology (IT) to help them respond to unanticipated environmental threats and opportunities. In this paper, we introduce a systematic review of the literature on IT-enabled agility, helping to establish the boundary between what we know and what we don’t know. We base our review on a wide body of literature drawn from the AIS Basket of Eight IT journals, a cross-section of non-Basket journals, IT practitioner outlets, and premier international IS conferences. We review the use of different theoretical lenses used to investigate the relationship between IT and organizational agility and how the literature has conceptualized agility, its antecedents, and consequences. We also map the evolution of the literature through a series of stages that highlight how researchers have built on previous work. Lastly, we discuss opportunities for future research in an effort to close important gaps in our understanding.     

Fetal phonocardiography--past and future possibilities

The paper presents an overview of the 15 year long development of fetal phonocardiography including the works on the applied signal processing methods for identification of sound components. Based on the improvements achieved on this field, the paper shows that beyond the traditional CTG test the phonocardiography may be successfully applied for long-term fetal measurements and home monitoring. In addition, by indication of heart murmurs based on a comprehensive analysis of the recorded heart sound congenital heart defects can also be detected together with additional features in the third trimester. This makes an early widespread screening possible combined with the prescribed CTG test even at home using a telemedicine system.     

GSL: a requirements specification language for end-user intelligibility

Software Requirements Specifications (SRS) have been used to fill the communication gap between systems analysts and the end-users. SRSs should satisfy the needs of both systems analysts and end-users. Non-technical end-users require intelligible SRSs while systems analysts need more precise, clear and concise SRSs. Object-oriented methods cannot represent temporal relations between events precisely. However, object-oriented principles are widely used in systems analysis and designing. Hence, there is a need for a software requirements specification language which supports object-oriented analysis methods, represents temporal knowledge precisely and whose representation scheme resembles natural languages. The specification language presented in this paper, GSL, is designed to meet the above requirements. The language is based on First-order Temporal Logic (FTL), which has temporal operators in addition to classical logical connectives and quantifiers. Since FTL cannot represent relative temporal knowledge and it inherits problems with point-based time models, a new logical connective TAND and redefined AND connective are used to represent relative temporal knowledge and to solve the problems with FTL. The language employs object-oriented principles: events, conditions, rules and activities can be represented as objects as well as attributes of an object. However, systems analysts can decide whether to use object-oriented conceptual modeling or not. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Drivers' communicative interactions: on-road observations and modelling for integration in future automation systems

Social interactions with other road users are an essential component of the driving activity and may prove critical in view of future automation systems; still up to now they have received only limited attention in the scientific literature. In this paper, it is argued that drivers base their anticipations about the traffic scene to a large extent on observations of social behaviour of other ‘animate human-vehicles’. It is further argued that in cases of uncertainty, drivers seek to establish a mutual situational awareness through deliberate communicative interactions. A linguistic model is proposed for modelling these communicative interactions. Empirical evidence from on-road observations and analysis of concurrent running commentary by 25 experienced drivers support the proposed model. It is suggested that the integration of a social interactions layer based on illocutionary acts in future driving support and automation systems will improve their performance towards matching human driver's expectations.

Practitioner Summary: Interactions between drivers on the road may play a significant role in traffic coordination. On-road observations and running commentaries are presented as empirical evidence to support a model of such interactions; incorporation of drivers' interactions in future driving support and automation systems may improve their performance towards matching driver's expectations.     

Vibes: A visual language for specifying behavioral requirements of algorithms

Manually verifying the behavior of software systems with respect to a set of requirements is a time-consuming and error-prone task. If the verification is automatically performed by a model checker however, time can be saved, and errors can be prevented. To be able to use a model checker, requirements need to be specified using a formal language. Although temporal logic languages are frequently used for this purpose, they are neither commonly considered to have sufficient usability, nor always naturally suited for specifying behavioral requirements of algorithms. Such requirements can be naturally specified as regular language recognizers such as deterministic finite accepters, which however suffer from poor evolvability: the necessity to re-compute the recognizer whenever the alphabet of the underlying model changes. In this paper, we present the visual language Vibes that both is naturally suited for specifying behavioral requirements of algorithms, and enables the creation of highly evolvable specifications. Based on our observations from controlled experiments with 23 professional software engineers and 21 M.Sc. computer science students, we evaluate the usability of Vibes in terms of its understandability, learnability, and operability. This evaluation suggests that Vibes is an easy-to-use language.     

A requirements modeling language and its logic

This paper describes some aspects of a Requirements Modeling Language (RML) which can be used in the initial phases of software development. RML is based on the idea that a requirements specification should embody a conceptual world model and that the language for expressing it should provide facilities for organizing and abstracting details, yet at the same time have qualities such as precision, consistency and clarity.RML has a number of novel features including assertion classes, the treatment of time and various abbreviation techniques, all integrated into one uniform object-oriented framework. The precise semantics of these and other features are provided in this paper by relating RML to a logic involving time. This demonstrates that a language can offer highly structured and convenient mechanisms for requirements specifications while having solid mathematical underpinnings.     

Present and future possibilities within computer aided design

In this paper a survey of the computer field developments as regards functions, performance and costs is given. The implications of these developments to computer aided design are then presented. Finally the possibilities of designing and implementing fully automated integrated systems for computer aided design are discussed.Although emphasis in this paper will be put on structural design, examples from other areas are given in order to illustrate the potentialities of the general methods.     

