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Assistant platforms
(2023)
Many assistant systems have evolved toward assistant platforms. These platforms combine a range of resources from various actors via a declarative and generative interface. Among the examples are voice-oriented assistant platforms like Alexa and Siri, as well as text-oriented assistant platforms like ChatGPT and Bard. They have emerged as valuable tools for handling tasks without requiring deeper domain expertise and have received large attention with the present advances in generative artificial intelligence. In view of their growing popularity, this Fundamental outlines the key characteristics and capabilities that define assistant platforms. The former comprise a multi-platform architecture, a declarative interface, and a multi-platform ecosystem, while the latter include capabilities for composition, integration, prediction, and generativity. Based on this framework, a research agenda is proposed along the capabilities and affordances for assistant platforms.
Digitization transforms business process models and processes in many enterprises. However, many of them need guidance, how digitization is impacting the design of their information systems. Therefore, this paper investigates the influence of digitization on information system design. We apply a two-phase research method applying a literature review and an exploratory case study. The case study took place in the IT service provider of a large insurance enterprise. The study’s results suggest that a number of areas of information system design are affected, such as architecture, processes, data and services.
Excellence in IT is a key enabler for the digital transformation of enterprises. To realize the vision of digital enterprises it is necessary to cope with changing business requirements and to align business and IT. In order to evaluate the contribution of enterprise architecture management to these goals, our paper explores the impact of various factors to the perceived benefit of EAM in enterprises. Based on literature, we build an empirical research model. It is tested with empirical data of European EAM experts using a structural equation modelling approach. It is shown that changing business requirements, IT business alignment, the complexity of information technology infrastructure as well as enterprise architecture knowledge of information technology employees are crucial impact factors to the perceived benefit of EAM in enterprises.
Leveraging textual information for improving decision making in the business process lifecycle
(2015)
Business process implementations fail, because requirements are elicited incompletely. At the same time, a huge amount of unstructured data is not used for decision-making during the business process lifecycle. Data from questionnaires and interviews is collected but not exploited because the effort doing so is too high. Therefore, this paper shows how to leverage textual information for improving decision making in the business process lifecycle. To do so, text mining is used for analyzing questionnaires and interviews.
Digital enterprise architecture management in tourism : state of the art and future directions
(2018)
The advance of information technology impacts tourism more than many other industries, due to the service character of its products. Most offerings in tourism are immaterial in nature and challenging in coordination. Therefore, the alignment of IT and strategy and digitization is of crucial importance to enterprises in tourism. To cope with the resulting challenges, methods for the management of enterprise architectures are necessary. Therefore, we scrutinize approaches for managing enterprise architectures based on a literature research. We found many areas for future research on the use of enterprise architecture in tourism.
Business process models provide a considerable number of benefits for enterprises and organizations, but the creation of such models is costly and time-consuming, which slows down the organizational adoption of business process modeling. Social paradigms pave new ways for business process modeling by integrating stakeholders and leveraging knowledge sources. However, empirical research about the impact of social paradigms on costs of business process modeling is sparse. A better understanding of their impact could help to reduce the cost of business process modeling and improve decision-making on BPM activities. The paper constributes to this field by reporting about an empirical investigation via survey research on the perceived influence of different cost factors among experts. Our results indicate that different cost components, as well as the use of social paradigms, influence cost.
An enormous amount of data in the context of business processes is stored as images. They contain valuable information for business process management. Up to now this data had to be integrated manually into the business process. By advances of capturing it is possible to extract information from an increasing number of images. Therefore, we systematically investigate the potentials of Image Mining for business process management by a literature research and an in-depth analysis of the business process lifecycle. As a first step to evaluate our research, we developed a prototype for recovering process model information from drawings using Rapidminer.
Modern enterprises reshape and transform continuously by a multitude of management processes with different perspectives. They range from business process management to IT service management and the management of the information systems. Enterprise Architecture (EA) management seeks to provide such a perspective and to align the diverse management perspectives. Therefore, EA management cannot rely on hierarchic - in a tayloristic manner designed - management processes to achieve and promote this alignment. It, conversely, has to apply bottom-up, information-centered coordination mechanisms to ensure that different management processes are aligned with each other and enterprise strategy. Social software provides such a bottom-up mechanism for providing support within EAM-processes. Consequently, challenges of EA management processes are investigated, and contributions of social software presented. A cockpit provides interactive functions and visualization methods to cope with this complexity and enable the practical use of social software in enterprise architecture management processes.
