一种提高系统柔性的工作流模型

为了提高工作流管理系统的柔性以满足现代企业多变的业务需求,本文基于活动网络图提出一种完全面向企业用户的工作流建模方法,给出其形式化定义,构建一个工作流模型,并结合一个抽象的流程示意图重点论述其演进规则。在此工作流模型的基础上开发的工作流管理系统的使用情况表明,它完全满足客户多变的实际需求。     

User,Use & Utility Research

Business and Information Systems Engineering (BISE) is at a turning point. Planning, designing, developing and operating IT used to be a management task of a few elites in public administrations and corporations. But the continuous digitization of nearly all areas of life changes the IT landscape fundamentally. Success in this new era requires putting the human perspective – the digital user – at the very heart of the new digitized service-led economy. BISE faces not just a temporary trend but a complex socio-technical phenomenon with far-reaching implications. The challenges are manifold and have major consequences for all stakeholders, both in information systems and management research as well as in practice. Corporate processes have to be re-designed from the ground up, starting with the user’s perspective, thus putting usage experience and utility of the individual center stage. The digital service economy leads to highly personalized application systems while organizational functions are being fragmented. Entirely new ways of interacting with information systems, in particular beyond desktop IT, are being invented and established. These fundamental challenges require novel approaches with regards to innovation and development methods as well as adequate concepts for enterprise or service system architectures. Gigantic amounts of data are being generated at an accelerating rate by an increasing number of devices – data that need to be managed. In order to tackle these extraordinary challenges we introduce ‘user, use & utility’ as a new field of BISE that focuses primarily on the digital user, his or her usage behavior and the utility associated with system usage in the digitized service-led economy. The research objectives encompass the development of theories, methods and tools for systematic requirement elicitation, systems design, and business development for successful Business and Information Systems Engineering in a digitized economy – information systems that digital users enjoy using. This challenge calls for leveraging insights from various scientific disciplines such as Design, Engineering, Computer Science, Psychology and Sociology. BISE can provide an integrated perspective, thereby assuming a pivotal role within the digitized service led economy.     

Integrating TTF and IDT to evaluate user intention of big data analytics in mobile cloud healthcare system

ABSTRACT

With the rapid development of mobile technology and cloud computing, observers have recognised the vast potential for mobile cloud healthcare systems in individualised preventive healthcare. Using a mobile cloud healthcare system and big data analysis, this study aids young users in preventive healthcare against diabetes. It also integrates the Task-Technology Fit (TTF) and Innovation Diffusion Theory (IDT) models to evaluate user intentions to use the system, and tests this model using data collected from 423 young people. Results show that task-technology fit is significantly affected by task characteristics and technology characteristics, and also user intention of using the mobile cloud healthcare system is affected by task-technology fit, complexity, and relative benefits. However, observability has no significant effect on user intentions of using the mobile cloud healthcare system. These findings provide some interesting theoretical insights into the usage of the mobile cloud healthcare system. The direct effects of TTF and IDT on young users′ intention of using the mobile cloud healthcare system are shown. This study thus makes an important contribution by highlighting the role that TTF and IDT may have in affecting use of the mobile cloud healthcare system.     

Enhancing Workflow Management in the Manufacturing Information System of a Small-Medium Enterprise: An Agent-Based Approach

One shortcoming of manufacturing information systems is their inability to integrate and to enhance different information and related functionalities, such as those found in workflow management. Software agents, once added as a new software layer to an existing system, can overcome this problem. Of the fields applying software agent technology, manufacturing, and especially workflow management, is perhaps the most promising for the development of distributed systems. This potential is reflected in the several ongoing research projects that focus on workflow management and share the final aim of integrating and coordinating plant and business activities.The approach presented in this paper can be regarded as an agent-based architecture applied to an existing workflow management system in order to manage new functionalities, e.g., customer relationship management in electronic commerce. This approach is particularly suitable for small medium enterprises with simple manufacturing information requirements and simple or nonexistent computer based workflow management.The model and some important features of system implementation, such as the knowledge modeling graphical user interface, the communication model, and a simple practical example of the architecture's use, are described.     

