PuLSE-I: Deriving instances from a product line infrastructure

Reusing assets during application engineering promises to improve the efficiency of systems development. However, in order to benefit from reusable assets, application engineering processes must incorporate when and how to use the reusable assets during single system development. However, when and how to use a reusable asset depends on what types of reusable assets have been created.Product line engineering approaches produce a reusable infrastructure for a set of products. In this paper, we present the application engineering process associated with the PuLSE product line software engineering method - PuLSE-I. PuLSE-I details how single systems can be built efficiently from the reusable product line infrastructure built during the other PuLSE activities

The development of competitive advantage through sustainable event management

Purpose: Whilst the debate rages between progressive and destructive considerations of economic development, this paper aims to develop thinking around the sustainable event and its contribution to competitive advantage. Design/methodology/approach: The paper defines the sustainable event and considers different position that might be adopted by private and public sector organisations when addressing the triple bottom line of sustainable development. Findings: Cost leadership strategies are unlikely to work and the event organiser must address competitive advantage via differentiation and focus strategies. Practical implications: Event managers must gain a better understanding of the motivations of their audience in relation to sustainability and work towards clearer means to demonstrate that their event meets these sustainable development needs. Originality/value: The intention being that if event organisers can see a competitive advantage in the sustainable event, their contribution to sustainable development will be increased. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited

To boardrooms and sustainability: the changing nature of segmentation

Market segmentation is the process by which customers in markets with some heterogeneity are grouped into smaller homogeneous segments of more ‘similar’ customers. A market segment is a group of individuals, groups or organisations sharing similar characteristics and buying behaviour that cause them to have relatively similar needs and purchasing behaviour. Segmentation is not a new concept: for six decades marketers have, in various guises, sought to break-down a market into sub-groups of users, each sharing common needs, buying behavior and marketing requirements. However, this approach to target market strategy development has been rejuvenated in the past few years. Various reasons account for this upsurge in the usage of segmentation, examination of which forms the focus of this white paper. Ready access to data enables faster creation of a segmentation and the testing of propositions to take to market. ‘Big data’ has made the re-thinking of target market segments and value propositions inevitable, desirable, faster and more flexible. The resulting information has presented companies with more topical and consumer-generated insights than ever before. However, many marketers, analytics directors and leadership teams feel over-whelmed by the sheer quantity and immediacy of such data. Analytical prowess in consultants and inside client organisations has benefited from a stepchange, using new heuristics and faster computing power, more topical data and stronger market insights. The approach to segmentation today is much smarter and has stretched well away from the days of limited data explored only with cluster analysis. The coverage and wealth of the solutions are unimaginable when compared to the practices of a few years ago. Then, typically between only six to ten segments were forced into segmentation solutions, so that an organisation could cater for these macro segments operationally as well as understand them intellectually. Now there is the advent of what is commonly recognised as micro segmentation, where the complexity of business operations and customer management requires highly granular thinking. In support of this development, traditional agency/consultancy roles have transitioned into in-house business teams led by data, campaign and business change planners. The challenge has shifted from developing a granular segmentation solution that describes all customers and prospects, into one of enabling an organisation to react to the granularity of the solution, deploying its resources to permit controlled and consistent one-to-one interaction within segments. So whilst the cost of delivering and maintaining the solution has reduced with technology advances, a new set of systems, costs and skills in channel and execution management is required to deliver on this promise. These new capabilities range from rich feature creative and content management solutions, tailored copy design and deployment tools, through to instant messaging middleware solutions that initiate multi-streams of activity in a variety of analytical engines and operational systems. Companies have recruited analytics and insight teams, often headed by senior personnel, such as an Insight Manager or Analytics Director. Indeed, the situations-vacant adverts for such personnel out-weigh posts for brand and marketing managers. Far more companies possess the in-house expertise necessary to help with segmentation analysis. Some organisations are also seeking to monetise one of the most regularly under-used latent business assets… data. Developing the capability and culture to bring data together from all corners of a business, the open market, commercial sources and business partners, is a step-change, often requiring a Chief Data Officer. This emerging role has also driven the professionalism of data exploration, using more varied and sophisticated statistical techniques. CEOs, CFOs and COOs increasingly are the sponsor of segmentation projects as well as the users of the resulting outputs, rather than CMOs. CEOs because recession has forced re-engineering of value propositions and the need to look after core customers; CFOs because segmentation leads to better and more prudent allocation of resources – especially NPD and marketing – around the most important sub-sets of a market; COOs because they need to better look after key customers and improve their satisfaction in service delivery. More and more it is recognised that with a new segmentation comes organisational realignment and change, so most business functions now have an interest in a segmentation project, not only the marketers. Largely as a result of the digital era and the growth of analytics, directors and company leadership teams are becoming used to receiving more extensive market intelligence and quickly updated customer insight, so leading to faster responses to market changes, customer issues, competitor moves and their own performance. This refreshing of insight and a leadership team’s reaction to this intelligence often result in there being more frequent modification of a target market strategy and segmentation decisions. So many projects set up to consider multi-channel strategy and offerings; digital marketing; customer relationship management; brand strategies; new product and service development; the re-thinking of value propositions, and so forth, now routinely commence with a segmentation piece in order to frame the ongoing work. Most organisations have deployed CRM systems and harnessed associated customer data. CRM first requires clarity in segment priorities. The insights from a CRM system help inform the segmentation agenda and steer how they engage with their important customers or prospects. The growth of CRM and its ensuing data have assisted the ongoing deployment of segmentation. One of the biggest changes for segmentation is the extent to which it is now deployed by practitioners in the public and not-for-profit sectors, who are harnessing what is termed social marketing, in order to develop and to execute more shrewdly their targeting, campaigns and messaging. For Marketing per se, the interest in the marketing toolkit from non-profit organisations, has been big news in recent years. At the very heart of the concept of social marketing is the market segmentation process. The extreme rise in the threat to security from global unrest, terrorism and crime has focused the minds of governments, security chiefs and their advisors. As a result, significant resources, intellectual capability, computing and data management have been brought to bear on the problem. The core of this work is the importance of identifying and profiling threats and so mitigating risk. In practice, much of this security and surveillance work harnesses the tools developed for market segmentation and the profiling of different consumer behaviours. This white paper presents the findings from interviews with leading exponents of segmentation and also the insights from a recent study of marketing practitioners relating to their current imperatives and foci. More extensive views of some of these ‘leading lights’ have been sought and are included here in order to showcase the latest developments and to help explain both the ongoing surge of segmentation and the issues under-pinning its practice. The principal trends and developments are thereby presented and discussed in this paper

