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Informationstechnische Systeme, die den Arbeitsablauf im klinischen Bereich unterstützen, sind aktuell auf organisatorische Abläufe beschränkt. Diese Arbeit stellt einen ersten Ansatz vor, wie solch ein System in den perioperativen Bereich eingebracht werden kann. Hierzu wurde eine Workflow Engine mit einer perioperativen Prozess-Visualisierung verknüpft. Das System wurde nach Modell-View-Controller-Prinzip implementiert. Als "Controller" kommt die Workflow Engine zum Einsatz; also "Modell" ein Prozessmodell, mit den erforderlichen klinischen Daten. Der "View" wurde durch eine abgekoppelte Anwendung realisiert, welche auf Web-Technologien basiert. Drei Visualisierungen, die Workflow Engine sowie die Anbindung beider über eine Datenbankschnittstelle, wurden erfolgreich umgesetzt. Bei den drei Visualisierungen wurden jeweils eine Ansicht für den OP-Koordinator, den Springer und eine Ansicht für die Übersicht einer OP erstellt.
Management nowadays is confronted by a variety of information originating from either internal or external sources. Thereby, the difficulty to focus on the relevant and company critical keyfigures information increases. In practice, information management is often a major weakness of efficient corporate management. That weakness is caused by the lack of a centralized, categorized and summarized presentation and analysis of strategy and decision-relevant information. Management cockpits, a kind of information center for managers, are an approach to meet the challenges of information management. They are a specific work environment for decision makers to get a quick and simple overview of the company’s economic situation. In the most completely equipped premises, the entire process is supported - from acquiring information, to analysis, decision-making, and communication. Use of management cockpits, a cross-functional, KPI-based and strategyoriented controlling and management process, can be successfully established in companies as well as the work of interdisciplinary management teams, which are supported. In order to provide these possibilities, the management cockpit is equipped with a range of functionalities that allow the structuring, categorization and management-adequate visualization of information along with extensive analysis and simulation options. Management cockpits, as a communication and collaboration platform, are a starting point and valuable process companion on the way to holistic and sustainable performance management.
War Anfang des Jahrtausends der Wertbeitrag der IT zum Unternehmenserfolg noch umstritten, so negieren diesen heute nur noch die wenigsten Geschäftsführer. Wie Wertschöpfung durch Alignment von Unternehmens- und IT-Strategie mittels passender IT-Architekturen erzeugt wird, scheint für kleine und mittlere Unternehmen (KMU) verschiedenster Branchen noch immer mysteriös. Besonders fatal ist diese Lücke in den KMU der Kultur- und Kreativwirtschaft, die klassischen Industriesektoren als Innovationslieferanten dienen. An dieser Stelle setzt der vorliegende Bericht an. Er baut auf den Ergebnissen des Forschungsprojekts KonfIT-SSC auf, das in den vergangenen Jahren die Möglichkeit erforschte, mit Produktkonfiguratoren den „strategical fit“ zwischen Business und IT-Strukturen zu bewerkstelligen. Die zentrale Herausforderung bei diesem Vorhaben war es, Daten über Informationssystemstrukturen und die sie bestimmenden Ökosysteme so zu erheben, dass sie einer formalen Modellierung von Regelwerken und der Konfiguration von Geschäftsarchitekturen zugänglich werden. Der vorliegende Bericht liefert Antworten auf die Fragen, wie sich passende IT-Service Strategien für Unternehmen der Kultur- und Kreativwirtschaft erreichen lassen, welchen Beitrag Produktkonfiguratoren dabei liefern können und mit welchen Methoden sich Daten gewinnen lassen, um generische IT-Architekturen für KMU der Kreativbranche definieren zu können. Dabei werden im Verlauf neben den Antworten auf die wissenschaftlichen Fragestellungen auch die Ergebnisse der einzelnen Schritte zur Lösung der Aufgabenstellung in Form eines handelsüblichen Konfigurators dokumentiert. Als Methoden im Rahmen des Vorgehens kommen dabei zur Datengewinnung ein klassischer Literature Review, eine Online-Befragung sowie fünf Fallstudien in kleinen und mittleren Unternehmen der Werbebranche, aber auch Interviews mit Experten zum Einsatz. Bei der Analyse der Daten werden die Modellierung von Wertschöpfungsnetzen (e3value und i*), aber auch die Referenzmodellierung von Unternehmensarchitekturen verwendet. Abschließend wird das Vorgehen bei der Entwicklung der Konfigurationsmodelle (Regelwerke) und der Implementierung erläutert.
