System Sciences

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) has been witnessed. This evolution reflects both the increasing maturity of information technology and also the business outlook of firms seeking to use IT for competitive advantage. In this paper we argue that system development is now entering a new phase of maturity with the advent of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software packages.

Information retrieval technology has been central to the success of the Web. For semantic web documents or annotations to have an impact, they will have to be compatible with Web based indexing and retrieval technology. We discuss some of the underlying problems and issues central to extending information retrieval systems to handle annotations in semantic web languages. We also describe three prototype systems that we have implemented to explore these ideas.

In this paper we present and review a framework for online simulations and predictions which are based on the combination of real-world traffic data and a multi-agent traffic flow model. The agent architecture consists of two layers which distinguish the different tasks that road users have to perform. The framework is applied to the urban road network of Duisburg and the freeway network of North Rhine-Westphalia. On the basis of historical data heuristics are derived, which can be combined with the dynamic data of the simulations to provide a short-term traffic forecast. The necessity for an anticipatory traffic forecast, which includes decision-making and route choice behavior of the road users, is discussed.

Business organizations operating in highly dynamic environments need agile processes. Though existing IT infrastructure including enterprise systems have made business processes cost efficient, they pose a serious challenge to process agility. This paper analyses their impact on the firm's ability to build business process agility. Using a case study approach, this study observes that the effects, vary depending upon the type and extent of integration and standardization achieved, after the implementation of enterprise system. While technical tight-coupling of the enterprise system infrastructure may limit the firm's ability to build agile processes, both vertical and horizontal integration, and standardization of the processes and information are contributing positively. The other two ES characteristics -best practices and process orientation, however, do not have any direct effect. Though it is difficult with existing IT/IS infrastructure, the potential ability of web services and SOA technologies to deliver both agility and control simultaneously appear promising.

Although the soft (i.e. non-technical) skills of information systems (I/S) professionals are recognized as important for job performance, few attempts have been made to study systematically the concept of soft skills. We draw upon the pioneering work in the area of practical intelligence and creativity at the workplace to develop the concept of soft skills and to validate an instrument to assess soft skills within the I/S profession. We define soft skills as a set of self-management and self-regulation strategies for managing self; managing careers; and managing others within the I/S work context.

In multimedia-based e-Learning systems, there are strong needs for segmenting lecture videos into topic units in order to organize the videos for browsing and to provide search capability. Automatic segmentation is highly desired because of the high cost of manual segmentation. While a lot of research has been conducted on topic segmentation of transcribed spoken text, most attempts rely on

Collaboration within an organisation can be said to be subject to the effective management of relationships. This study focuses on one such relationship, that between the business and IT sides of an organisation, which need to communicate and coordinate their activities for the successful development of working systems.

While commoditization is creating opportunities for customers of information technology services, it is creating new challenges for the service providers. Pricing strategies are one of the most important challenges and decisions for today's IT service providers. Pricing strategies for IT services have traditionally focused on covering costs, achieving desired margins and meeting the competition. These pricing schemes range from simple approaches, easily copied by competitors, to complex models with high ...

Software visualization is the use of interactive computer graphics, typography, graphic design, animation, and cinematography to enhance the interface between the software engineer or the computer science student and their programs. Although several taxonomies of software visualization have been proposed, they use few dimensions and do not span the space of important distinctions between systems. We attempt to fill this gap in the literature by proposing a novel and systematic taxonomy of six areas making up thirty characteristic features of software visualization technology. The taxonomy is presented and illustrated in terms of its application to seven systems of historic importance and technical interest.

While commoditization is creating opportunities for customers of information technology services, it is creating new challenges for the service providers. Pricing strategies are one of the most important challenges and decisions for today's IT service providers. Pricing strategies for IT services have traditionally focused on covering costs, achieving desired margins and meeting the competition. These pricing schemes range from simple approaches, easily copied by competitors, to complex models with high ...

The term " assurance" has been used for decades in trusted system development as an expression of confidence that one has in the strength of mechanisms or countermeasures. One of the unsolved problems of security engineering is the adoption of measures or metrics that can reliably depict the assurance associated with a specific hardware and software system. This paper reports on a recent attempt to focus requirements in this area by examining those currently in use. It then suggests a categorization of Information Assurance (IA) metrics that may be tailored to an organization's needs 1 . We believe that the provision of security mechanisms in systems is a subset of the systems engineering discipline having a large software-engineering correlation. There is general agreement that no single system metric or any "one-prefect" set of IA metrics applies across all systems or audiences. The set most useful for an organization largely depends on their IA goals, their technical, organizational and operational needs, and the financial, personnel, and technical resources that are available.