Performance assessment of urban precinct design: a scoping study

Executive Summary: Significant advances have been made over the past decade in the development of scientifically and industry accepted tools for the performance assessment of buildings in terms of energy, carbon, water, indoor environment quality etc. For resilient, sustainable low carbon urban development to be realised in the 21st century, however, will require several radical transitions in design performance beyond the scale of individual buildings. One of these involves the creation and application of leading edge tools (not widely available to built environment professions and practitioners) capable of being applied to an assessment of performance across all stages of development at a precinct scale (neighbourhood, community and district) in either greenfield, brownfield or greyfield settings. A core aspect here is the development of a new way of modelling precincts, referred to as Precinct Information Modelling (PIM) that provides for transparent sharing and linking of precinct object information across the development life cycle together with consistent, accurate and reliable access to reference data, including that associated with the urban context of the precinct. Neighbourhoods are the ‘building blocks’ of our cities and represent the scale at which urban design needs to make its contribution to city performance: as productive, liveable, environmentally sustainable and socially inclusive places (COAG 2009). Neighbourhood design constitutes a major area for innovation as part of an urban design protocol established by the federal government (Department of Infrastructure and Transport 2011, see Figure 1). The ability to efficiently and effectively assess urban design performance at a neighbourhood level is in its infancy. This study was undertaken by Swinburne University of Technology, University of New South Wales, CSIRO and buildingSMART Australasia on behalf of the CRC for Low Carbon Living

Less is more: what design against crime can contribute to sustainability.