Stress is recognized as a factor of predominant disease and in the future the costs for treatment will increase. The presented approach tries to detect stress in a very basic and easy to implement way, so that the cost for the device and effort to wear it remain low. The user should benefit from the fact that the system offers an easy interface reporting the status of his body in real time. In parallel, the system provides interfaces to pass the obtained data forward for further processing and (professional) analyses, in case the user agrees. The system is designed to be used in every day’s activities and it is not restricted to laboratory use or environments. The implementation of the enhanced prototype shows that the detection of stress and the reporting can be managed using correlation plots and automatic pattern recognition even on a very light weighted microcontroller platform.
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.
Context: Companies increasingly strive to adapt to market and ecosystem changes in real time. Gauging and understanding team performance in such changing environments present a major challenge.
Objective: This paper aims to understand how software developers experience the continuous adaptation of performance in a modern, highly volatile environment using Lean and Agile software development methodology. This understanding can be used as a basis for guiding formation and maintenance of high-performing teams, to inform performance improvement initiatives, and to improve working conditions for software developers.
Method: A qualitative multiple-case study using thematic interviews was conducted with 16 experienced practitioners in five organisations.
Results: We generated a grounded theory, Performance Alignment Work, showing how software developers experience performance. We found 33 major categories of performance factors and relationships between the factors. A cross-case comparison revealed similarities and differences between different kinds and different sizes of organisations.
Conclusions: Based on our study, software teams are engaged in a constant cycle of interpreting their own performance and negotiating its alignment with other stakeholders. While differences across organisational sizes exist, a common set of performance experiences is present despite differences in context variables. Enhancing performance experiences requires integration of soft factors, such as communication, team spirit, team identity, and values, into the overall development process. Our findings suggest a view of software development and software team performance that centres around behavioural and social sciences.
Purpose: This paper aims to conceptualize and empirically test the determinants of service interaction quality (SIQ) as attitude, behavior and expertise of a service provider (SP). Further, the individual and simultaneous effects of SIQ and its dimensions on important marketing outcomes are tested. Design/methodology/approach – The narrative review of extant research helps formulate a conceptual model of SIQ, which is investigated using the univariate and multivariate meta-analysis.
Findings: There are interdependencies between drivers of SIQ that underlines the need to conceptualize service interaction as a dyadic phenomenon; use contemporary multilevel models, dyadic models, non-linear structural equation modeling and process studies; and study new and diverse services contexts. Meta-analysis illustrates the relative importance of the three drivers of SIQ and, in turn, their impact on consumer satisfaction and loyalty.
Research limitations/implications – The meta-analysis is based on existing research, which, unfortunately, has not examined critical services or exigency situations where SIQ is of paramount importance. Future research will be tasked with diversifying to several important domains where SIQ is a critical aspect of perceived service quality.
Practical implications: This study emphasizes that, although the expertise of an SP is important, firms would be surprised to learn that the attitude and behavior of their employees are equally important antecedents. In fact, there is a delicate balance that needs to be found; otherwise, attitudinal factors can have an overall counterproductive effect on consumer satisfaction.
Originality/value: This paper provides an empirical synthesis of SIQ and opens up interesting areas for further research.
New or adapted digital business models have huge impacts on Enterprise Architectures (EA) and require them to become more agile, flexible, and adaptable. All these changes are happening frequently and are currently not well documented. An EA consists of a lot of elements with manifold relationships between them. Thus changing the business model may have multiple impacts on other architectural elements. The EA engineering process deals with the development, change and optimization of architectural elements and their dependencies. Thus an EA provides a holistic view for both business and IT from the perspective of many stakeholders, which are involved in EA decision-making processes. Different stakeholders have specific concerns and are collaborating today in often unclear decision-making processes. In our research we are investigating information from collaborative decision-making processes to support stakeholders in taking current decisions. In addition we provide all information necessary to understand how and why decisions were taken. We are collecting the decision-related information automatically to minimize manual time intensive work as much as possible. The core contribution of our research extends a decisional metamodel, which links basic decisions with architectural elements and extends them with an associated decisional case context. Our aim is to support a new integral method for multi perspective and collaborative decision-making processes. We illustrate this by a practice-relevant decision-making scenario for Enterprise Architecture Engineering.
In modern times markets are very dynamic. This situation requires agile enterprises to have the ability to react fast on market influences. Thereby an enterprise’ IT is especially affected, because new or changed business models have to be realized. However, enterprise architectures (EA) are complex structures consisting of many artifacts and relationships between them. Thus analyzing an EA becomes to a complex task for stakeholders. In addition, many stakeholders are involved in decision-making processes, because Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) targets providing a holistic view of the enterprise. In this article we use concepts of Adaptive Case Management (ACM) to design a decision-making case consisting of a combination of different analysis techniques to support stakeholders in decision-making. We exemplify the case with a scenario of a fictive enterprise.