基于J2EE开源工作流引擎JBPM的设计实现

结合工作流和J2EE方面的实践经验,建立基于J2EE架构的开放源代码的工作流管理系统JBPM及其工作流模型,并分析JBPM工作流引擎的流程运转过程。结合实际案例对JBPM工作流引擎的应用进行深入研究,使用JBPM工作流引擎进行工作流程的实现,提出Web应用程序和JBPM的整合方案,并且进行实际的流程测试取得正确的运行结果。     

SEAM: A state-entity-activity-model for a well-defined workflowdevelopment methodology

Current conceptual workflow models use either informally defined conceptual models or several formally defined conceptual models that capture different aspects of the workflow, e.g., the data, process, and organizational aspects of the workflow. To the best of our knowledge, there are no algorithms that can amalgamate these models to yield a single view of reality. A fragmented conceptual view is useful for systems analysis and documentation. However, it fails to realize the potential of conceptual models to provide a convenient interface to automate the design and management of workflows. First, as a step toward accomplishing this objective, we propose SEAM (State-Entity-Activity-Model), a conceptual workflow model defined in terms of set theory. Second, no attempt has been made, to the best of our knowledge, to incorporate time into a conceptual workflow model. SEAM incorporates the temporal aspect of workflows. Third, we apply SEAM to a real-life organizational unit's workflows. In this work, we show a subset of the workflows modeled for this organization using SEAM. We also demonstrate, via a prototype application, how the SEAM schema can be implemented on a relational database management system. We present the lessons we learned about the advantages obtained for the organization and, for developers who choose to use SEAM, we also present potential pitfalls in using the SEAM methodology to build workflow systems on relational platforms. The information contained in this work is sufficient enough to allow application developers to utilize SEAM as a methodology to analyze, design, and construct workflow applications on current relational database management systems. The definition of SEAM as a context-free grammar, definition of its semantics, and its mapping to relational platforms should be sufficient also, to allow the construction of an automated workflow design and construction tool with SEAM as the user interface     

A User‐based Visual Analytics Workflow for Exploratory Model Analysis

Many visual analytics systems allow users to interact with machine learning models towards the goals of data exploration and insight generation on a given dataset. However, in some situations, insights may be less important than the production of an accurate predictive model for future use. In that case, users are more interested in generating of diverse and robust predictive models, verifying their performance on holdout data, and selecting the most suitable model for their usage scenario. In this paper, we consider the concept of Exploratory Model Analysis (EMA), which is defined as the process of discovering and selecting relevant models that can be used to make predictions on a data source. We delineate the differences between EMA and the well‐known term exploratory data analysis in terms of the desired outcome of the analytic process: insights into the data or a set of deployable models. The contributions of this work are a visual analytics system workflow for EMA, a user study, and two use cases validating the effectiveness of the workflow. We found that our system workflow enabled users to generate complex models, to assess them for various qualities, and to select the most relevant model for their task.     

User Roles in Online Communities and Their Moderating Effect on Online Community Usage Intention: An Integrated Approach

Recently, it has been evident that the analysis of user data and content in online environments allows practitioners to understand how to motivate online community members and keep them frequently involved in the community, and so to manage these communities successfully. In this sense, practitioners should comprehend community members’ usage intentions to give a better service and to motivate them. However, different user types engage in such communities, so understanding their diverse needs is also essential for practitioners. In parallel, this article addresses the problem of the different user types existing in online communities, and each of them requires different strategies to be motivated and involved in the community. Thus, unlike previous studies, this study firstly identifies user roles in an online community based on the structural role theory, social network analysis, and community members’ contribution behavior. After that, it investigates members’ usage intentions based on the technology acceptance model and examines the moderating effect of identified user roles on their usage intentions. The study also guides practitioners to develop motivational strategies to keep each type of member continually satisfied.     

Behavioral intention,use behavior and the acceptance of electronic learning systems: Differences between higher education and lifelong learning

Widespread implementation of e-learning systems – learning management systems, virtual learning environments – across higher education institutions has aroused great interest on the study of e-learning acceptance. Acceptance studies focus on the predictors of system adoption and use, with behavioral intention to use the system as a proxy for actual use. This study proposes a TAM3-based model – with the inclusion of two additional variables: personal innovativeness in the domain of information technology and perceived interaction – to study the factors influencing the acceptance of e-learning systems. Attention is also brought towards the role of behavioral intention, especially in its relation with use behavior. In order to do so, two different settings were considered: higher education and lifelong learning; data was gathered from a survey administrated to Spanish graduate and lifelong learning students, and partial least squares analysis was used to test the research model. Results supported TAM relations, except for the intention-behavior linkage, and unveiled a dual nature of perceived usefulness – with one component related to efficiency and performance, and another component related to flexibility. The adequacy of applying TAM3-based models in educational contexts and suitability of actual system usage measures are also discussed.     

