Towards a capability and maturity model for Collaborative Software-as-a-Service

Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering - Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has been attracting providers and customers due to the facilities of cloud computing and the outsourcing of IT...     

A design-time data-centric maturity model for assessing resilience in multi-party business processes

Nowadays, every business organization operates in ecosystems and cooperation is mandatory. If, on the one hand, this increases the opportunities for the involved organizations, on the other hand, every business partner is a potential source of failures with impacts on the entire ecosystem. To avoid that these failures, which are local to one of the organizations, would block the whole cooperation, resilience is a feature that multi-party business processes currently support at run-time, to cope with unplanned situations caused by those failures.In this work, we consider awareness of resilience in multi-party business processes during design-time, by focusing on the role of available – as an alternative to unreliable – data as a resource for increasing resiliency, as data exchange usually drives the cooperation among the parties. In fact, a proper analysis of involved data allows the process designer to identify (possible) failures, their impact, and thus improve the process model at the outset. A maturity model for resilience awareness is proposed, based on a modeling notation extending OMG CMMN — Case Management Model and Notation, and it is organized in different resiliency levels, which allow designers (i) to model at an increasing degree of detail how data and milestones should be defined in order to have resilient by-design process models and (ii) to quantify the distance between a process model and the complete achievement of a resiliency level.     

Towards a unifying domain model of construction safety,health and well-being: SafeConDM

Specific occupational construction safety, health, and well-being related knowledge and information are scattered and fragmented. Despite technological advancements of information and knowledge management, a link between safety management and information models is still missing. In this paper we present first steps towards a unifying formal (logic-based) domain model of construction safety, called SafeConDM, that consists of: (1) a semantically rich ontology of hazard, safety concepts, and concept relationships that builds on, and integrates with, existing construction safety ontologies and building information models; (2) a set of first-order if-then rules linking construction site states with the potential for specific hazards to occur that we define in a novel way using spatial artefacts. We present a prototype software tool, based on our ASP4BIM tool that implements SafeConDM for construction hazard analysis and safe construction planning decision support, and empirically evaluate our tool on three real-world construction building models.     

Towards a model for assessing workers' risks resulting from the implementation of information and communication systems and technologies

The authors investigate the effects of information and communication systems and technologies (ICST) on workers' health and safety. A multidisciplinary and convergent perspective is used to define a model that evaluates the risks associated with the implementation of any information system. The model incorporates the organizational, individual, and social elements that affect workers' risks. Special attention has been paid to the incorporation of ergonomic and organizational factors including culture, technological change, and informatics ethics. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Hum Factors Man 16: 39–59, 2006.     

The maturity of maturity model research: A systematic mapping study

ContextMaturity models offer organizations a simple but effective possibility to measure the quality of their processes. Emerged out of software engineering, the application fields have widened and maturity model research is becoming more important. During the last two decades the publication amount steadily rose as well. Until today, no studies have been available summarizing the activities and results of the field of maturity model research.ObjectiveThe objective of this paper is to structure and analyze the available literature of the field of maturity model research to identify the state-of-the-art research as well as research gaps.MethodA systematic mapping study was conducted. It included relevant publications of journals and IS conferences. Mapping studies are a suitable method for structuring a broad research field concerning research questions about contents, methods, and trends in the available publications.ResultsThe mapping of 237 articles showed that current maturity model research is applicable to more than 20 domains, heavily dominated by software development and software engineering. The study revealed that most publications deal with the development of maturity models and empirical studies. Theoretical reflective publications are scarce. Furthermore, the relation between conceptual and design-oriented maturity model development was analyzed, indicating that there is still a gap in evaluating and validating developed maturity models. Finally, a comprehensive research framework was derived from the study results and implications for further research are given.ConclusionThe mapping study delivers the first systematic summary of maturity model research. The categorization of available publications helps researchers gain an overview of the state-of-the-art research and current research gaps. The proposed research framework supports researchers categorizing their own projects. In addition, practitioners planning to use a maturity model may use the study as starting point to identify which maturity models are suitable for their domain and where limitations exist.     