Business objects are object-oriented representations of the concepts of interest in an organization, such as activities, resources and actors. Business objects collaborate with one another in order to achieve business goals, showing different behavior and properties according to each specific collaboration context. This means the same business object may be perceived differently depending on the business objects it is collaborating with. However, most approaches to business process modeling do not separate the collaborative aspects of a business object from its internal aspects. To cope with such issues, this paper makes use of role modeling to separate these concerns while increasing the understandability and reusability of business process models. This approach makes use of object-oriented concepts to separate a business process model into a business object model and a role model. The business object models deals with specifying the structure and intrinsic behavior of business objects, while the role model specifies its collaborative aspects.

ERP implementation issues have been given much attention since two decades ago due to its low implementation success. Nearly 90 percent of ERP implementations are late or over budget and the success rate with ERP implementation is about 33%. In China, the success rate of implementing ERP systems is extremely low at 10% [28] which is much lower than that in West countries. This study attempts to study critical success factors affecting enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems implementation success in China with focus on both generic and unique factors. User satisfaction and White's ABCD classification method are used to judge whether an ERP system implementation is a success or a failure. Survey methodology and structural equation modeling technique of PLS-Graph are used to collect and analyze data. Discussions on the results of data analysis are made.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) leverages technology to coordinate business-customer interactions with the objective of building long-term loyalty. Multilevel Secure (MLS) data models were originally developed as database models for the management of information in environments with a strict hierarchy of security levels, such as military institutions and government security agencies. This paper demonstrates how an MLS model can be used to address the issue of sharing and managing customer-related information in Ebusinesses with diverse constituencies. The potential for exploiting the advantages offered by the MLS models in the E-business CRM context is examined. Several examples are used to show how organizing a database management system based on MLS principles can be used to help E-businesses to provide consistent and appropriate content to various customers and partners in a more efficient manner.

With the recent advances in mobile technologies and infrastructures, citizens start to demand for not just mobile but also ubiquitous access to e-government services. Further with the invention of new interaction devices, the context in which the service is being used becomes an integral part of the activity carried out with the system. This demands a new paradigm for system requirements elicitation and design in order to make good use of such extended context information. Instead of redesigning or adapting existing e-government services in an ad-hoc manner, we introduce a methodology for the elicitation of contextaware adaptation requirements and the matching of context-awareness features to the target context by capability matching. For the implementation of these adaptations, we propose the use of three tiers of views: user interface views, data views, and process views. This approach centers on a novel notion of process views to ubiquitous government (u-government) service adaptation, where mobile users may execute a more concise version or modified procedures of the original process according to their context. The process view also serves as the key mechanism for integrating user interface views and data views. We demonstrate our methodology by extending an egovernment appointment service into a mobile one with context support.

Participants were observed while searching and browsing the internet for campaign information in a mock-voting situation in three online note-taking conditions: No Notes, Private Notes, and Shared Notes. Note taking significantly influenced the manner in which participants browsed for information about candidates. Note taking competed for time and cognitive resources and resulted in less thorough browsing. Effects were strongest when participants thought that their notes would be seen by others. Think-aloud comments indicated that participants were more evaluative when taking notes, especially shared notes. Our results suggest that there could be design trade-offs between e-Democracy and e-Participation technologies.

IT governance is one of these concepts that suddenly emerged and became an important issue in the information technology area. Some organisations started with the implementation of IT governance in order to achieve the fusion between business and IT. This paper interprets some important existing theories, models and practices in the IT governance domain and derives research questions and research propositions from it. They are the basis for pilot case research in Belgian organisations.