Big Data wird aktuell als einer der Haupttrends der IT-Industrie diskutiert. Big Data d. h. auf Basis großer Mengen unterschiedlich strukturierter Daten die Entscheidungen in Echtzeit oder prognostisch zu treffen. Von hochleistungsfähigen, schnell verfügbaren Prognoseverfahren erhofft man sich eine Risikominimierung für unternehmerische Entscheidungen in hochvolatilen Märkten.
Die Energiewende bietet reichlich Fragen für verschiedenste Wissenschaftsdisziplinen einschließlich der Informatik und Wirtschaftsinformatik (WI). Bedauerlicherweise wurde bisher der Bereich der regionalen Energiegenossenschaften und kleinerer Energieversorgungsunternehmen weitgehend von der WI-Forschung vernachlässigt. Der vorliegende Beitrag stellt die aktuelle Situation dieser Organisationen dar und konzentriert sich auf die bestehende Wissenslücke von Geschäftsmodellen (GM) für Energiegenossenschaften (EG) als Zusammenschluss aus Privatpersonen oder kleinen Unternehmen, welche primär regionale, erneuerbare Energie produzieren. Die Modell- und Theorieentwicklung basiert auf der klassischen Literaturrecherche, Fallstudien in der Energiewirtschaft (EW), sowie grafischer Modellierung. Als Ergebnis wird das Referenzgeschäftsmodell einer EG als morphologischer Business Model Canvas vorgestellt. Dieses singuläre GM wird um die Darstellung des Wertschöpfungsnetzwerks, welches die strukturelle Einbindung der Akteure in das digitale Ökosystem der EG berücksichtigt, erweitert. Das aus der Forschung resultierende Referenzmodell dient der kritischen Überprüfung empirisch vorfindbarer GM und zur weiteren Entwicklung von Unternehmensarchitekturen digitaler Unternehmensverbünde.
Customer services in the digital transformation: social media versus hotline channel performance
(2015)
Due to the digital transformation online service strategies have gained prominence in practice as well as in the theory of service management. This study examines the efficacy of different types of service channels in customer complaint handling. The theoretical framework, developed using complaint handling and social media literature, is tested against data collected from two different channels (hotline and social media) of a German telecommunication service provider. We contribute to the understanding of firm’s multichannel distribution strategy in two ways: a) by conceptualizing and evaluating complaint handling quality across traditional and social media channels, and b) by testing the impact of complaint handling quality on key performance outcomes like customer loyalty, positive word-of-mouth, and cross purchase intentions.
The Internet of Things (IoT) fundamentally influences today’s digital strategies with disruptive business operating models and fast changing markets. New business information systems are integrating emerging Internet of Things infrastructures and components. With the huge diversity of Internet of Things technologies and products organizations have to leverage and extend previous enterprise architecture efforts to enable business value by integrating the Internet of Things into their evolving Enterprise Architecture Management environments. Both architecture engineering and management of current enterprise architectures is complex and has to integrate beside the Internet of Things synergistic disciplines like EAM - Enterprise Architecture and Management with disciplines like: services & cloud computing, semantic-based decision support through ontologies and knowledge-based systems, big data management, as well as mobility and collaboration networks. To provide adequate decision support for complex business/IT environments, it is necessary to identify affected changes of Internet of Things environments and their related fast adapting architecture. We have to make transparent the impact of these changes over the integral landscape of affected EAM-capabilities, like directly and transitively impacted IoT-objects, business categories, processes, applications, services, platforms and infrastructures. The paper describes a new metamodel-based approach for integrating partial Internet of Things objects, which are semi-automatically federated into a holistic Enterprise Architecture Management environment.
Enterprise architecture management (EAM) is a holistic approach to tackle the complex Business and IT architecture. The transformation of an organization’s EA towards a strategy-oriented system is a continuous task. Many stakeholders have to elaborate on various parts of the EA to reach the best decisions to shape the EA towards an optimized support of the organizations’ capabilities. Since the real world is too complex, analyzing techniques are needed to detect optimization potentials and to get all information needed about an issue. In practice visualizations are commonly used to analyze EAs. However these visualizations are mostly static and do not provide analyses. In this article we combine analyzing techniques from literature and interactive visualizations to support stakeholders in EA decision-making.
The stimulation of user engagement has received significant attention in extant research. However, the theory of antecedents for user engagement with an initial electronic word-of-mouth (eWoM) communication is relatively less developed. In an investigation of 576 unique user postings across independent Facebook (FB) communities for two German firms, we contribute to the extant knowledge on user engagement in two different ways. First, we explicate senders’ prior usage experience and the extent of their acquaintance with other community members as the two key drivers of user engagement across a product and a service community. Second, we reveal that these main effects differ according to the type of community. In service communities, experience has a stronger impact on user engagement; whereas, in product communities, acquaintance is more important.