Towards improving the navigability of Web applications: a model-driven approach

Navigability in use, defined as the efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction with which a user navigates through the system in order to fulfil her goals under specific conditions, has a definite impact on the overall success of Web applications. This quality attribute can be measured based on the navigational model (NM) provided by Web engineering (WE) methodologies. Most of the measures currently defined for NMs are tightly coupled with particular WE methodologies, however. Furthermore, modifications to the design of the NM, carried out with the aim of improving navigability, are performed manually. Both practices have seriously hampered the reusability and adoption of proposed navigability measures and improvement techniques. In this paper, we present a Model-Driven Engineering approach to solving these problems. On the one hand, we propose a generic approach for the definition of navigability measurement models that can be integrated into any WE methodology. On the other hand, we present a model-driven improvement process for the NM design that incurs no increase in costs or in time-to-market of Web applications. This process is divided into two phases: evaluation (i.e. assessment of the model through objective measures) and evolution (i.e. transformation of the model when the measurement results do not fall inside the boundaries set by certain quality decision criteria that have been defined previously).     

A measurement framework for assessing the maturity of requirements engineering process

Because requirements engineering (RE) problems are widely acknowledged as having a major impact on the effectiveness of the software development process, Sommerville et al. have developed a requirements maturity model. However, research has shown that the measurement process within Sommerville’s model is ambiguous, and implementation of his requirements maturity model leads to confusion. Hence, the objective of our research is to propose a new RE maturity measurement framework (REMMF) based on Sommerville’s model and to provide initial validation of REMMF. The main purpose of proposing REMMF is to allow us to more effectively measure the maturity of the RE processes being used within organisations and to assist practitioners in measuring the maturity of their RE processes. In order to evaluate REMMF, two organisations implemented the measurement framework within their IT divisions, provided us with an assessment of their requirements process and gave feedback on the REMMF measurement process. The results show that our measurement framework is clear, easy to use and provides an entry point through which the practitioners can effectively judge the strengths and weakness of their RE processes. When an organisation knows where it is, it can more effectively plan for improvement.

Educational computing technology transfer: Towards a non-magical approach

This paper focuses on trends in transferring educational computing technology. It emphasizes analyzing related magical ideas about educational uses of computers and the impact these ideas may have in developing countries. The paper concludes by analyzing critical aspects of technology transfer to be considered in order to really profit from the potential of computers in education and from related technology transfer.     

Essence of the capability maturity model

The CMM (Capability Maturity Model) wasn't intended to be all things to all people or cover all possible aspects of software and systems development. CMM was intended to provide one set of guidelines for managing software development projects and making improvements over time. This set of guidelines was based on best practices, software engineering discipline, real world experience and extrapolation from other industries. These guidelines were only meant to be tailored and applied within the culture and context of each unique organization     

Towards instance-dependent label noise-tolerant classification: a probabilistic approach

Pattern Analysis and Applications - Learning from labelled data is becoming more and more challenging due to inherent imperfection of training labels. Existing label noise-tolerant learning...     

An approach for sub-ontology evolution in a distributed health care enterprise

In response to the changing nature of health issues, standardized health ontologies such as SNOMED CT and UMLS incline to change more frequently than most other domain ontologies. Yet, semantic interoperability shared among institutions within a distributed health care enterprise relies heavily on the availability of a valid and up-to-date standardized ontology. In this paper, we propose the creation and preservation of sub-ontologies to deal with the frequent changes in health ontologies. Our approach focuses on the nature and characteristics of standard health ontologies, however it can also be applied to other domain ontologies with similar characteristics. Our sub-ontology evolution approach defines ways to create valid sub-ontologies for each specific health application, and to effectively develop a series of propagation mechanism when the main ontology changes. Our approach will (i) isolate the required change propagation to the relevant health applications that utilized the changing concepts only, and (ii) optimize the propagation mechanism to include the minimum number of operations only. Since a sub-ontology should be a valid ontology by itself, the change propagation approach used in this process should contain the rules to assure the validity of the produced sub-ontology while keeping the consistency of the sub-ontology to the evolved base ontology. A change identification process, which considers the nature of the health ontology change logs, is conducted to identify the semantics of the changes. From the evaluation, it is shown that the content of the evolved sub-ontologies produced using our approach is consistent to the evolved base ontology. Moreover, the propagation process can be performed more efficiently because the number of operations required for our change propagation method is lower than the number of operations required for direct re-extraction from the evolved base ontology.     