Investigating the success of operational business process management systems

Business process management systems (BPMS) belong to a class of enterprise information systems that are characterized by the dependence on explicitly modeled process logic. Through the process logic, it is relatively easy to manage explicitly the routing and allocation of work items along a business process through the system. Inspired by the DeLone and McLean framework, we theorize that these process-aware system features are important attributes of system quality, which in turn will elevate key user evaluations such as perceived usefulness, and usage satisfaction. We examine this theoretical model using data collected from four different, mostly mature BPM system projects. Our findings validate the importance of input quality as well as allocation and routing attributes as antecedents of system quality, which, in turn, determines both usefulness and satisfaction with the system. We further demonstrate how service quality and workflow dependency are significant precursors to perceived usefulness. Our results suggest the appropriateness of a multi-dimensional conception of system quality for future research, and provide important design-oriented advice for the design and configuration of BPMSs.     

Seeing the forest through the trees: A review of integrated environmental modelling tools

Today’s interconnected socio-economic and environmental challenges require the combination and reuse of existing integrated modelling solutions. This paper contributes to this overall research area, by reviewing a wide range of currently available frameworks, systems and emerging technologies for integrated modelling in the environmental sciences. Based on a systematic review of the literature, we group related studies and papers into viewpoints and elaborate on shared and diverging characteristics. Our analysis shows that component-based modelling frameworks and scientific workflow systems have been traditionally used for solving technical integration challenges, but ultimately, the appropriate framework or system strongly depends on the particular environmental phenomenon under investigation. The study also shows that – in general – individual integrated modelling solutions do not benefit from components and models that are provided by others. It is this island (or silo) situation, which results in low levels of model reuse for multi-disciplinary settings. This seems mainly due to the fact that the field as such is highly complex and diverse. A unique integrated modelling solution, which is capable of dealing with any environmental scenario, seems to be unaffordable because of the great variety of data formats, models, environmental phenomena, stakeholder networks, user perspectives and social aspects. Nevertheless, we conclude that the combination of modelling tools, which address complementary viewpoints – such as service-based combined with scientific workflow systems, or resource-modelling on top of virtual research environments – could lead to sustainable information systems, which would advance model sharing, reuse and integration. Next steps for improving this form of multi-disciplinary interoperability are sketched.     

产品数据管理系统的用户权限管理

通过对产品数据管理系统的分析，本文探讨了产品数据管理系统中数据、工作流程、活动、操作和角色之间的关系，提出了基于数据、工作流程、活动、操作和角色的用户权限管理的建模方法。通过在某航空企业PDM系统中建立用户权限管理模型的应用，证明了这种方法具有简单、规范、有效等特点，井可广泛应用于其它类型的复杂信息系统中。     

A Model of Green Acceptance and Intentions to Use Bike-Sharing: YouBike Users in Taiwan

With the emphasis on sustainability in transportation, bike-sharing systems are gaining popularity. This paper investigates the attitudes of users of a bike-sharing system with the aim of identifying their priorities, thus allowing local governments to focus their efforts most effectively on enhancing users’ intentions to use such systems. The relationships among green perceived usefulness (the extent to which individuals believe that a bike-sharing system will improve the environmental performance of some part of their life within a specific context), user attitude and perceived ease of use with green intentions, and the mediation effect of user attitude towards bike-sharing are explored. The focus of the study is on how to enhance green intentions via perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and user attitude of the green technology acceptance model (green TAM) (Davis 1989). The two-step approach of structural equation modeling was applied to analyze the empirical results, which indicated that green perceived usefulness and user attitude have positive influences on the green intentions of 262 users and 262 non-users from ten sampled bike-sharing sites around the central administrative districts of Taipei. However, user attitude has the highest mediation effect on green intentions, and perceived ease of use does not have a significant effect on intentions for either users or non-users. Therefore, governmental institutions can strive to improve the attitudes of bike-sharing users and non-users, their green perceived usefulness, and perceived ease of use to strengthen their intentions to use this mode of sustainable transportation.     

VisComplete: automating suggestions for visualization pipelines

Building visualization and analysis pipelines is a large hurdle in the adoption of visualization and workflow systems by domain scientists. In this paper, we propose techniques to help users construct pipelines by consensus--automatically suggesting completions based on a database of previously created pipelines. In particular, we compute correspondences between existing pipeline subgraphs from the database, and use these to predict sets of likely pipeline additions to a given partial pipeline. By presenting these predictions in a carefully designed interface, users can create visualizations and other data products more efficiently because they can augment their normal work patterns with the suggested completions. We present an implementation of our technique in a publicly-available, open-source scientific workflow system and demonstrate efficiency gains in real-world situations.     