In recent years, the rise of the digital transformation received significant importance in Business-to-Business (B2B) research. Social media applications provide executives with a raft of new options. Consequently, interfaces to social media platforms have also been integrated into B2B salesforce applications, although very little is as yet known about their usage and general impact on B2B sales performance. This paper evaluates 1) the conceptualization of social media usage in a dyadic B2B relationship; 2) the effects of a more differentiated usage construct on customer satisfaction; 3) antecedents of social media usage on multiple levels; and 4) the effectiveness of social media usage for different types of customers. The framework presented here is tested cross-industry against data collected from dyadic buyer seller relationships in the IT service industry. The results elucidate the preconditions and the impact of social media usage strategies in B2B sales relations.
Im Rahmen der Vernetzung des Autos drängen neue Wettbewerber in die Automobilindustrie. Mittels disruptiver Innovationsmethoden haben Google, Apple, Facebook und Co. bereits Branchen grundlegend verändert und Marktführer wie Nokia oder Otto innerhalb weniger Jahre abgelöst. Die folgende Arbeit befasst sich mit diesen Methoden und der Fragestellung, wie sie in den automotiven Produktentstehungsprozess integriert werden können, um nachhaltig erfolgreiche Geschäftsmodelle am Markt platzieren zu können.
Location-based services in buildings represent a great advantage for people to search places, products or people. In our paper we examine the feasibility of Bluetooth iBeacons for indoor localization. In the first part we define and evaluate the iBeacon technology through different experiments. In the second part our solution application is described. Our system is able to estimate the position of the user’s smartphone based on RSSI measurements. Therefore we used the built-in smartphone sensor and a building map with required sender information. Trilateration is used as positioning technique in contrast to fingerprinting to minimize beforehand effort. Results are promising but cannot reach the same accuracy level as sensor-fusion or fingerprinting approaches.
Enterprise Architecture (EA) management is an activity that seeks to foster the alignment of business and IT, and pursues various goals further operationalizing this alignment. Key to effective EA management is a framework that defines the roles, activities, and viewpoints used for EA management in accordance to the concerns that the stakeholders aim to address. Consensus holds that such frameworks are organization-specific and hence they are designed in governance activities for EA management. As of today, top-down approaches for governance are used to derive organization-specific frameworks. These usually lack systematic mechanisms for improving the framework based on the feedback of the responsible stakeholders. We outline a bottom-up approach for EA management governance that systematically observes the behavior of the actors to learn user concerns and recommend appropriate viewpoints. With this approach, we complement traditional top-down governance activities.
Decision-making in the field of Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a complex task. Many organizations establish a set of complex processes and hierarchical structures to enable strategy-driven development of their EA. This leads to slow and inefficient decision-making entailing bad time-to-market and discontented stakeholders. Collaborative EA delineates a lightweight approach to enable EA decisions but often neglects strategic alignment. In this paper, we present an approach to integrate the concept of collaborative EA and goal-driven decision-making through collaborative modeling of goal-oriented information demands based on ArchiMate’s motivation extension to reach a goal-oriented EA decision support in a collaborative EA environment.
The digital transformation of our society changes the way we live, work, learn, communicate, and collaborate. This disruptive change interacts with all information processes and systems that are important business enablers for the digital transformation since years. The Internet of Things, social collaboration systems for adaptive case management, mobility systems and services for Big Data in cloud services environments are emerging to support intelligent user-centered and social community systems. They will shape future trends of business innovation and the next wave of information and communication technology. Biological metaphors of living and adaptable ecosystems provide the logical foundation for self-optimizing and resilient run-time environments for intelligent business services and related distributed information systems with service-oriented enterprise architectures. The present research investigates mechanisms for flexible adaptation and evolution of digital enterprise architectures in the context of integrated synergistic disciplines like distributed service-oriented architectures and information systems, EAM - Enterprise Architecture and Management, metamodeling, semantic echnologies, web services, cloud computing and Big Data technology. Our aim is to support flexibility and agile transformations for both business domains and related enterprise systems through adaptation and evolution of digital enterprise architectures. The present research paper investigates digital transformations of business and IT and integrates fundamental mappings between adaptable digital enterprise architectures and service-oriented information systems.