Towards a micro-ecological approach to CSCL

International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning - In this paper, we argue that how we use theories may be preventing us from developing a deeper understanding of computer...     

Towards Circular Economy implementation: an agent-based simulation approach for business model changes

This paper introduces an agent-based approach to study customer behavior in terms of their acceptance of new business models in Circular Economy (CE) context. In a CE customers are perceived as integral part of the business and therefore customer acceptance of new business models becomes crucial as it determines the successful implementation of CE. However, tools or methods are missing to capture customer behavior to assess how customers will react if an organization introduces a new business model such as leasing or functional sales. The purpose of this research is to bring forward a quantitative analysis tool for identifying proper marketing and pricing strategies to obtain best fit demand behavior for the chosen new business model. This tool will support decision makers in determining the impact of introducing new (circular) business models. The model has been developed using an agent-based modeling approach which delivers results based on socio-demographic factors of a population and customers’ relative preferences of product attributes price, environmental friendliness and service-orientation. The implementation of the model has been tested using the practical business example of a washing machine. This research presents the first agent-based tool that can assess customer behavior and determine whether introduction of new business models will be accepted or not and how customer acceptance can be influenced to accelerate CE implementation. The tool integrates socio-demographic factors, product utility functions, social network structures and inter-agent communication in order to comprehensively describe behavior on individual customer level. In addition to the tool itself the results of this research indicates the need for systematic marketing strategies which emphasize CE value propositions in order to accelerate customer acceptance and shorten the transition time from linear to circular. Agent-based models are emphasized as highly capable to fill the gap between diffusion-based penetration of information and resulting behavior in the form of purchase decisions.     

Understanding challenges in the front lines of home health care: A human-systems approach

A human-systems perspective is a fruitful approach to understanding home health care because it emphasizes major individual components of the system – persons, equipment/technology, tasks, and environments – as well as the interaction between these components. The goal of this research was to apply a human-system perspective to consider the capabilities and limitations of the persons, in relation to the demands of the tasks and equipment/technology in home health care. Identification of challenges and mismatches between the person(s) capabilities and the demands of providing care provide guidance for human factors interventions. A qualitative study was conducted with 8 home health Certified Nursing Assistants and 8 home health Registered Nurses interviewed about challenges they encounter in their jobs. A systematic categorization of the challenges the care providers reported was conducted and human factors recommendations were proposed in response, to improve home health. The challenges inform a human-systems model of home health care.     

Towards a journalist-based news recommendation system: The Wesomender approach

The present paper introduces a context-aware recommendation system for journalists to enable the identification of similar topics across different sources. More specifically a journalist-based recommendation system that can be automatically configured is presented to exploit news according to expert preferences. News contextual features are also taken into account due to the their special nature: time, current user interests, location or existing trends are combined with traditional recommendation techniques to provide an adaptive framework that deals with heterogeneous data providing an enhanced collaborative filtering system. Since the Wesomender approach is able to generate context-aware recommendations in the journalism field, a quantitative evaluation with the aim of comparing Wesomender results with the expectations of a team of experts is also performed to show that a context-aware adaptive recommendation engine can fulfil the needs of journalists daily work when retrieving timely and primary information is required.     

