Bookkeeping In The Cloud: Advancements In Accounting Software

In our constantly changing economy, it is crucial for a business to be able to stay flexible and responsive with the information it gathers, processes, and provides. Due to this fact, the relationship between information technology (IT) and businesses has grown tremendously through the years. One of the newest concepts from IT is cloud computing. This service allows for the connection of multiple devices to servers around the world from any location with an internet connection. Cloud computing has started to secure a foothold in the accounting software market. While the users of this new software are increasing every year, many firms and businesses are still cautious on making the switch. This paper will mitigate the concerns of accountants about the software by addressing how the software works and the various advantages and disadvantages that it provides to a firm

Software Reuse in Agile Development Organizations - A Conceptual Management Tool

The reuse of knowledge is considered a major factor for increasing productivity and quality. In the software industry knowledge is embodied in software assets such as code components, functional designs and test cases. This kind of knowledge reuse is also referred to as software reuse. Although the benefits can be substantial, software reuse has never reached its full potential. Organizations are not aware of the different levels of reuse or do not know how to address reuse issues. This paper proposes a conceptual management tool for supporting software reuse. Furthermore the paper presents the findings of the application of the management tool in an agile development organization

“Never is going to be as calm as now” – How do large Finnish organizations adapt their digital strategies to the fast-changing business environment?

There are more developments and disruptions in technology and business models than ever before. To react to and benefit from these changes, organizations have created digital strategies. However, solely implementing a long-term digital strategy can cause falling behind in technology and competition if the organization is not able to react to the fast changes in business environment. The purpose of this thesis is to study how large organizations adapt their digital strategies in order to simultaneously implement long-term digital strategy and react fast to the changes in business environment. The previous research of digital strategy’s adaptation to the fast changes in business environment and capabilities it requires from organizations is still scarce. This thesis is conducted as a multiple case study of 11 large Finnish organizations which have shown interest towards digitalization. One person participating to digital strategy or strategy work was interviewed from each organization meaning in total 11 semi-structured interviews. The data was analyzed with Gioia method to bring rigor to the data analysis and to look for the themes in data with a consistent way. Findings of the study present that organizations adapt to the changes in environment by adapting their digital strategies and by following changes in environment, addressing new opportunities, and transforming the organization in ways they did not use with traditional business. This thesis contributes to the previous research by extending the literature of digital strategy and looking dynamic capabilities theory from the perspective of digital strategy. This study suggests that digital strategy develops through three steps: first digitalization is mentioned in strategy, secondly organizations have a digital strategy or transformation program, and finally digitalization is embedded to business strategy. To follow changes effectively, organizations do it as a part of their strategy processes but also use external partners, internal idea collection processes, or specified teams to support following changes. Addressing new opportunities differ from traditional product development and is aimed to be faster and more agile. Opportunities are addressed through three steps which include planning the pilot, implementing it, and finally ending or scaling it to a product. To implement the pilots, organizations engage customers and combine capabilities relating to business, IT and software development, and new knowledge. To support adaptation to the changes in environment, organizations have made changes to their structures, built new digital competences, used centralized funding, and tried to transform their organizational cultures. Furthermore, the findings suggest that organizations feel that the changes in business environment are becoming faster and organizations have the need for dynamic capabilities

A Generative Communication Service for Database Interoperability

Parallel and distributed programming is conceptually harder to undertake and to understand than sequential programming, because a programmer often has to manage the coexistence and coordination of multiple concurrent activities. The model of Generative Communication in Linda a paradigm that has been developed for parallel computing emphasizes the decoupling of cooperating parallel processes; thus, relieving the programmer from the burden of having to consider all process interrelations explicitly. In many application areas, data is distributed over a multitude of heterogeneous, autonomous information systems. These systems are often isolated and an exchange of data among them is not easy. On the other hand, support for dynamic exchange of data is required to improve the business processes. Cooperative information systems enable such autonomous systems to interoperate. They are complex systems of systems which require a well designed and flexible software architecture. The Linda model had a great influence on research in parallel programming languages. Stimulated by this success, a Generative Communication Service, which offers a very flexible associative addressing mechanism based on metadata matching, has been developed for supporting interoperability of cooperative information systems. Some design patterns guided the construction of the resulting communication service that has been implemented on top of CORBA for an ODMG canonical data model

R&D on co-working transport schemes in Geant4

A research and development (R&D) project related to the extension of the Geant4 toolkit has been recently launched to address fundamental methods in radiation transport simulation. The project focuses on simulation at different scales in the same experimental environment; this problem requires new methods across the current boundaries of condensed-random-walk and discrete transport schemes. The new developments have been motivated by experimental requirements in various domains, including nanodosimetry, astronomy and detector developments for high energy physics applications.Comment: To be published in the Proceedings of the CHEP (Computing in High Energy Physics) 2009 conferenc

Addressing business agility challenges with enterprise systems

It is clear that systems agility (i.e., having a responsive IT infrastructure that can be changed quickly to meet changing business needs) has become a critical component of organizational agility. However, skeptics continue to suggest that, despite the benefits enterprise system packages provide, they are constraining choices for firms faced with agility challenges. The reason for this skepticism is that the tight integration between different parts of the business that enables many enterprise systems\u27 benefits also increases the systems\u27 complexity, and this increased complexity, say the skeptics, increases the difficulty of changing systems when business needs change. These persistent concerns motivated us to conduct a series of interviews with business and IT managers in 15 firms to identify how they addressed, in total, 57 different business agility challenges. Our analysis suggests that when the challenges involved an enterprise system, firms were able to address a high percentage of their challenges with four options that avoid the difficulties associated with changing the complex core system: capabilities already built-in to the package but not previously used, leveraging globally consistent integrated data already available, using add-on systems available on the market that easily interfaced with the existing enterprise system, and vendor provided patches that automatically updated the code. These findings have important implications for organizations with and without enterprise system architectures

What influences the speed of prototyping? An empirical investigation of twenty software startups

It is essential for startups to quickly experiment business ideas by building tangible prototypes and collecting user feedback on them. As prototyping is an inevitable part of learning for early stage software startups, how fast startups can learn depends on how fast they can prototype. Despite of the importance, there is a lack of research about prototyping in software startups. In this study, we aimed at understanding what are factors influencing different types of prototyping activities. We conducted a multiple case study on twenty European software startups. The results are two folds, firstly we propose a prototype-centric learning model in early stage software startups. Secondly, we identify factors occur as barriers but also facilitators for prototyping in early stage software startups. The factors are grouped into (1) artifacts, (2) team competence, (3) collaboration, (4) customer and (5) process dimensions. To speed up a startups progress at the early stage, it is important to incorporate the learning objective into a well-defined collaborative approach of prototypingComment: This is the author's version of the work. Copyright owner's version can be accessed at doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57633-6_2, XP2017, Cologne, German

Benefits and challenges of applying Semantic Web Services in the e-Government domain

Joining up services in e-Government usually implies governmental agencies acting in concert without a central control regime. This requires the sharing of scattered and heterogeneous data. Semantic Web Service (SWS) technology can help to integrate, mediate and reason between these datasets. However, since few real-world applications have been developed, it is still unclear which are the actual benefits and issues of adopting such a technology in the e-Government domain. In this paper, we contribute to raising awareness of the potential benefits in the e-Government community by analyzing motivations, requirements, and expected results, before proposing a reusable SWS-based framework. We demonstrate the application of this framework by a compelling use case: a GIS-based emergency planning system. We illustrate the obtained benefits and the key challenges which remain to be addressed