EAM ist ein holistischer Ansatz, um komplexe IT- und Unternehmensstrukturen darzustellen. Dabei ist es von zentraler Bedeutung, diese Strukturen möglichst komplett und übersichtlich zu visualisieren. Ein Ansatz, dies zu erreichen, ist eine multiperspektivische Darstellung von mehreren Views in einem Architekturcockpit. Dabei können mehrere Views simultan betrachtet und analysiert werden. Dadurch ist es möglich, die Auswirkungen einer Analyse des Views eines Stakeholders simultan aus den Views anderer Stakeholder betrachten zu können, um eventuelle Wechselwirkungen zu erkennen und einen allgemeinen Überblick über die Unternehmensarchitektur zu behalten. In dieser Arbeit zeigen wir, von der Konzeption über die Umsetzung bis zu einem Anwendungsbeispiel, wie ein solches Architekturcockpit realisiert werden kann.
Business processes are important knowledge resources of a company. The knowledge contained in business processes impart procedures used to create products and services. However, modelling and application of business processes are affected by problems connected to knowledge transfer. This paper presents and implements a layered model to improve the knowledge transfer. Thus modelling and understanding of business process models is supported. An evaluation of the approach is presented and results and other areas of application are discussed.
The character of knowledge-intense processes is that participants decide the next process activities on base of the present information and their expert knowledge. The decisions of these knowledge workers are in general non-deterministic. It is not possible to model these processes in advance and to automate them using a process engine of a BPM system. Hence, in this context a process instance is called a case, because there is no predefined model that could be instantiated. Domain-specific or general case management systems are used to support the knowledge workers. These systems provide all case information and enable users to define the next activities, but they have no or only limited activity recommendation capabilities. In the following paper, we present a general concept for a self-learning system based on process mining that suggests the next best activity on quantitative and qualitative data for a given case. As a proof of concept, it was applied to the area of insurance claims settlement.
In a world with rapidly changing customer requirements and the increased role of technology, companies need more flexible systems to adapt their processes and react dynamically to changes. Adaptive Case Management (ACM) comes into consideration by providing a concept to adapt to changing business conditions. Within our research project we did a first foundational evaluation of the potential of ACM in supporting unpredictable sales processes. Based on a set of criteria we tested the concept of ACM with the open source tool Cognoscenti. The evaluation gave us the possibility to experience the concept of ACM. Hence we were able to provide a statement about the potential of ACM within the context of an unpredictable sales process, setting the path to further research and discussion of ACM in the area of sales processes.
A sequence of transactions represents a complex and multi dimensional type of data. Feature construction can be used to reduce the data´s dimensionality to find behavioural patterns within such sequences. The patterns can be expressed using the blue prints of the constructed relevant features. These blue prints can then be used for real time classification on other sequences.
Das Provisioning Tool automaIT wurde prototypisch um die Möglichkeit eines Data Discovery erweitert, mit dem Ziel, nicht durch automaIT verwaltete Systeme anbinden und steuern zu können. Daten aus dem Data Discovery werden mittels dem Tool Facter gesammelt und können dynamisch in ausführbare Modelle von automaIT integriert und ausgewertet werden. Dadurch kann der Verlauf weiterer Provisionierungsschritte gesteuert werden, ohne dass es eines manuellen Eingriffs bedarf.
Die DGCH registriert vermehrt Klagen aus der klinischen Praxis hinsichtlich der nicht vollständigen Vernetzung bzw. Integration von Gerätesystemen im Chirurgischen OP. Die Anzahl, der Funktionsumfang und der Komplexitätsgrad der verwendeten Geräte nehmen ständig zu und machen die Bedienung immer aufwendiger und damit schwieriger und fehleranfälliger, sodass eine Verbesserung bei der Unterstützung im Ablauf wünschenswert ist. Die Sektion Computer- und telematikassistierte Chirurgie (CTAC) der DGCH hat es auf Veranlassung des Generalsekretärs deshalb übernommen, eine aktuelle Bestandsaufnahme vorzunehmen und mögliche Ansätze zur Verbesserung des derzeitigen Status zu bewerten.
An operating room is a stressful work environment. Nevertheless, all involved persons have to work safely as there is no space for mistakes. To ensure a high level of concentration and seamless interaction, all involved persons have to know their own tasks and the tasks of their colleagues. The entire team must work synchronously at all times. To optimize the overall workflow, a task manager supporting the team was developed. In parallel, a common conceptual design of a business process visualization was developed, which makes all relevant information accessible in real-time during a surgery. In this context an overview of all processes in the operating room was created and different concepts for the graphical representation of these user-dependent processes were developed. This paper describes the concept of the task manager as well as the general concept in the field of surgery.
