AN INFORMATION SYSTEMS ARCHITECTURE FOR UNIVERSITY HOSPITALS: A CASE STUDY AT HOSPITAL DAS CLÍNICAS OF UFPE

Enterprise Architecture (EA) has been present in the literature since the 1980s and has been widely applied in several fields, bringing notable benefits in supporting the management and governance of organizations. However, this concept is still little explored when we refer to the application of EA in health systems. The objective of this research in the area of Business Architecture applied to health is to investigate and propose an Information Systems Architecture Model for University Hospitals through a case study carried out at the Hospital das Clínicas of the Federal University of Pernambuco (HC- UFPE). The methodological path covered two main stages, with a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) followed by a case study at HC-UFPE. The SRL was developed from a protocol, using the methodology addressed by Kitchenham (2007) and Dybå & Dingsøyr (2008). Nine specific research questions were selected to explore quantitative and qualitative aspects of state of art in applying EA in health. The Cohen's Kappa method was also used to assess the level of disagreement between the two teams of researchers involved in this SLR. The case study considered two primary data collection methodologies, semi-structured interviews, and second participant observation. The data analysis was based on a data triangulation of collected data through open coding, including technical and normative documents from the HC-UFPE. Lastly, the development of an initial Information Systems Architecture modeling the hospital IT sector's current and future business processes. With the SLR, it was possible to identify, from specific research questions, which environments of EA application; what are the positive impacts that EA has brought to the organization; what are the problems and challenges encountered during the application of the EA; and what are the critical success factors for the application of EA. The main publication channels and authors who publish on the topic were also identified. In the case study, the Information Systems Architecture of HC-UFPE was built, using the TOGAF 9.2 framework and the Archi software as a construction tool, aligned with the Archimate language. The data presented here can help IT, and health professionals search for methods to support management hospitals. Regarding the case study, it was possible to present tools that can help in the governance of the HC-UFPE and open doors for new studies to be started for future implementation of EA in the network of university hospitals in Brazil

Enterprise Architecture in Healthcare Networks: A Systematic Literature Review

Healthcare organizations collaborate, share knowledge, and need to be accountable to each other. Therefore, healthcare organizations manage a dynamic information system landscape. Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a management tool for aligning these landscapes to the primary information needs that healthcare organizations have. EA is of value in some environments, but it seems to be not well suited to the dynamics of healthcare. Despite the publication of several systematic literature reviews on EA in healthcare, a systematic literature study comparing EA applicability at various levels of cooperation (intra, inter, and network collaboration) is lacking. Therefore, we posed the following research question: To what extent is EA researched within healthcare organizations in the context of intra, inter and network collaboration? A systematic literature review was used to select 94 scientific publications for evaluation. These studies make explicit the EA elements at three levels of collaboration in the context of healthcare. The findings show that EA is most frequently studied in relation to a single healthcare organization with a wide range of topics. IT governance and EA implementation are the subjects of the majority of EA network level studies (17 out of 94 studies), followed by building/developing EA, EA acceptance, EA issues and root causes, and EA modeling. Although numerous EA frameworks are discussed in studies at the intra- and interorganizational levels, they are rarely referenced in studies at the network level. Additionally, the EA benefits, success factors, and challenges are comparable at high level, but details differ per level. These findings demonstrate that EA is researched within the healthcare sector context. The majority of knowledge on EA is focused on a single healthcare organization, but little is known about EA in a networked healthcare environment. To learn more about how EA might be used in a healthcare network setting, a research agenda has been set up based on the results

A method for developing Reference Enterprise Architectures

Industrial change forces enterprises to constantly adjust their organizational structures in order to stay competitive. In this regard, research acknowledges the potential of Reference Enterprise Architectures (REA). This thesis proposes REAM - a method for developing REAs. After contrasting organizations' needs with approaches available in the current knowledge base, this work identifies the absence of method support for REA development. Proposing REAM, the author aims to close this research gap and evaluates the method's utility by applying REAM in different naturalistic settings

ArchiSmartCity: Modelling the Alignment of Services and Information in Smart City Architectures

