13,857 research outputs found
Developing an inter-enterprise alignment maturity model: research challenges and solutions
Business-IT alignment is pervasive today, as organizations strive to achieve competitive advantage. Like in other areas, e.g., software development, maintenance and IT services, there are maturity models to assess such alignment. Those models, however, do not specifically address the aspects needed for achieving alignment between business and IT in inter-enterprise settings. In this paper, we present the challenges we face in the development of an inter-enterprise alignment maturity model, as well as the current solutions to counter these problems
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Integrating information and knowledge for enterprise innovation
It has widely been accepted that enterprise integration, can be a source of socio-technical and cultural problems within organisations wishing to provide a focussed end-to-end business service. This can cause possible “straitjacketing” of business process architectures, thus suppressing responsive business re-engineering and competitive advantage for some companies. Accordingly, the current typology and emergent forms of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) technologies are set in the context of understanding information and knowledge integration philosophies. As such, key influences and trends in emerging IS integration choices, for end-to-end, cost-effective and flexible knowledge integration, are examined. As touch points across and outside organisations proliferate, via work-flow and relationship management-driven value innovation, aspects of knowledge refinement and knowledge integration pose challenges to maximising the potential of innovation and sustainable success, within enterprises. This is in terms of the increasing propensity for data fragmentation and the lack of effective information management, in the light of information overload. Furthermore, the nature of IS mediation which is inherent within decision making and workflow-based business processes, provides the basis for evaluation of the effects of information and knowledge integration. Hence, the authors propose a conceptual, holistic evaluation framework which encompasses these ideas. It is thus argued that such trends, and their implications regarding enterprise IS integration to engender sustainable competitive advantage, require fundamental re-thinking
Integration of BPM systems
New technologies have emerged to support the global economy where for instance suppliers, manufactures and retailers are working together in order to minimise the cost and
maximise efficiency. One of the technologies that has become a buzz word for many businesses is business process management or BPM. A business process comprises activities
and tasks, the resources required to perform each task, and the business rules linking these activities and tasks. The tasks may be performed by human and/or machine actors.
Workflow provides a way of describing the order of execution and the dependent relationships between the constituting activities of short or long running processes.
Workflow allows businesses to capture not only the information but also the processes that transform the information - the process asset (Koulopoulos, T. M., 1995). Applications which involve automated, human-centric and collaborative processes across organisations are
inherently different from one organisation to another. Even within the same organisation but over time, applications are adapted as ongoing change to the business processes is seen as the norm in today’s dynamic business environment. The major difference lies in the specifics of business processes which are changing rapidly in order to match the way in which businesses operate. In this chapter we introduce and discuss Business Process Management (BPM) with a focus on the integration of heterogeneous BPM systems across multiple organisations. We identify the problems and the main challenges not only with regards to technologies but also in the social and cultural context. We also discuss the issues that have arisen in our bid to find the solutions
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A survey of simulation techniques in commerce and defence
Despite the developments in Modelling and Simulation (M&S) tools and techniques over the past years, there has been a gap in the M&S research and practice in healthcare on developing a toolkit to assist the modellers and simulation practitioners with selecting an appropriate set of techniques. This study is a preliminary step towards this goal. This paper presents some results from a systematic literature survey on applications of M&S in the commerce and defence domains that could inspire some improvements in the healthcare. Interim results show that in the commercial sector Discrete-Event Simulation (DES) has been the most widely used technique with System Dynamics (SD) in second place. However in the defence sector, SD has gained relatively more attention. SD has been found quite useful for qualitative and soft factors analysis. From both the surveys it becomes clear that there is a growing trend towards using hybrid M&S approaches
From Design to Production Control Through the Integration of Engineering Data Management and Workflow Management Systems
At a time when many companies are under pressure to reduce "times-to-market"
the management of product information from the early stages of design through
assembly to manufacture and production has become increasingly important.
Similarly in the construction of high energy physics devices the collection of
(often evolving) engineering data is central to the subsequent physics
analysis. Traditionally in industry design engineers have employed Engineering
Data Management Systems (also called Product Data Management Systems) to
coordinate and control access to documented versions of product designs.
However, these systems provide control only at the collaborative design level
and are seldom used beyond design. Workflow management systems, on the other
hand, are employed in industry to coordinate and support the more complex and
repeatable work processes of the production environment. Commercial workflow
products cannot support the highly dynamic activities found both in the design
stages of product development and in rapidly evolving workflow definitions. The
integration of Product Data Management with Workflow Management can provide
support for product development from initial CAD/CAM collaborative design
through to the support and optimisation of production workflow activities. This
paper investigates this integration and proposes a philosophy for the support
of product data throughout the full development and production lifecycle and
demonstrates its usefulness in the construction of CMS detectors.Comment: 18 pages, 13 figure
Web-based support for managing large collections of software artefacts
There has been a long history of CASE tool development, with an underlying software repository at the heart of most systems. Usually such tools, even the more recently web-based systems, are focused on supporting individual projects within an enterprise or across a number of distributed sites. Little support for maintaining large heterogeneous collections of software artefacts across a number of projects has been developed. Within the GENESIS project, this has been a key consideration in the development of the Open Source Component Artefact Repository
(OSCAR). Its most recent extensions are explicitly addressing the provision of cross project global views of large software collections as well as historical views of individual artefacts within a collection. The long-term benefits of such support can only be realised if OSCAR is widely adopted and various steps to facilitate this are described
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