The proposed approach applies current unsupervised clustering approaches in a different dynamic manner. Instead of taking all the data as input and finding clusters among them, the given approach clusters Holter ECG data (longterm electrocardiography data from a holter monitor) on a given interval which enables a dynamic clustering approach (DCA). Therefore advanced clustering techniques based on the well known Dynamic TimeWarping algorithm are used. Having clusters e.g. on a daily basis, clusters can be compared by defining cluster shape properties. Doing this gives a measure for variation in unsupervised cluster shapes and may reveal unknown changes in healthiness. Embedding this approach into wearable devices offers advantages over the current techniques. On the one hand users get feedback if their ECG data characteristic changes unforeseeable over time which makes early detection possible. On the other hand cluster properties like biggest or smallest cluster may help a doctor in making diagnoses or observing several patients. Further, on found clusters known processing techniques like stress detection or arrhythmia classification may be applied.
New business concepts such as Enterprise 2.0 foster the use of social software in enterprises. Especially social production significantly increases the amount of data in the context of business processes. Unfortunately, these data are still an unearthed treasure in many enterprises. Due to advances in data processing such as Big Data, the exploitation of context data becomes feasible. To provide a foundation for the methodical exploitation of context data, this paper introduces a classification, based on two classes, intrinsic and extrinsic data.
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.
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.
The digitization of our society changes the way we live, work, learn, communicate, and collaborate. This disruptive change interacts with all information processes and systems that are important business enablers for the context of digitization since years. Our aim is to support flexibility and agile transformations for both business domains and related information technology and enterprise systems through adaptation and evolution of digital enterprise architectures. The present research paper investigates collaborative decision mechanisms for adaptive digital enterprise architectures by extending original architecture reference models with state of art elements for agile architectural engineering for the digitization and collaborative architectural decision support.
The Seventh International Conference on Advances in Databases, Knowledge, and Data Applications (DBKDA 2015), held between May 24-29, 2015 in Rome, Italy, continued a series of international events covering a large spectrum of topics related to advances in fundamentals on databases, evolution of relation between databases and other domains, data base Technologies and content processing, as well as specifics in applications domains databases. Advances in different technologies and domains related to databases triggered substantial improvements for content processing, information indexing, and data, process and knowledge mining. The push came from Web services, artificial intelligence, and Agent technologies, as well as from the generalization of the XML adoption. High-speed communications and computations, large storage capacities, and loadbalancing for distributed databases access allow new approaches for content processing with incomplete patterns, advanced ranking algorithms and advanced indexing methods. Evolution on e-business, e-health and telemedicine, bioinformatics, finance and marketing, geographical positioning systems put pressure on database communities to push the ‘de facto’ methods to support new requirements in terms of scalability, privacy, performance, indexing, and heterogeneity of both content and technology.
Enterprise Architectures (EA) consist of a multitude of architecture elements, which relate in manifold ways to each other. As the change of a single element hence impacts various other elements, mechanisms for architecture analysis are important to stakeholders. The high number of relationships aggravates architecture analysis and makes it a complex yet important task. In practice EAs are often analyzed using visualizations. This article contributes to the field of visual analytics in enterprise architecture management (EAM) by reviewing how state-of-the-art software platforms in EAM support stakeholders with respect to providing and visualizing the “right” information for decision-making tasks. We investigate the collaborative decision-making process in an experiment with master students using professional EAM tools by developing a research study. We evaluate the students’ findings by comparing them with the experience of an enterprise architect.
This paper presents a concurrency control mechanism that does not follow a ‘one concurrency control mechanism fits all needs’ strategy. With the presented mechanism a transaction runs under several concurrency control mechanisms and the appropriate one is chosen based on the accessed data. For this purpose, the data is divided into four classes based on its access type and usage (semantics). Class O (the optimistic class) implements a first-committer-wins strategy, class R (the reconciliation class) implements a first-n-committers-win strategy, class P (the pessimistic class) implements a first reader-wins strategy, and class E (the escrow class) implements a firsnreaderswin strategy. Accordingly, the model is called OjRjPjE. Under this model the TPC-C benchmark outperforms other CC mechanisms like optimistic Snapshot Isolation.
Delivering value to customers in real-time requires companies to utilize real-time deployment of software to expose features to users faster, and to shorten the feedback loop. This allows for faster reaction and helps to ensure that the development is focused on features providing real value. Continuous delivery is a development practice where the software functionality is deployed continuously to customer environment. Although this practice has been established in some domains such as B2C mobile software, the B2B domain imposes specific challenges. This article presents a case study that is conducted in a medium-sized software company operating in the B2B domain. The objective of this study is to analyze the challenges and benefits of continuous delivery in this domain. The results suggest that technical challenges are only one part of the challenges a company encounters in this transition. The company must also address challenges related to the customer and procedures. The core challenges are caused by having multiple customers with diverse environments and unique properties, whose business depends on the software product. Some customers require to perform manual acceptance testing, while some are reluctant towards new versions. By utilizing continuous delivery, it is possible for the case company to shorten the feedback cycles, increase the reliability of new versions, and reduce the amount of resources required for deploying and testing new releases.
