Agility through scenario development and continuous implementation: a global aftermarket logistics case

This paper examines a business and IS/IT initiative at Volvo that involves managing the development and implementation of an agile aftermarket supply chain. The case is based on Volvo's global initiative to create a platform, Web services, and a Web portal for selling spare parts over the Internet. Creating and integrating a new platform is difficult, and establishing new relations in global aftermarket logistics is even more challenging. Agility relates to an organisation's ability to sense and respond rapidly to unpredictable events in order to satisfy changing customer demands. Volvo's effort illustrates agility as achieved by working continuously with scenario development and keeping implementation projects to a comprehendible size in order to nurture learning. The effort involved direct actions to manage both the technology and the relations among supply chain actors. As this case shows, continuous implementation projects can deliver innovation in new relations and through new channels – particularly if projects address agility from the start.     

Agility

Aus der Kunst, Software zu erstellen, wurde in den letzten 30 Jahren mehr und mehr eine Ingenieurdisziplin. Die Kunst wurde ersetzt durch Methoden und Verfahren für Analyse, Design, Programmierung, Projektmanagement, Änderungs-, Konfigurations- und Qualitätsmanagement. Diese wurden und werden ständig weiter optimiert und präzisiert.     

Mediating debate through on-line large-scale argumentation: Evidence from the field

Web 2.0 technologies, such as forums and wikis, are enabling an explosion of global knowledge sharing through distributed large-scale conversations, but they seem to be less successful at supporting collaborative deliberation around complex and controversial questions. In order to cope with this limitation, many scholars have proposed to adopt on-line argumentation platforms to improve information visualization, organization and reuse. However, such research has mostly focused on the design of adequate argument-based knowledge formalisms. Less attention has been paid to the empirical analysis of actual interactions mediated by argumentation technology with reasonably large user communities. In this paper, we present an in-depth analysis of the data obtained in the empirical test of an argumentation platform where a 160-member community created, in 3 weeks, what is to our knowledge the largest single online argument map ever built (around 5000 posts). Our results show that (i) users were able to quickly and comprehensively explore and map the debate on the selected discussion topic; (ii) substantial moderation was needed to ensure that the argument map was well-organized and users were confident with the argumentation formalism; (iii) considerable out-of-the map communication occurred, possibly as a way to allow for conversational flows inhibited by the argumentation formalism, (iv) formal rating of contributions favored exploration of the map, understanding the debate structure, and improving the quality of content.     

Management: a scientific discipline for humanity

This paper proposed a new concept of management: Managing According to Reason (MR). Since “manage” means to lead, plan, organize and control, and “reason” means to understand the law of the development of objects being managed, this new concept is an integration of the two elements of “managing” and “reason”. MR studies the contradictory relationship between “managing” and “reason”, and considers how such a relationship changes and develops. MR is an integration of the disciplines of management, philosophy, natural science, engineering technology, and social science. We believe the MR is a comprehensive scientific discipline that will greatly benefit humanity. Since “management” cannot work without power, while “reason” relies on science, MR is an integration of power and science. Power is MR’s assurance, and science is MR’s basis. We believe that MR will play a major role in twenty-first century.     

Collaborative networks: a new scientific discipline

Collaborative networks manifest in a large variety of forms, including virtual organizations, virtual enterprises, dynamic supply chains, professional virtual communities, collaborative virtual laboratories, etc. A large body of empiric knowledge related to collaborative networks is already available, but there is an urgent need to consolidate this knowledge and build the foundations for a more sustainable development of this area. The establishment of a scientific discipline for collaborative networks is a strong instrument in achieving this purpose. In this article the main characteristics of a “discipline” are analyzed in the context of collaborative networks, showing that the pre-conditions necessary for building this new discipline are available.     

Agility and Respect

The Agile values are ethical values. The author describes four values that form the basis of agility and challenges the computing profession to pursue these values.     

Architecture Meets Agility

The concept of architecture has a major role to play in expanding the traditional scope of agile software development.     