Agile project management with Scrum derives from best business practices in companies like Fuji-Xerox, Honda, Canon, and Toyota. Toyota routinely achieves four times the productivity and 12 times the quality of competitors. Can Scrum do the same for globally distributed teams? Two Agile companies, SirsiDynix and StarSoft Development Laboratories achieved comparable performance developing a Java application with over 1,000,000 lines of code. During 2005, a distributed team of 56 Scrum developers working from Provo, Utah; Waterloo, Canada; and St. Petersburg, Russia, delivered 671,688 lines of production Java code. At 15.3 function points per developer/month, this is the most productive Java project ever documented. SirsiDynix best practices are similar to those observed on distributed Scrum teams at IDX Systems, radically different than those promoted by PMBOK, and counterintuitive to practices advocated by the Scrum Alliance. This paper analyzes and recommends best practices for globally distributed Agile teams.

This paper describes an organizational memory information system (OMIS) Success Model that is based on the I/S Success Model proposed by DeLone and McLean [6]. The current model is refined from the original through application of specific factors associated with an OMIS. The paper briefly summarizes previous research that explored effectiveness of OMIS, including a case study of a station engineering unit at a nuclear power plant, and shows that no quantitative study has been done to test the effectiveness of OMIS for a cross-section of organizations. It is proposed to test the OMIS Success Model by surveying station engineering units at nuclear power plants throughout the United States. These groups do similar tasks, but will have different kinds of organizational memory information systems. Measures for the OMIS Success Model constructs that can be included in the survey instrument are proposed. Other factors affecting the possible outcomes of the study are discussed.

This paper presents a formal approach to the comparison of six object-oriented analysis and design methodologies. For each of the methodologies, a formal representation of it is constructed as a meta-process model and a meta-data model. These two meta models of a methodology represent the steps of the analysis and design, the concepts, and the techniques provided by this methodology. Based on this uniform representation, an extensive comparison of these six methodologies is then performed. The results are given as a set of tables in which the similarity and differences of these methodologies are exhibited. Adopting this formal approach, we can avoid errors caused by misunderstanding or misinterpretation of these methodologies. Consequently, an accurate and unbiased comparison is made possible.

This research reviews studies using the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM0 in order to create a modified model and instrument to study the acceptance of Internet technology by consumers. In this paper, we examined the relationships between the TAM constructs in ...

Data warehousing systems enable enterprise managers to acquire and integrate information from heterogeneous sources and to query very large databases efficiently. Building a data warehouse requires adopting design and implementation techniques completely different from those underlying information systems. In this paper we present a graphical conceptual model for data warehouses, called Dimensional Fact model, and propose a semi-automated methodology to build it from the pre-existing Entity/Relationship schemes describing a database. Our conceptual model consists of tree-structured fact schemes whose basic elements are facts, attributes, dimensions and hierarchies; other features which may be represented on fact schemes are the additivity of fact attributes along dimensions, the optionality of dimension attributes and the existence of non-dimension attributes. Compatible fact schemes may be overlapped in order to relate and compare data. Fact schemes may be integrated with information of the conjectured workload, expressed in terms of query patterns, to be used as the input of a design phase whose output are the logical and physical schemes of the data warehouse.

This paper presents the results of a survey used to collect data about media choice from 228 respondents in Norwegian organizations. In this study, we focus on the role of three factors in influencing media choice: (a) task type, (b) experience with different media and (c) users perceptions of media. Results indicate that traditional media (such as face-to-face meetings and telephones) are used to a greater extent than modern media (such as e-mail and faxes) regardless of task type. Prior experience with a medium played a key role in determining the extent to which it was used. Interestingly, different perceptions appeared to affect the choice of different media. In general, these results cast some doubt on media richness theory and highlight the importance of experience and perceptions in users' choice of media.

The recent introduction of a spate of data access applications, such as CLAP and data mining tools, has led to an increased interest on the part of both scholars and practitioners on how best to use and benefit from these tools. This paper reports on six exploratory case studies involving eight decision-makers and seven end-users. A process model based on the Value Chain is proposed and explained. Results show that database usage and information processing practices have indeed grown more sophisticated. Implications for practice and future research aimed at testing the Value Chain model are proposed.

The efficient and effective management of projects is a key success factor for many organizations. Empirical studies indicate that systematic know-how transfer from, between and within projects has significant impact on the success of projects. However, the role of ...