Digitization is more than using digital technologies to transfer data and perform computations and tasks. Digitization embraces disruptive effects of digital technologies on economy and society. To capture these effects, two perspectives are introduced, the product and the value-creation perspective. In the product perspective, digitization enables the transition from material, static products to interactive and configurable services. In the value-creation perspective, digitization facilitates the transition from centralized, isolated models of value creation, to bidirectional, co-creation oriented approaches of value creation.
In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has increasingly become a relevant technology for many companies. While there are a number of studies that highlight challenges and success factors in the adoption of AI, there is a lack of guidance for firms on how to approach the topic in a holistic and strategic way. The aim of this study is therefore to develop a conceptual framework for corporate AI strategy. To address this aim, a systematic literature review of a wide spectrum of AI-related research is conducted, and the results are analyzed based on an inductive coding approach. An important conclusion is that companies should consider diverse aspects when formulating an AI strategy, ranging from technological questions to corporate culture and human resources. This study contributes to knowledge by proposing a novel, comprehensive framework to foster the understanding of crucial aspects that need to be considered when using the emerging technology of AI in a corporate context.
The goal of the presented project is to develop the concept of home e-health centers for barrier-free and cross-border telemedicine. AAL technologies are already present on the market but there is still a gap to close until they can be used for ordinary patient needs. The general idea needs to be accompanied by new services, which should be brought together in order to provide a full coverage of service for the users. Sleep and stress were chosen as predominant influence in the population. The executed scientific study of available home devices analyzing sleep has provided the necessary to select appropriate devices. The first choice for the project implementation is the device EMFIT QS+. This equipment provides a part of a complete system that a home telemedical hospital can provide at a level of precision and communication with internal and/or external health services.
An ongoing challenge in our days is to lower the impact on the quality of life caused by dysfunctionality through individual support. With the background of an aging society and continuous increases in costs for care, a holistic solution is needed. This solution must integrate individual needs and preferences, locally available possibilities, regional conditions, professional and informal caregivers and provide the flexibility to implement future requirements. The proposed model is a result of a common initiative to overcome the major obstacles and to center a solution on individual needs caused by dysfunctionality.
The digital twin concept has been widely known for asset monitoring in the industry for a long time. A clear example is the automotive industry. Recently, there has also been significant interest in the application of digital twins in healthcare, especially in genomics in what is known as precision medicine. This work focuses on another medical speciality where digital twins can be applied, sleep medicine. However, there is still great controversy about the fundamentals that constitute digital twins, such as what this concept is based on and how it can be included in healthcare effectively and sustainably. This article reviews digital twins and their role so far in what is known as personalized medicine. In addition, a series of steps will be exposed for a possible implementation of a digital twin for a patient suffering from sleep disorders. For this, artificial intelligence techniques, clinical data management, and possible solutions for explaining the results derived from artificial intelligence models will be addressed.
Modern component-based architectural styles, e.g., microservices, enable developing the components independently from each other. However, this independence can result in problems when it comes to managing issues, such as bugs, as developer teams can freely choose their technology stacks, such as issue management systems (IMSs), e.g., Jira, GitHub, or Redmine. In the case of a microservice architecture, if an issue of a downstream microservice depends on an issue of an upstream microservice, this must be both identified and communicated, and the downstream service’s issues should link to its causing issue. However, agile project management today requires efficient communication, which is why more and more teams are communicating through comments in the issues themselves. Unfortunately, IMSs are not integrated with each other, thus, semantically linking these issues is not supported, and identifying such issue dependencies from different IMSs is time-consuming and requires manual searching in multiple IMS technologies. This results in many context switches and prevents developers from being focused and getting things done. Therefore, in this paper, we present a concept for seamlessly integrating different IMS technologies into each other and providing a better architectural context. The concept is based on augmenting the websites of issue management systems through a browser extension. We validate the approach with a prototypical implementation for the Chrome browser. For evaluation, we conducted expert interviews, which approved that the presented approach provides significant advantages for managing issues of agile microservice architectures.
Medical applications are becoming increasingly important in the current development of health care and therefore a crucial part of the medical industry. The work focuses on the analysis of requirements and the challenges arisen from designing mobile medical applications in relation to the user interface. The paper describes the current status in the development of mobile medical apps and illustrates the development of e-health market. The author will explain the requirements and will illustrate the hurdles and problems. He refers to the German market which is similar to the European and compares that with the market in the USA.
This paper provides an introduction to the topic of enterprise social networks (ESN) and illustrates possible applications, potentials, and challenges for future research. It outlines an analysis of research papers containing a literature overview in the field of ESN. Subsequently, single relevant research papers are analysed and further research potentials derived therefrom. This yields seven promising areas for further research: (1) user behaviour; (2) effects of ESN usage; (3) management, leadership, and governance; (4) value assessment and success measurement; (5) cultural effects, (6) architecture and design of ESN; and (7) theories, research designs and methods. This paper characterises these areas and articulates further research directions.