Providing traffic smoothness and service guarantees within ATM networks through a rate-controlled service discipline

With the introduction of diverse rate requirements under a variety of statistical multiplexing schemes, traffic burstiness behavior of a source stream and its quality-of-service (QoS) performances within the ATM networks become difficult to model and analyze. In this paper, we address this issue and propose a rate-controlled service discipline that provides control of the traffic burstiness while maintaining QoS guarantees for traffic flows with various rate requirements. According to our analysis, traffic streams from different connections can be well regulated at the output of each network node based on their rate requirements. Traffic envelope and the associated burstiness behavior inside the network can thus be effectively characterized. In addition, by assuming a leaky-bucket constrained input source, we prove that the proposed scheme can provide end-to-end delay and jitter bounds for each connection passing through a multi-hop network. Further, due to the low traffic burstiness, only a small buffer space is required at the internal switches for guaranteeing QoS requirements.     

SOA与企业的业务敏捷性

在对当前企业应用系统复杂性等问题的分析基础上,提出了最新的面向服务的体系架构.该架构具有松耦合、真正意义上的平台独立性和语言独立性等优势,可以提高企业敏捷性、提供灵活的IT基本架构以迎合快速变化的市场需求.并给出建立企业面向服务体系架构(SOA)的解决步骤.     

RCDA: Architecting as a risk- and cost management discipline

We propose to view architecting as a risk- and cost management discipline. This point of view helps architects identify the key concerns to address in their decision making, by providing a simple, relatively objective way to assess architectural significance. It also helps business stakeholders to align the architect's activities and results with their own goals. We examine the consequences of this point of view on the architecture process. The point of view is the basis of RCDA, the Risk- and Cost Driven Architecture approach. So far, more than 150 architects have received RCDA training. For a majority of the trainees, RCDA has a significant positive impact on their architecting work.     

Undergraduate software engineering education: the mark of a discipline

Undergraduate software engineering education is now well established in many countries, and many of these degree programs have received formal accreditation by the relevant country's professional body for computing. SE 2004 represents an enormous effort by numerous individuals across the discipline. Its quality has been clearly recognized by the sponsoring organizations. The developmental team confidently looks forward to the volume's use and to your participation in future evaluations and in the next phase of development. The volume provides usable results for those in emerging economies who wish to enter the software engineering community, and we know that individual project members and the participating national bodies are ready to assist.     

商业竞争催生敏捷包装

纵览在五年之前,商务决策还非常容易。由于包装成本越来越高,包装消费品(CPG)生产商现在需要考虑是进行外购还是调整生产线。CPG生产商面临的最大问题包括:商品价格高涨、货币波动、通胀压力以及可持续性,而原始材料价格、客户购买习惯和监管机制现今都在飞快的变化。     

Toward a discipline of software engineering

Despite rapid changes in computing and software development, some fundamental ideas have remained constant. This article describes eight such concepts that together constitute a viable foundation for a software engineering discipline: abstraction, analysis and design methods and notations, user interface prototyping, modularity and architecture, software life cycle and process, reuse, metrics, and automated support     

Measuring Agility and Architectural Integrity

Most organizations that depend on software are pursuing more flexible architectures and more agile life-cycle processes to increase business flexibility. What does agility look like, and how do we measure it? A truly agile project or organization should experience changes that are more straightforward and more predictable. Consequently, improvements are best measured by gauging the change trends in software baselines. A well-accepted tenet of software engineering states, "The later you are in the life cycle, the more expensive things are to fix." This iron law, an artifact of a waterfall culture, should not apply if you have transformed to agile software delivery with a well-architected system. This bold assertion is the root of the metric patterns presented in this paper.     

On the Measurement of Enterprise Agility

Agility metrics are difficult to define in general, mainly due to the multidimensionality and vagueness of the concept of agility itself. In this paper, a knowledge-based framework is proposed and presented as a candidate solution for the measurement and assessment of manufacturing agility. Given an enterprise, in order to calculate its overall agility, a set of quantitatively defined agility parameters is proposed and grouped into production, market, people and information infrastructures. The combined, resulting, measure incorporates the individual and grouped infrastructure agility parameters and their variations into one calculated value of the overall agility. The necessary expertise used to quantitatively determine and measure individual agility parameters is represented via fuzzy logic terminology that allows for human-like knowledge representation and reasoning. An example demonstrates the feasibility and applicability of the proposed approach.     

The emergence of a discipline: Automatic control 1940–1960

The period 1940–1960 saw an enormous growth in both the theory and practice of automatic control, a growth which led in 1957 to the founding of IFAC. This paper examines some of the organizational developments which took place in Britain and the U.S.A. and which accompanied and helped to foster the growth of automatic control as a distinct discipline. It provides an account of government and professional institution activities and of the establishment of standards, the publication of books and bibliographies and the response of the public to automatic control.