工作流管理系统中的数据流传输优化

在分布式工作流程管理系统中,由于工作流引擎分散在不同的区域,因此工作流程中数据传输是一个值得研究的问题。本文提出了一种新型的分布式工作流管理系统中数据流的传输策略。定义了一个工作流模型表示法-控制与数据流图CDFG,用于观察数据流存在的问题;提出了具有数据流传输优化机制的工作流系统架构DTO DWfMS和支持该架构的数据流传输语言DFTL。利用DFTL设计者能够以程序设计的方式定义工作流中活动对数据的作用情形和活动之间的数据传输策略。利用该架构和语言设计的工作流系统具有最佳的数据传输功能,可在不需要等待程序代码、数据且正常的情况下完成工作流的执行,以降低网络的负载并提高整体执行效率。     

The puzzle of experience vs. memory: Peak-end theory and strategic gamification design in M-commerce

As businesses increasingly use gamified mobile marketing campaign (GMMC) systems to engage mobile shoppers, gamification in m-commerce systems warrants more attention in both IS research and design practices. Inspired by peak-end theory, this study focused on the puzzling differences between user experience vs. memory and empirically examined the impact of different experience orders of cognitive load on user perceptions and behavioral intentions. Overall, the outcomes of this research suggest that appropriate applications of the peak-end effect, moderated via users’ regulatory focus styles, can alleviate the negative mental utility imagery of users, reducing their perceived uncertainties and opt-out intentions from the GMMC. Important implications for research and practice are then discussed.     

面向电子政务的轻量级工作流引擎

分析了工作流管理系统的基本功能和研究现状,对当前流行的几种开源引擎进行了研究,指出了它们的不足.结合电子政务的实际应用,提出了一种轻量级的工作流引擎,并给出了该工作流系统的体系结构和相关设计.     

普适计算环境中基于群组特性的业务流程管理

局限于桌面设备的交互模式是制约业务流程管理在普适计算环境中广泛应用的主要因素.此外,日趋复杂和灵活的群组活动已成为当前企业业务流程的一个突出特点.传统的工作流管理系统从建模到运行对以上特性难以提供有效的支持.对通用工作流模型的表达能力和工作流运行机制进行扩展,设计并实现了一个具备用户多通道交互能力、支持多种群组协同活动的工作流管理系统.介绍了多通道交互的设计原理和针对群组活动的建模方法和运行机制,然后对应用中的一些结果和发现进行了讨论.     

Evaluating the value of collaboration systems in collocated teams: A longitudinal analysis

Distributed work structure has increased the importance of group work. Consequently, the usage of collaboration systems that support group work has increased exponentially. However, limited research exists on why collocated group members use collaborative system and how their perceptions about the system change from project initiation to project completion. The study proposes resource management support, coordination support, and evaluation support as key aspects based on which collocated users form beliefs about collaboration system value. Based on technology acceptance model and expectancy disconfirmation theory, we propose a model that examines the evolution of user beliefs from pre to post-adoption stage. Further, we argue that users may engage in different information processing strategies as part of the belief change process. The research model was examined based on longitudinal data collected from student groups working on a software application development project over a three month period. The results show that users deemed all features to be valuable at the pre-adoption stage. However, at the post-adoption stage evaluation support was the only factor that had a direct influence on collaboration system usefulness. While the impact of other support factors was mediated through the confirmation process. Further, users engaged in high information processing in revising their beliefs about collaboration system features, when they experienced a high level of dissonance. On the contrary, a dual information processing approach was visible in the context of support features that required adjustment or update to beliefs from pre to post-adoption stage. The study provides three core areas around which designers can structure collaboration system features to make it more useful. It also provides theoretical insights into the process through which user cognitions about collaboration system value change over time.     

Instrumentino: An open-source modular Python framework for controlling Arduino based experimental instruments

Instrumentino is an open-source modular graphical user interface framework for controlling Arduino based experimental instruments. It expands the control capability of Arduino by allowing instruments builders to easily create a custom user interface program running on an attached personal computer. It enables the definition of operation sequences and their automated running without user intervention. Acquired experimental data and a usage log are automatically saved on the computer for further processing. The use of the programming language Python also allows easy extension. Complex devices, which are difficult to control using an Arduino, may be integrated as well by incorporating third party application programming interfaces into the Instrumentino framework.