The control objectives for information and related technology (COBIT) is a "trusted" open standard that is being used increasingly by a diverse range of organizations throughout the world. COBIT is arguably the most appropriate control framework to help an organization ensure alignment between use of information technology (IT) and its business goals, as it places emphasis on the business need

Agile project management with Scrum derives from best business practices in companies like Fuji-Xerox, Honda, Canon, and Toyota. Toyota routinely achieves four times the productivity and 12 times the quality of competitors. Can Scrum do the same for globally distributed teams? Two Agile companies, SirsiDynix and StarSoft Development Laboratories achieved comparable performance developing a Java application with over 1,000,000 lines of code. During 2005, a distributed team of 56 Scrum developers working from Provo, Utah; Waterloo, Canada; and St. Petersburg, Russia, delivered 671,688 lines of production Java code. At 15.3 function points per developer/month, this is the most productive Java project ever documented. SirsiDynix best practices are similar to those observed on distributed Scrum teams at IDX Systems, radically different than those promoted by PMBOK, and counterintuitive to practices advocated by the Scrum Alliance. This paper analyzes and recommends best practices for globally distributed Agile teams.

User authentication in computer systems has been a cornerstone of computer security for decades. The concept of a user id and password is a cost effective and efficient method of maintaining a shared secret between a user and a computer system. One of the key elements in the password solution for security is a reliance on human cognitive ability to remember the shared secret. In early computing days with only a few computer systems and a small select group of users, this model proved effective.

The need to develop software at Internet speed and accommodate changes during the entire software development life cycle has made lightweight or agile development methodologies like Extreme Programming popular. However, such methodologies have been considered to be beneficial for small and medium sized projects, with small teams. In this research, based on a case study in an organization that develops large-scale, complex software using a modified form of extreme programming, we highlight the key differences between agile principles proposed in prior literature and the agile practices that are suitable for large-scale, complex software development. Based on these differences, we propose general guidelines on tailoring agile development methodologies to make them suitable for the development of large, complex software systems .

A typology of trust concepts would enable researchers to compare results and communicate results more clearly. The typology would be especially valuable if the types of trust are shown to relate to each other. This paper justifies such an interdisciplinary typology and relates the trust constructs to e-commerce actions. It defines both conceptual level and operational level trust constructs. The conceptual level constructs consist of Disposition to Trust (from Psychology), Institution-based Trust (from Sociology), and Trusting Beliefs and Trusting Intentions (from Social Psychology). Each construct is further decomposed into two to four measurable subconstructs. Web vendor interventions designed to encourage customers to purchase goods/services or to share personal information with the vendor are posited to affect these behaviors by influencing customer trusting beliefs and trusting intentions in the vendor. 0-7695-

Online service quality is a much-studied concept. Despite this, dimensions that make up service quality, and the items used to measure those dimensions have proven unstable. It is widely suggested that service quality measurement scales need to be instantiated differently in different business domains. In addition, the nature of online services is continually changing. Universities have been at the forefront of this change, with university websites increasingly acting as a portal for a wide range of on-line transactions for a wide range of stakeholders. In this work-in-progress, qualitative study, we conduct focus groups with a range of stakeholders in university web portals with a view to adapting the e-qual instrument for use in a university web portal environment. We find support for a new service quality dimension, and for additional items in existing scales. We conclude by proposing a revised instrument that can form the basis for a more extensive quantitative study.

Intelligent agents are a new emerging technology that allows for machine-to-machine contract formation. Agents equipped with a set of rules instructed by humans, surf the web, discover other agents and/or humans, and take decisions forming agreements in an autonomous way. Despite recent legislations on electronic contracting, there are no legislations governing automatic agent transactions except one preliminary attempt in the USA. In this paper, we are looking into the new legal issues that arise due to intelligent agents in automatic contracting. There are few scattered opinions in the literature and are inadequate to address these issues. So, we present a legal framework to analyze these novel issues and show why even recent legislations cannot adequately address this problem. We identify many of these issues which are rooted at the authorization management in agent delegation. Therefore, we advocate solutions that consider both legal and technical aspects. Based on current legal and business practices, we develop a conceptual model for agent authorization. We propose the use of a Contract Agent Authorization Platform (CAAP) that also supports alerts and acknowledgments, and illustrate the platform with typical use cases. We attempt to investigate the ambiguities of the existing legal framework on contracting agents that emerged due to new technical developments in the field.