Application systems often need to be deployed in different variants if requirements that influence their implementation, hosting, and configuration differ between customers. Therefore, deployment technologies, such as Ansible or Terraform, support a certain degree of variability modeling. Besides, modern application systems typically consist of various software components deployed using multiple deployment technologies that only support their proprietary, non-interoperable variability modeling concepts. The Variable Deployment Metamodel (VDMM) manages the deployment variability across heterogeneous deployment technologies based on a single variable deployment model. However, VDMM currently only supports modeling conditional components and their relations which is sometimes too coarse-grained since it requires modeling entire components, including their implementation and deployment configuration for each different component variant. Therefore, we extend VDMM by a more fine-grained approach for managing the variability of component implementations and their deployment configurations, e.g., if a cheap version of a SaaS deployment provides only a community edition of the software and not the enterprise edition, which has additional analytical reporting functionalities built-in. We show that our extended VDMM can be used to realize variable deployments across different individual deployment technologies using a case study and our prototype OpenTOSCA Vintner.
Near-Data Processing (NDP) is a key computing paradigm for reducing the ever growing time and energy costs of data transport versus computations. With their flexibility, FPGAs are an especially suitable compute element for NDP scenarios. Even more promising is the exploitation of novel and future non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies for NDP, which aim to achieve DRAM-like latencies and throughputs, while providing large capacity non-volatile storage.
Experimentation in using FPGAs in such NVM-NDP scenarios has been hindered, though, by the fact that the NVM devices/FPGA boards are still very rare and/or expensive. It thus becomes useful to emulate the access characteristics of current and future NVMs using off-the-shelf DRAMs. If such emulation is sufficiently accurate, the resulting FPGA-based NDP computing elements can be used for actual full-stack hardware/software benchmarking, e.g., when employed to accelerate a database.
For this use, we present NVMulator, an open-source easy-to-use hardware emulation module that can be seamlessly inserted between the NDP processing elements on the FPGA and a conventional DRAM-based memory system. We demonstrate that, with suitable parametrization, the emulated NVM can come very close to the performance characteristics of actual NVM technologies, specifically Intel Optane. We achieve 0.62% and 1.7% accuracy for cache line sized accesses for read and write operations, while utilizing only 0.54% of LUT logic resources on a Xilinx/AMD AU280 UltraScale+ FPGA board. We consider both file-system as well as database access patterns, examining the operation of the RocksDB database when running on real or emulated Optane-technology memories.
For years, agile methods are considered the most promising route toward successful software development, and a considerable number of published studies the (successful) use of agile methods and reports on the benefits companies have from adopting agile methods. Yet, since the world is not black or white, the question for what happened to the traditional models arises. Are traditional models replaced by agile methods? How is the transformation toward Agile managed, and, moreover, where did it start? With this paper we close a gap in literature by studying the general process use over time to investigate how traditional and agile methods are used. Is there coexistence or do agile methods accelerate the traditional processes’ extinction? The findings of our literature study comprise two major results: First, studies and reliable numbers on the general process model use are rare, i.e., we lack quantitative data on the actual process use and, thus, we often lack the ability to ground process-related research in practically relevant issues. Second, despite the assumed dominance of agile methods, our results clearly show that companies enact context-specific hybrid solutions in which traditional and agile development approaches are used in combination.
Context: Nowadays the market environment is characterized by high uncertainties due to high market dynamics, confronting companies with new challenges in creating and updating product roadmaps. Most companies are still using traditional approaches which typically fail in such environments. Therefore, companies are seeking opportunities for new product roadmapping approaches.
Objective: This paper presents good practices to support companies better understand what factors are required to conduct a successful product roadmapping in a dynamic and uncertain market environment.
Method: Based on a grey literature review, essential aspects for conducting product roadmapping in a dynamic and uncertain market environment were identified. Expert workshops were then held with two researchers and three practitioners to develop best practices and the proposed approach for an outcome-driven roadmap. These results were then given to another set of practitioners and their perceptions were gathered through interviews.
Results: The study results in the development of 9 good practices that provide practitioners with insights into what aspects are crucial for product roadmapping in a dynamic and uncertain market environment. Moreover, we propose an approach to product roadmapping that includes providing a flexible structure and focusing on delivering value to the customer and the business. To ensure the latter, this approach consists of the main items outcome hypothesis, validated outcomes, and discovered outputs.