Digital transformation in the public sector describes the shift from traditional creation and delivery of services, into the massive use of digital technologies to enhance public services. The digitalisation of public administration presents significant challenges for many municipalities in the social, economic, environmental, and sustainable dimensions. Cities take advantage of the rapid advances in information and communication technologies capabilities to make the provision of city services (e.g., health service, transport service, air-quality service, education service) more efficient. These modern urban environments are commonly referred to as Smart Cities, where advanced and innovative services are offered to improve the overall quality of life for the citizens. Smart Cities are complex systems that involve diverse stakeholders and concerns, use heterogeneous information systems and technologies, and aim to fulfill multiple and conflicting goals. Such complexity challenges the provision of services that may fail to achieve city goals and meet the needs of citizens due to the lack of alignment between city services and the information systems that support them. Evidence of this is the existence of city services and systems that fail to address the real needs of stakeholders, and are not perceived as valuable by them because they do not interoperate, leading to duplication of work and incompatible solutions. Enterprise Architecture (EA) is an established planning and governance approach to manage the complexity of corporate systems. EA presents a holistic view of organisational business strategies and IT initiatives to achieve organisational goals by adopting a comprehensive perspective on the overall architecture. Smart Cities can be seen as urban enterprises with more complex and multi-dimensional systems that require integration among smarter services from different domains (e.g., mobility, energy, public safety, emergency, education, culture, etc.) to respond to diverse interests and objectives from a range of stakeholders. Existing research on EAs for Smart Cities uses the concept of layers and views to describe architecture content and guide its implementation. However, these approaches do not identify the concepts to describe and model the relationships between the service and information layers which are essential to address the strategic alignment. Furthermore, there is an absence of such concepts in languages and metamodels for Enterprise Modelling. These architectures and metamodels mostly emphasize technical aspects that constitute Smart Cities and they rarely focus on city services and their strategic aspects towards delivering the cities vision and objectives. This research introduces ArchiSmartCity, a metamodel that addresses the alignment between city services and information systems according to Smart City strategies to assist in the digitalisation of public city services. In this thesis, design principles and design requirements are defined and instantiated by designing the ArchiSmartCity metamodel that explicitly expresses this alignment, following a design science research approach. Further, ArchiSmartCity is developed and implemented as a coherent extension of an EA metamodel to describe an expository instantiation and its application. ArchiSmartCity is evaluated in an iterative manner within multiple-case studies, by creating real-world services models that are validated by Smart City domain experts. Moreover, this thesis demonstrates and evaluates ArchiSmartCity by developing a computer-based solution for semantic alignment analysis. Ex-post evaluation results demonstrate the quality and practical relevance of the developed metamodel extension for cities and municipalities. This study contributes to the current understanding of how city strategies should be aligned with Smart City implementations by providing a prescriptive view and metamodel to guide coherent and unambiguous architecture design in the Smart Cities field

ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks: a literature review

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation is a complex and vibrant process, one that involves a combination of technological and organizational interactions. Often an ERP implementation project is the single largest IT project that an organization has ever launched and requires a mutual fit of system and organization. Also the concept of an ERP implementation supporting business processes across many different departments is not a generic, rigid and uniform concept and depends on variety of factors. As a result, the issues addressing the ERP implementation process have been one of the major concerns in industry. Therefore ERP implementation receives attention from practitioners and scholars and both, business as well as academic literature is abundant and not always very conclusive or coherent. However, research on ERP systems so far has been mainly focused on diffusion, use and impact issues. Less attention has been given to the methods used during the configuration and the implementation of ERP systems, even though they are commonly used in practice, they still remain largely unexplored and undocumented in Information Systems research. So, the academic relevance of this research is the contribution to the existing body of scientific knowledge. An annotated brief literature review is done in order to evaluate the current state of the existing academic literature. The purpose is to present a systematic overview of relevant ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks as a desire for achieving a better taxonomy of ERP implementation methodologies. This paper is useful to researchers who are interested in ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Results will serve as an input for a classification of the existing ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Also, this paper aims also at the professional ERP community involved in the process of ERP implementation by promoting a better understanding of ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks, its variety and history