Experiences with the capability maturity model in a research environment

This paper describes a project aimed at the evaluation of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) in the context of a research organization. The evaluation was done at the Winand Staring Centre (a Dutch research organization). Part of the evaluation was a standard CMM-assessment. It was found that CMM could be applied to a research organization, although its five maturity levels were considered to be rather rigid. It was felt to be a disadvantage, especially by management, that business goals were not explicitly taken into account by CMM. It turned out that the process of doing an assessment is more important than the assessment itself! The assessment process introduced to the organization a language which encouraged discussion of the software development process and its improvement. This topic was hardly discussed before the assessment.     

Measuring e-business performance: Towards a revised balanced scorecard approach

The balanced scorecard (BSC) is a management system that enables executives and managers to map their strategic objectives onto a set of performance measures in four inter-related areas, known as the financial, customer, learning and growth, and the internal process perspectives. Based on research into leading and lagging e-business companies and their measurement practices, this paper introduces an approach to modifying the balanced scorecard, applicable to the management of e-business units in which the customer perspective of the traditional balanced score card is supplemented by the incorporation of four additional perspectives (brand, service, market and technology) that have been found to be critical to the development and execution of e-business strategies. This approach facilitates a clearer understanding of the customer perspective, which consequently benefits the process of selecting the goals and measures associated with the other three perspectives, improving the quality of the overall decision-making and managerial processes as a whole.     

Towards a uniform cooperative platform: Cova approach and experience

A cooperative platform called Cova is presented, which aims to uniformly model a wide range of cooperation scenarios and to reduce the groupware design and development work. To achieve these goals, Cova provides two facilities, namely a specification language for developers to describe various cooperation modes uniformly and a run-time system that provides some general-purposed services guaranteeing the semantics specified. With these facilities, the developers can then concentrate on the application specific functions rather than the control mechanisms. There-fore, the development efficiency is promoted. This paper details the design and implementation issues of the platform including the model and the specification language, platform architecture,transaction management, service integration and so on. Application development with Cova plat-form is also covered.     

Towards a conceptual framework for assessing the effectiveness of digital game-based learning

In recent years, interest has grown in the systematic assessment of the effectiveness of digital game-based learning (DGBL). A conceptual framework describing what effectiveness means in the context of DGBL and which are its subcomponents has hitherto been lacking however. Hence, the goal of this paper is to propose a conceptualization and operationalization of effectiveness rooted in social-cognitive theory. In order to identify desired outcomes and be able to operationalize effectiveness, focus groups were organized with three stakeholder groups following a user requirements analysis methodology.Results indicate that three categories of desired outcomes can be distinguished: learning, motivational and efficiency outcomes. For the different outcomes, different subcomponents can be extracted which can be organized hierarchically. Learning outcomes that are seen as relevant to the effectiveness of DGBL are 1) increased interest in the subject matter, 2) improvement in objective performance (e.g., in a test), and 3) transfer, referring to the player's ability to apply acquired knowledge or skills to real-world situations. Relevant motivational outcomes concern 1) enjoyment, the extent to which playing the game evoked an enjoyable experience, and 2) increased motivation to learn using DGBL. Efficiency outcomes relevant to DGBL effectiveness, finally, are related to 1) time management and 2) cost-effectiveness. Overall, it can be stated that a DGBL intervention is effective when it achieves similar or higher scores compared to other instructional methods in relation to any of the above mentioned outcomes without significantly (in the common, not the statistical sense) diminishing any of the others.     

Towards a quantitative approach for comparing crowds

In this paper, we propose a new model to quantitatively compare global flow characteristics of two crowds. The proposed approach explores a 4‐D histogram that contains information on the local velocity (speed and orientation) of each spatial position, and the comparison is made using histogram distances. The 4‐D histogram also allows the comparison of specific characteristics, such as distribution of orientations only, speed only, relative spatial occupancy only, and combinations of such features. Experimental results indicate that the proposed quantitative metric correlates with visual inspection. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.