In this paper, we will illustrate the use of modern information technology to provide knowledge support to CRM processes. This knowledge support allows for performance enhancement in customer oriented business processes. We will base our reasoning on an integrated Customer Knowledge Management process model, which identifies six CRM sub-processes and four aspects of Knowledge Management. This integrated model aims at achieving knowledge transparency, knowledge dissemination, knowledge development and knowledge efficiency. The application of the four aspects content, competence, community and composition in specific CRM sub-processes will be demonstrated in several action research cases. These cases were implemented in European companies in the financial services sector and concern the support of customer-facing processes across all channels. They validate the proposed architecture while indicating critical success factors for a successful implementation of Customer Knowledge Management.

This paper presents results from a study of mobile ticketing service acceptance in public transportation. The theoretical background of the study was drawn from technology acceptance and diffusion of innovation theories, which were augmented with issues related to mobile service features, as well as the mobile use situation. The resulting research model was tested with data gathered through a self-administered mail survey with 360 subjects.

ERP implementation issues have been given much attention since two decades ago due to its low implementation success. Nearly 90 percent of ERP implementations are late or over budget and the success rate with ERP implementation is about 33%. In China, the success rate of implementing ERP systems is extremely low at 10% [28] which is much lower than that in West countries. This study attempts to study critical success factors affecting enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems implementation success in China with focus on both generic and unique factors. User satisfaction and White's ABCD classification method are used to judge whether an ERP system implementation is a success or a failure. Survey methodology and structural equation modeling technique of PLS-Graph are used to collect and analyze data. Discussions on the results of data analysis are made.

The public sector provides a variety of services to citizens. The delivery of information for these services over electronic means such as the Internet forms an important component of e-government strategy. However, providing information is not enough; it is imperative that this delivery satisfies customers of government services. This study focuses on evaluating a citizen-centric approach in the Advanced Travel Information Systems (ATIS) domain, a form of government-citizen information service. This paper summarizes two phases of research, including findings from the first phase. It details the structure and results of the preliminary study (n=71) of usability that was conducted in two major metropolitan areas -Los Angeles and Minneapolis. Based on findings from phase I; a more comprehensive concept of overall satisfaction with these services has been developed. The paper details this satisfaction measure and future directions for the study.

The increasing availability of web services necessitates efficient discovery and execution framework. The use of xml at various levels of web services standards poses challenges to the above process. OWLS is a service ontology and language, whose semantics are based on OWL. The semantics provided by OWL support greater automation of service selection, invocation, translation of message content between heterogeneous services, and service composition. The development and consumption of an OWLS based web service is time consuming and error prone. OWLS IDE assists developers in the semantic web service development, deployment and consumption processes. In order to achieve this the OWLS IDE uses and extends existing web service tools. In this paper we will look in detail at the support for discovery for semantic web services. We also present the matching schemes, the implementation and the results of performance evaluation. .

Case-based reasoning and multicriteria decision making have common grounds: they are both problem solving methodologies; both involve the selection, ranking and aggregation of best alternatives and provide tools for evaluating the alternatives in respect to multiple attributes or criteria. Each of the two methodologies has its own strengths and weaknesses. By integrating the two methodologies, we can take advantage of their strengths and complement each other's weaknesses. This paper proposes a multi-stage framework for intelligent decision support that integrates case-based reasoning and fuzzy multicriteria decision making techniques. We illustrated the proposed approach in the context of tropical cyclone prediction. We describe a prototype intelligent decision support system, which helps the forecaster in retrieving best-fitted solutions in terms of both usefulness and similarity to the current observed case.

The profitability of banks world-wide has decreased from the early 1980s to the 1990s. This has been attributed to several factors: the decline of traditional banking activities (deposit taking and lending), poorly performing debts (arising from poor lending decisions) and for domestic banks to factors such as depressed property prices and important local industrial sectors performing badly. However the analyses of bank performance tend to be short-term and narrow in their outlook, and seldom attempt to explain the underlying trends and processes of change. In this paper it is argued that the broad competitive forces of information technology, globalisation and deregulation are de-stabilising the banking industry which leads to irrevocable changes which allow new entrants, disintermediation, innovation and customer changes on a much greater scale than has occurred in the past. These concepts are illustrated using a range of different bank markets as examples. To compete in these new markets different approaches are needed. Possible strategies for addressing new bank markets are outlined with reference to size and type of bank and the long-term outlook for banking is discussed.