System: A core conceptual modeling construct for capturing complexity

[EN] The digitalization of human society continues at a relentless rate. However, to develop modern information technologies, the increasing complexity of the real-world must be modeled, suggest-ing the general need to reconsider how to carry out conceptual modeling. This research proposes that the often-overlooked notion of "system"should be a separate, and core, conceptual modeling construct and argues for incorporating it and related concepts, such as emergence, into existing approaches to conceptual modeling. The work conducts a synthesis of the ontology of systems and general systems theory. These modeling foundations are then used to propose a CESM+ template for conducing systems-grounded conceptual modeling. Several new conceptual modeling notations are introduced. The systemist modeling is then applied to a case study on the development of a citizen science platform. The case demonstrates the potential contributions of the systemist approach and identifies specific implications of explicit modeling with systems for theory and practice. The paper provides recommendations for how to incorporate systems into existing projects and suggests fruitful opportunities for future conceptual modeling research.We wish to thank the editor-in-chief, Carson Woo, and three anonymous reviewers for their exceptionally insightful and developmental comments. The substantial improvements that resulted from their feedback were much deeper than we usually experience in journal review processes. We wish to thank the participants of www.nlnature.com (now inactive) who contributed their sightings from 2010 to 2022. We also thank Jeffrey Parsons and Yolanda Wiersma - the co -investigators of NLNature. We are grateful to the late Mario Bunge and to Ron Weber with whom we discussed ontological ideas that inspired this paper. We also want to thank the participants and reviewers of AIS SIGSAND and ER Conference for their comments and feedback on earlier versions of this paper. This research was supported by McIntire School of Commerce, University of Virginia, J. Mack Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University, United States, and by VRAIN Research Institute of the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia and the Generalitat Valenciana, Spain under the CoMoDiD project (CIPROM/2021/023) .Lukyanenko, R.; Storey, VC.; Pastor López, O. (2022). System: A core conceptual modeling construct for capturing complexity. Data & Knowledge Engineering. 141:1-29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.datak.2022.10206212914

The Nexus Between Security Sector Governance/Reform and Sustainable Development Goal-16

This Security Sector Reform (SSR) Paper offers a universal and analytical perspective on the linkages between Security Sector Governance (SSG)/SSR (SSG/R) and Sustainable Development Goal-16 (SDG-16), focusing on conflict and post-conflict settings as well as transitional and consolidated democracies. Against the background of development and security literatures traditionally maintaining separate and compartmentalized presence in both academic and policymaking circles, it maintains that the contemporary security- and development-related challenges are inextricably linked, requiring effective measures with an accurate understanding of the nature of these challenges. In that sense, SDG-16 is surely a good step in the right direction. After comparing and contrasting SSG/R and SDG-16, this SSR Paper argues that human security lies at the heart of the nexus between the 2030 Agenda of the United Nations (UN) and SSG/R. To do so, it first provides a brief overview of the scholarly and policymaking literature on the development-security nexus to set the background for the adoption of The Agenda 2030. Next, it reviews the literature on SSG/R and SDGs, and how each concept evolved over time. It then identifies the puzzle this study seeks to address by comparing and contrasting SSG/R with SDG-16. After making a case that human security lies at the heart of the nexus between the UN’s 2030 Agenda and SSG/R, this book analyses the strengths and weaknesses of human security as a bridge between SSG/R and SDG-16 and makes policy recommendations on how SSG/R, bolstered by human security, may help achieve better results on the SDG-16 targets. It specifically emphasizes the importance of transparency, oversight, and accountability on the one hand, and participative approach and local ownership on the other. It concludes by arguing that a simultaneous emphasis on security and development is sorely needed for addressing the issues under the purview of SDG-16

Big Data in Bioeconomy

This edited open access book presents the comprehensive outcome of The European DataBio Project, which examined new data-driven methods to shape a bioeconomy. These methods are used to develop new and sustainable ways to use forest, farm and fishery resources. As a European initiative, the goal is to use these new findings to support decision-makers and producers – meaning farmers, land and forest owners and fishermen. With their 27 pilot projects from 17 countries, the authors examine important sectors and highlight examples where modern data-driven methods were used to increase sustainability. How can farmers, foresters or fishermen use these insights in their daily lives? The authors answer this and other questions for our readers. The first four parts of this book give an overview of the big data technologies relevant for optimal raw material gathering. The next three parts put these technologies into perspective, by showing useable applications from farming, forestry and fishery. The final part of this book gives a summary and a view on the future. With its broad outlook and variety of topics, this book is an enrichment for students and scientists in bioeconomy, biodiversity and renewable resources