WebSpec: a visual language for specifying interaction and navigation requirements in web applications

Web application development is a complex and time-consuming process that involves different stakeholders (ranging from customers to developers); these applications have some unique characteristics like navigational access to information, sophisticated interaction features, etc. However, there have been few proposals to represent those requirements that are specific to Web applications. Consequently, validation of requirements (e.g., in acceptance tests) is usually informal and as a result troublesome. To overcome these problems, we present WebSpec, a domain-specific language for specifying the most relevant and characteristic requirements of Web applications: those involving interaction and navigation. We describe WebSpec diagrams, discussing their abstraction and expressive power. With a simple though realistic example, we show how we have used WebSpec in the context of an agile Web development approach discussing several issues such as automatic test generation, management of changes in requirements, and improving the understanding of the diagrams through application simulation.     

The evolution from CAD/CAM to CIM: possibilities, problems and strategies for the future

Many manufacturing companies, and even entire industry segments, are approaching critical phases in their quest for improved productivity and market share. Computer assistance in engineering and manufacturing offers significant potential as a technological resource. Despite significant investment in isolated applications of CAD/CAM to present operations, with some notable success stories, broad penetration is spotty and many current barriers exist to effective implementation. At the same time, rapid technology advances are providing a realistic future goal of linking CAD/CAM with other computer-based methods (MRP, AMH, ROBOTICS, GT) to achieve Computer integrated manufacturing (CIM). CIM-implementation is being driven by some forces and hindered by others in the industrial environment. The paper examines the key factors influencing the evolution from CAD/CAM to CIM. It is shown that a companywide strategic planning perspective—where CIM is linked to overall corporate objectives and interacts with related planning issues of marketing, organization, investment and human resources—is necessary to achieve maximum integration and full corporate benefit. Management of CIM as a strategic instrument also provides a clearer framework for deriving detailed CIM-implementation and operational plan. The paper concludes by reviewing methodologies for planning and controlling effective CIM-implementation.     

Human language technologies for knowledge management

Knowledge management has changed the way we look at knowledge in the current economy; it is a key factor in an enterprise's success or failure. In contrast to what we as engineers typically love, KM puts people first organizational issues second, and technology third. Seriously considering these issues to produce a successful KM system leads to at least three requirements. We must: encourage employees to participate; integrate KM with current organizational practice; and provide the natural tools such that people can easily recognize the benefits, align with current organizational practices, and use the system. The natural choice of substance for such a KM system is human language, and the required tools are based on human language understanding. As we all know, comprehensive human language understanding is out of reach for the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, although the knowledge system's substance is language and complete human language understanding is out of reach, the system need not be restricted to text nor the tools restricted to a keyword-based search. Human language technology can and should do better. The article elaborates on the interaction between human language technology and KM to achieve this goal.     

Software requirements as an application domain for natural language processing

Mapping functional requirements first to specifications and then to code is one of the most challenging tasks in software development. Since requirements are commonly written in natural language, they can be prone to ambiguity, incompleteness and inconsistency. Structured semantic representations allow requirements to be translated to formal models, which can be used to detect problems at an early stage of the development process through validation. Storing and querying such models can also facilitate software reuse. Several approaches constrain the input format of requirements to produce specifications, however they usually require considerable human effort in order to adopt domain-specific heuristics and/or controlled languages. We propose a mechanism that automates the mapping of requirements to formal representations using semantic role labeling. We describe the first publicly available dataset for this task, employ a hierarchical framework that allows requirements concepts to be annotated, and discuss how semantic role labeling can be adapted for parsing software requirements.     

Formal logical language to set requirements for secure code execution

Presently, a special attention is paid to the problem of information security when designing and using objects of critical information infrastructure. One of the most common approaches used to secure the information processed on these objects is the creation of an isolated program environment (sandbox). The security of the environment is determined by its invariability. However, the evolutionary development of data processing systems makes it necessary to implement new components and software in this environment on the condition that the security requirements are met. In this case, the most important requirement is trust in a new program code. This paper is devoted to developing a formal logical language to describe functional requirements for program code that allows one to impose further constraints at the stage of static analysis, as well as to control their fulfillment in dynamics.     

Requirements for tools for ambiguity identification and measurement in natural language requirements specifications

This paper proposes a two-step approach to identifying ambiguities in natural language (NL) requirements specifications (RSs). In the first step, a tool would apply a set of ambiguity measures to a RS in order to identify potentially ambiguous sentences in the RS. In the second step, another tool would show what specifically is potentially ambiguous about each potentially ambiguous sentence. The final decision of ambiguity remains with the human users of the tools. The paper describes several requirements-identification experiments with several small NL RSs using four prototypes of the first tool based on linguistic instruments and resources of different complexity and a manual mock-up of the second tool.

Testing the predictive ability of a requirements pattern language

This paper looks at a case study in the commercial procurement of an IT system to support learners on short educational courses. It compares the use case model created before the system was built with the use case model after the system was delivered. The original use case model was created through the application of a requirements pattern language designed to be employed during the procurement phase of an IT system. The final use case model was reverse engineered from the working application. The objective was to discover how accurately the original model represented the final application to provide a measure of the potential usefulness of the pattern language during procurement.