THE ROLE OF DATA ARCHITECTURE AS A PART OF ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE

In the early days of computing, technology simply automated manual processes with greater efficiency. The new organizational context provides input into the data architecture and is the primary tool for the management and sharing of enterprise data. It enables architects, data modelers, and stakeholders to identify, classify, and analyze information requirements across the enterprise, allowing the right priorities for data sharing initiatives. Data architecture states how data are persisted, managed, and utilized within an organization. Data architecture is made up of the structure of all corporate data and its relationships to itself and external systems. In far too many situations, the business community has to enlist the assistance of IT to retrieve information due to the community's inconsistency, lack of intuitiveness, or other factors. The goal of any architecture should illustrate how the components of the architecture will fit together and how the system will adapt and evolve over time.data architecture, enterprise architecture, business process planning,databases, business objects.

A characteristics framework for Semantic Information Systems Standards

Semantic Information Systems (IS) Standards play a critical role in the development of the networked economy. While their importance is undoubted by all stakeholders—such as businesses, policy makers, researchers, developers—the current state of research leaves a number of questions unaddressed. Terminological confusion exists around the notions of “business semantics”, “business-to-business interoperability”, and “interoperability standards” amongst others. And, moreover, a comprehensive understanding about the characteristics of Semantic IS Standards is missing. The paper addresses this gap in literature by developing a characteristics framework for Semantic IS Standards. Two case studies are used to check the applicability of the framework in a “real-life” context. The framework lays the foundation for future research in an important field of the IS discipline and supports practitioners in their efforts to analyze, compare, and evaluate Semantic IS Standard

Value-oriented process modeling - towards a financial perspective on business process redesign

To date, typical process modeling approaches put a strong emphasis on describing behavioral aspects of business operations. However, they often neglect value-related information. Yet, such information is of key importance to strategic decisionmaking, for instance in the context of process improvement or business engineering. In this paper we propose a valueoriented approach to business process modeling based on key concepts and metrics from operations and financial management. A simple case study suggests that our approach facilitates managerial decision-making in the context of process re-design

BlogForever D3.2: Interoperability Prospects

This report evaluates the interoperability prospects of the BlogForever platform. Therefore, existing interoperability models are reviewed, a Delphi study to identify crucial aspects for the interoperability of web archives and digital libraries is conducted, technical interoperability standards and protocols are reviewed regarding their relevance for BlogForever, a simple approach to consider interoperability in specific usage scenarios is proposed, and a tangible approach to develop a succession plan that would allow a reliable transfer of content from the current digital archive to other digital repositories is presented

Benchmarking performance management systems

The Balanced Scorecard and associated performance management approaches, has become a widely practiced and popular management reporting method in recent times. Moreover, enabling technology, which assists in the delivery and personalisation of corporate performance information, is having a deeper and more rapid impact than ever before. This paper presents a brief comparative benchmarking study of leading enterprise performance management systems. Also, the author discusses the merits of bespoke internet technology development and out-of-the-box portal functionalities. An analysis of key business drivers and implementation risks of such approaches is highlighted via a case study example, and concludes the paper

Towards Information Systems Design for Value Webs

In this paper we discuss the alignment between a business model of a value web and the information systems of the participating companies needed to implement the business model. Traditional business-IT alignment approaches\ud focus on one single company, but in a value web we are dealing with various independent businesses. Since a value web is actually a web of services, delivered by IT systems owned by different companies, to ensure alignment we need to\ud specify the services and their properties and then map them on the available IT support in the different companies. Such mappings have to be evaluated in terms of their impact on the profitability of participating in the value web of the different companies. We propose techniques to map services to IT support and show how to do commercial trade-offs

Towards a Layered Architectural View for Security Analysis in SCADA Systems

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems support and control the operation of many critical infrastructures that our society depend on, such as power grids. Since SCADA systems become a target for cyber attacks and the potential impact of a successful attack could lead to disastrous consequences in the physical world, ensuring the security of these systems is of vital importance. A fundamental prerequisite to securing a SCADA system is a clear understanding and a consistent view of its architecture. However, because of the complexity and scale of SCADA systems, this is challenging to acquire. In this paper, we propose a layered architectural view for SCADA systems, which aims at building a common ground among stakeholders and supporting the implementation of security analysis. In order to manage the complexity and scale, we define four interrelated architectural layers, and uses the concept of viewpoints to focus on a subset of the system. We indicate the applicability of our approach in the context of SCADA system security analysis.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure

Enterprise information security policy assessment - an extended framework for metrics development utilising the goal-question-metric approach

Effective enterprise information security policy management requires review and assessment activities to ensure information security policies are aligned with business goals and objectives. As security policy management involves the elements of policy development process and the security policy as output, the context for security policy assessment requires goal-based metrics for these two elements. However, the current security management assessment methods only provide checklist types of assessment that are predefined by industry best practices and do not allow for developing specific goal-based metrics. Utilizing theories drawn from literature, this paper proposes the Enterprise Information Security Policy Assessment approach that expands on the Goal-Question-Metric (GQM) approach. The proposed assessment approach is then applied in a case scenario example to illustrate a practical application. It is shown that the proposed framework addresses the requirement for developing assessment metrics and allows for the concurrent undertaking of process-based and product-based assessment. Recommendations for further research activities include the conduct of empirical research to validate the propositions and the practical application of the proposed assessment approach in case studies to provide opportunities to introduce further enhancements to the approach

Accounting decoupled : A case study of accounting regime change in a Malaysian company

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