Software development as an experiment system : a qualitative survey on the state of the practice
(2015)
An experiment-driven approach to software product and service development is gaining increasing attention as a way to channel limited resources to the efficient creation of customer value. In this approach, software functionalities are developed incrementally and validated in continuous experiments with stakeholders such as customers and users. The experiments provide factual feedback for guiding subsequent development. Although case studies on experimentation in industry exist, the understanding of the state of the practice and the encountered obstacles is incomplete. This paper presents an interview-based qualitative survey exploring the experimentation experiences of ten software development companies. The study found that although the principles of continuous experimentation resonated with industry practitioners, the state of the practice is not yet mature. In particular, experimentation is rarely systematic and continuous. Key challenges relate to changing organizational culture, accelerating development cycle speed, and measuring customer value and product
success.
Rapid value delivery requires a company to utilize empirical evaluation of new features and products in order to avoid unnecessary product risks. This helps to make data-driven decisions and to ensure that the development is focused on features that provide real value for customers. Short feedback loops are a prerequisite as they allow for fast learning and reduced reaction times. Continuous experimentation is a development practice where the entire R&D process is guided by constantly conducting experiments and collecting feedback. Although principles of continuous experimentation have been successfully applied in domains such as game software or SAAS, it is not obvious how to transfer continuous experimentation to the business to-business domain. In this article, a case study from a medium-sized software company in the B2B domain is presented. The study objective is to analyze the challenges, benefits and organizational aspects of continuous experimentation in the B2B domain. The results suggest that technical challenges are only one part of the challenges a company encounters in this transition. The company also has to address challenges related to the customer and organizational culture. Unique properties in each customers business play a major role and need to be considered when designing experiments. Additionally, the speed by which experiments can be conducted is relative to the speed by which production deployments can be made. Finally, the article shows how the study results can be used to modify the development in the case company in a way that more feedback and data is used instead of opinions.
This is a report from a one-day fourth international workshop on "Information Systems in Distributed Environments" (ISDE), which was organized in conjunction with the OnTheMove Federated Conferences & Workshops (OTM 2014) October 29-30, 2014, Amantea, Calabria, Italy. The main focus of this event was to provide a venue for the discussion of challenges related to the development, operation, and maintenance of distributed information systems, and their creation in the context of global development projects. Further dissemination of research results will lead to an improvement of distributed information system development and deployment across the globe.
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.
Managers recognize that software development project teams need to be developed and guided. Although technical skills are necessary, non-technical (NT) skills are equally, if not more, necessary for project success. Currently, there are no proven tools to measure the NT skills of software developers or software development teams. Behavioral markers (observable behaviors that have positive or negative impacts on individual or team performance) are beginning to be successfully used by airline and medical industries to measure NT skill performance. The purpose of this research is to develop and validate the behavior marker system tool that can be used by different managers or coaches to measure the NT skills of software development individuals and teams. This paper presents an empirical study conducted at the Software Factory where users of the behavior marker tool rated video clips of software development teams. The initial results show that the behavior marker tool can be reliably used with minimal training.
Software process improvement (SPI) is around for decades: frameworks are proposed, success factors are studied, and experiences have been reported. However, the sheer mass of concepts, approaches, and standards published over the years overwhelms practitioners as well as researchers. What is out there? Are there new emerging approaches? What are open issues? Still, we struggle to answer the question for what is the current state of SPI and related research? In this paper, we present initial results from a systematic mapping study to shed light on the field of SPI and to draw conclusions for future research directions. An analysis of 635 publications draws a big picture of SPI-related research of the past 25 years. Our study shows a high number of solution proposals, experience reports, and secondary studies, but only few theories. In particular, standard SPI models like CMMI and ISO/IEC 15504 are analyzed, enhanced, and evaluated for applicability, whereas these standards are critically discussed from the perspective of SPI in small-to- medium-sized companies, which leads to new specialized frameworks. Furthermore, we find a growing interest in success factors to aid companies in conducting SPI.
Entrepreneurs and small and medium enterprises usually have issues on developing new prototypes, new ideas or testing new techniques. In order to help them, in the last years, academic Software Factories, a new concept of collaboration between universities and companies have been developed. Software Factories provide a unique environment for students and companies. Students benefit from the possibility of working in a real work environment learning how to apply the state of the art of the existing techniques and showing their skills to entrepreneurs. Companies benefit from the risk-free environment where they can develop new ideas, in a protected environment. Universities finally benefit from this setup as a perfect environment for empirical studies in industrial-like environment. In this paper, we present the network of academic Software Factories in Europe, showing how companies had already benefit from existing Software Factories and reporting success stories. The results of this paper can increase the network of the factories and help other universities and companies to setup similar environment to boost the local economy.