Crime is a voracious form of premature obsolescence. Replacement of insured stolen items increases levels of product consumption that are unsustainable. Additional to the ecological cost of crime are the social and economic impacts linked to ‘courts, cops and corrections’ – money better spent on building social innovation and sustainability. The user/ abuser centered methodology of the Design Against Crime Research Centre (DACRC) at University of Arts London as a socially responsive design movement is described in this paper. It argues that DACRC’s approach is unique. It addresses social agendas by accommodating consideration of multiple, often competing, user-demands in a given context, and responding in ways that produce both fiscal and social capital through sustainable design

Do Cultural and Creative Industries (CCI) matter for innovation and value creation in knowledge-based business? Aims, forms and practice of collaboration in Italy

Purpose: This paper provides the first results of a scoping study exploring in detail how Cultural and Creative Industries(CCI) can represent a source and resource of critical and creative thinking as well as a set of processes to be deployed in order to foster and support innovation. Scope: Focusing on a sample of Italian companies, the aims, the forms and the specific practices of collaborations between CCI and knowledge-based and traditional businesses are identified and discussed. Method: In order to derive and test theories, trace causal pathways, explore hypotheses, researchers have designed and implemented qualitative research methods and conducted investigation mainly based on web-available data, archives and interview-based information. Results: The case examples of relevant Italian companies effectively provide evidences of the impact and modalities of adopting initiatives to develop innovation capacity. Recommendations and conclusions: The investigation of a sample of Italian companies suggests that most of the attention is focused on collaborations aimed to reinforce company image and reputation, to develop corporate social responsibility and to improve brand recognition

Alexandria: Extensible Framework for Rapid Exploration of Social Media

The Alexandria system under development at IBM Research provides an extensible framework and platform for supporting a variety of big-data analytics and visualizations. The system is currently focused on enabling rapid exploration of text-based social media data. The system provides tools to help with constructing "domain models" (i.e., families of keywords and extractors to enable focus on tweets and other social media documents relevant to a project), to rapidly extract and segment the relevant social media and its authors, to apply further analytics (such as finding trends and anomalous terms), and visualizing the results. The system architecture is centered around a variety of REST-based service APIs to enable flexible orchestration of the system capabilities; these are especially useful to support knowledge-worker driven iterative exploration of social phenomena. The architecture also enables rapid integration of Alexandria capabilities with other social media analytics system, as has been demonstrated through an integration with IBM Research's SystemG. This paper describes a prototypical usage scenario for Alexandria, along with the architecture and key underlying analytics.Comment: 8 page

Review of Requirement Engineering Approaches for Software Product Lines

The Software Product Lines (SPL) paradigm is one of the most recent topics of interest for the software engineering community. On the one hand, the Software Product Lines is based on a reuse strategy with the aim to reduce the global time-to-market of the software product, to improve the software product quality, and to reduce the cost. On the other hand, traditional Requirement Engineering approaches could not be appropriated to deal with the new challenges that arises the SPL adoption. In the last years, several approaches have been proposed to cover this limitation. This technical report presents an analysis of specific approaches used in the development of SPL to provide solutions to model variability and to deal with the requirements engineering activities. The obtained results show that most of the research in this context is focused on the Domain Engineering, covering mainly the Feature Modeling and the Scenario Modeling. Among the studied approaches, only one of them supported the delta identification; this fact implies that new mechanisms to incorporate new deltas in the Domain specification are needed. Regarding the SPL adoption strategy, most of the approaches support a proactive strategy. However, this strategy is the most expensive and risk-prone. Finally, most of the approaches were based on modeling requirements with feature models giving less support to other important activities in the requirements engineering process such as elicitation, validation, or verification of requirements. The results of this study provide a wide view of the current state of research in requirements engineering for SPL and also highlight possible research gaps that may be of interest for researchers and practitioners.Blanes Domínguez, D.; Insfrán Pelozo, CE. (2011). Review of Requirement Engineering Approaches for Software Product Lines. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/1023