The Innovation Public Policies and the Firms’ adoption of Innovative Processes - A New Methodological Approach for Evaluation

Today, innovation is present in the discourse of politicians and business leaders. They see innovation as a positive value and as a solution to solve social problems and company’s competitiveness, so organizations are encouraged to adopt innovative practices through incentives and innovation policies. Several economic and sociological studies have shown that Portuguese companies adopt more easily technological innovations (with short-term effects) then organizational and social innovations. In this sense, we will consider innovation public policies effects at Portuguese companies and how they take available opportunities for innovation. The aim is to know if the concept of innovation spread by these policies is multidimensional (eg social, economic and technological) or restricted. We propose to study the factors (internal and external) that affect innovation processes in enterprises through case studies methodology. This research strategy will show us the processes of innovation from within the organizations and analyze the socio-economic context in which organizations operate through a new methodological approach for evaluation.Innovation, Innovation Systems, Public Policies, Enterprises, Territory.

Enterprise Engineering and Management at the Crossroads

The article provides an overview of the challenges and the state of the art of the discipline of Enterprise Architecture (EA), with emphasis on the challenges and future development opportunities of the underlying Information System (IS), and its IT implementation, the Enterprise Information System (EIS). The first challenge is to overcome the narrowness of scope of present practice in IS and EA, and re-gain the coverage of the entire business on all levels of management, and a holistic and systemic coverage of the enterprise as an economic entity in its social and ecological environment. The second challenge is how to face the problems caused by complexity that limit the controllability and manageability of the enterprise as a system. The third challenge is connected with the complexity problem, and describes fundamental issues of sustainability and viability. Following from the third, the fourth challenge is to identify modes of survival for systems, and dynamic system architectures that evolve and are resilient to changes of the environment in which they live. The state of the art section provides pointers to possible radical changes to models, methodologies, theories and tools in EIS design and implementation, with the potential to solve these grand challenges.Griffith Sciences, School of Information and Communication TechnologyNo Full Tex

Enterprise Information Systems as Objects and Carriers of Institutional Forces: The New Iron Cage?

This paper draws upon the institutional theory lens to examine enterprise information systems. We propose that these information systems engender a duality. On one hand, these systems are subject to institutional forces and institutional processes that set the rules of rationality. On the other hand, they are an important embodiment of institutional commitments and serve to preserve these rules by constraining the actions of human agents. The complexity inherent to enterprise technologies renders them an equivoque. This, when combined with the propensity toward lack of mindfulness in organizations, is likely to lead to acquiescence to institutional pressures. Enterprise information systems bind organizations to fundamental choices about how their activities should be organized; unquestioned choices that tend to appear natural. We suggest implications of this view and develop propositions examining: (1) enterprise information systems as objects of institutional forces in the chartering and project phases, (2) the resolution of institutional misalignments caused by the introduction of new systems, and (3) enterprise information systems as carriers of institutional logics in the shakeout and onward & upward phases

A framework for Model-Driven Engineering of resilient software-controlled systems

AbstractEmergent paradigms of Industry 4.0 and Industrial Internet of Things expect cyber-physical systems to reliably provide services overcoming disruptions in operative conditions and adapting to changes in architectural and functional requirements. In this paper, we describe a hardware/software framework supporting operation and maintenance of software-controlled systems enhancing resilience by promoting a Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) process to automatically derive structural configurations and failure models from reliability artifacts. Specifically, a reflective architecture developed around digital twins enables representation and control of system Configuration Items properly derived from SysML Block Definition Diagrams, providing support for variation. Besides, a plurality of distributed analytic agents for qualitative evaluation over executable failure models empowers the system with runtime self-assessment and dynamic adaptation capabilities. We describe the framework architecture outlining roles and responsibilities in a System of Systems perspective, providing salient design traits about digital twins and data analytic agents for failure propagation modeling and analysis. We discuss a prototype implementation following the MDE approach, highlighting self-recovery and self-adaptation properties on a real cyber-physical system for vehicle access control to Limited Traffic Zones

Monitoring and Information Alignment in Pursuit of an IoT-Enabled Self-Sustainable Interoperability

To remain competitive with big corporations, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) often need to be more dynamic, adapt to new business situations, react faster, and thereby survive in today‘s global economy. To do so, SMEs normally seek to create consortiums, thus gaining access to new and more opportunities. However, this strategy may also lead to complications. Due to the different sources of enterprise models and semantics, organizations are experiencing difficulties in seamlessly exchanging vital information via electronic means. In their attempt to address this issue, most seek to achieve interoperability by establishing peer-to-peer mappings with different business partners, or by using neutral data standards to regulate communications in optimized networks. Moreover, systems are more and more dynamic, frequently changing to answer new customer‘s requirements, causing new interoperability problems and a reduction of efficiency. Another situation that is constantly changing is the devices used in the enterprises, as the Enterprise Information Systems, devices are used to register internal data, and to be used to monitor several aspects. These devices are constantly changing, following the evolution and growth of the market. So, it is important to monitor these devices and doing a model representation of them. This dissertation proposes a self-sustainable interoperable framework to monitor existing enterprise information systems and their devices, monitor the device/enterprise network for changes and automatically detecting model changes. With this, network harmonization disruptions are detected in a timely way, and possible solutions are suggested to regain the interoperable status, thus enhancing robustness for reaching sustainability of business networks along time