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a fundamental role in the economic system of the European Union: SMEs represent over 99 percent of all companies and provide two-thirds of the jobs in the private sector. Their innovativeness and economic success have significant influence on growth, jobs and prosperity in Europe.
Information technologies are regarded as key drivers of innovation in small and medium-sized enterprises (SME). Modern information technologies (IT) offer SMEs today many opportunities to improve their competitiveness and market position. Thus, business processes can be designed efficiently, open up new market segments and strengthen the innovation capacity significantly. However, many SMEs still have difficulties in utilizing these new technologies efficiently in order to foster process and product innovation. This is partly due to the fact that many SMEs don’t use IT Service Management and waste resources in running basic IT-functions like the maintenance of printers, software or servers.
Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) is a discipline for managing IT systems centred on the customer’s perspective of IT’s contribution to the business. Thus, by strengthening the performance of SME’s IT departments, ITSM enables process innovation (e.g. eProcurement) and product innovations (e.g. client services) can be promoted. The EU-funded project "IT Service Management for small and medium-sized Enterprises of the Danube Region" (ITSM4SME) aims to make SMEs in the Danube Region aware of the potential of ITSM, to inspire SMEs about the use of information technology and to allow IT-enabled innovations. The aims of the project have been achieved inter alia through a simplified method for IT service management for small IT organisations, practical case studies, a "do-it-yourself" service management modelling tool, an eLearning portal and by training more than 300 participants from SMEs in pilot training courses in Bulgaria, Romania and Slovenia.
Information systems, which support the workflow in the clinical area, are currently limited to organizational processes. This work shows a first approach of an information system supporting all actors in the perioperative area. The first prototype and proof of concept was a task manager, giving all actors information about their task and the task of all other actors during an intervention. Based on this initial task manager, we implemented an information system based on a workflow engine controlling all processes and all information necessary for the intervention. A second part was the development of a perioperative process visualization which was developed based on a user centered approach jointly with clinicians and OR members.
We investigated the influence of body shape and pose on the perception of physical strength and social power for male virtual characters. In the first experiment, participants judged the physical strength of varying body shapes, derived from a statistical 3D body model. Based on these ratings, we determined three body shapes (weak, average, and strong) and animated them with a set of power poses for the second experiment. Participants rated how strong or powerful they perceived virtual characters of varying body shapes that were displayed in different poses. Our results show that perception of physical strength was mainly driven by the shape of the body. However, the social attribute of power was influenced by an interaction between pose and shape. Specifically, the effect of pose on power ratings was greater for weak body shapes. These results demonstrate that a character with a weak shape can be perceived as more powerful when in a high-power pose.
To evaluate the quality of a person´s sleep it is essential to identify the sleep stages and their durations. Currently, the gold standard in terms of sleep analysis is overnight polysomnography (PSG), during which several techniques like EEG (eletroencephalogram), EOG (electrooculogram), EMG (electromyogram), ECG (electrocardiogram), SpO2 (blood oxygen saturation) and for example respiratory airflow and respiratory effort are recorded. These expensive and complex procedures, applied in sleep laboratories, are invasive and unfamiliar for the subjects and it is a reason why it might have an impact on the recorded data. These are the main reasons why low-cost home diagnostic systems are likely to be advantageous. Their aim is to reach a larger population by reducing the number of parameters recorded. Nowadays, many wearable devices promise to measure sleep quality using only the ECG and body-movement signals. This work presents an android application developed in order to proof the accuracy of an algorithm published in the sleep literature. The algorithm uses ECG and body movement recordings to estimate sleep stages. The pre-recorded signals fed into the algorithm have been taken from physionet1 online database. The obtained results have been compared with those of the standard method used in PSG. The mean agreement ratios between the sleep stages REM, Wake, NREM-1, NREM-2 and NREM-3 were 38.1%, 14%, 16%, 75% and 54.3%.
A behavior marker for measuring non-technical skills of software professionals : an empirical study
(2015)
Managers recognize that software development teams need to be developed. Although technical skills are necessary, non-technical (NT) skills are equally, if not more, necessary for project success. Currently, there are no proven tools to measure the NT skills of software developers or software development teams. Behavioral markers (observable behaviors that have positive or negative impacts on individual or team performance) are successfully used by airline and medical industries to measure NT skill performance. This research developed and validated a behavior marker tool rated video clips of software development teams. The initial results show that the behavior marker tool can be reliably used with minimal training.