The Knowledge Application and Utilization Framework Applied to Defense COTS: A Research Synthesis for Outsourced Innovation

Purpose -- Militaries of developing nations face increasing budget pressures, high operations tempo, a blitzing pace of technology, and adversaries that often meet or beat government capabilities using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technologies. The adoption of COTS products into defense acquisitions has been offered to help meet these challenges by essentially outsourcing new product development and innovation. This research summarizes extant research to develop a framework for managing the innovative and knowledge flows. Design/Methodology/Approach – A literature review of 62 sources was conducted with the objectives of identifying antecedents (barriers and facilitators) and consequences of COTS adoption. Findings – The DoD COTS literature predominantly consists of industry case studies, and there’s a strong need for further academically rigorous study. Extant rigorous research implicates the importance of the role of knowledge management to government innovative thinking that relies heavily on commercial suppliers. Research Limitations/Implications – Extant academically rigorous studies tend to depend on measures derived from work in information systems research, relying on user satisfaction as the outcome. Our findings indicate that user satisfaction has no relationship to COTS success; technically complex governmental purchases may be too distant from users or may have socio-economic goals that supersede user satisfaction. The knowledge acquisition and utilization framework worked well to explain the innovative process in COTS. Practical Implications – Where past research in the commercial context found technological knowledge to outweigh market knowledge in terms of importance, our research found the opposite. Managers either in government or marketing to government should be aware of the importance of market knowledge for defense COTS innovation, especially for commercial companies that work as system integrators. Originality/Value – From the literature emerged a framework of COTS product usage and a scale to measure COTS product appropriateness that should help to guide COTS product adoption decisions and to help manage COTS product implementations ex post

Data-driven through-life costing to support product lifecycle management solutions in innovative product development

Innovative product usually refers to product that comprises of creativity and new ideas. In the development of such a new product, there is often a lack of historical knowledge and data available to be used to perform cost estimation accurately. This is due to the fact that traditional cost estimation methods are used to predict costs only after a product model has been built, and not at an early design stage when there is little data and information available. In light of this, original equipment manufacturers are also facing critical challenges of becoming globally competitive and increasing demands from customer for continuous innovation. To alleviate these situations this research has identified a new approach to cost modelling with the inclusion of product lifecycle management solutions to address innovative product development.The aim of this paper, therefore, is to discuss methods of developing an extended-enterprise data-driven through-life cost estimating method for innovative product development

Non-functional requirements: size measurement and testing with COSMIC-FFP

The non-functional requirements (NFRs) of software systems are well known to add a degree of uncertainty to process of estimating the cost of any project. This paper contributes to the achievement of more precise project size measurement through incorporating NFRs into the functional size quantification process. We report on an initial solution proposed to deal with the problem of quantitatively assessing the NFR modeling process early in the project, and of generating test cases for NFR verification purposes. The NFR framework has been chosen for the integration of NFRs into the requirements modeling process and for their quantitative assessment. Our proposal is based on the functional size measurement method, COSMIC-FFP, adopted in 2003 as the ISO/IEC 19761 standard. Also in this paper, we extend the use of COSMIC-FFP for NFR testing purposes. This is an essential step for improving NFR development and testing effort estimates, and consequently for managing the scope of NFRs. We discuss the merits of the proposed approach and the open questions related to its design

Case study: Business Analysis in ERP Implementation/Customization Projects

Töös uuritakse äraanalüüsi osakaalu erinevate juurutusmeetodite puhul ning äraanalüüsi mõju projekti tulemusele. Teoreetilises osas antakse ülevaade ärianalüüsist ning ERP-st üldiselt. Empiirilsies osas kirjeldadatakse ning analüüsitakse andmekomplekti ja leitakse vastused uurimuse eesmärgiks seatud küsimustele.Reseach has been made to compare business analysis core activities ratios in different implementation methods and business analysis effect on project outcome. In theoretical part overview of business analysis and ERP in general is provided. In reseach part used case study is planned, dataset is prepared and answers to research questions are provided

A framework for cots software evaluation and selection for COTS mismatches handling and non-functional requirements

The decision to purchase Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) software needs systematic guidelines so that the appropriate COTS software can be selected in order to provide a viable and effective solution to the organizations. However, the existing COTS software evaluation and selection frameworks focus more on functional aspects and do not give adequate attention to accommodate the mismatch between user requirements and COTS software specification, and also integration with non functional requirements of COTS software. Studies have identified that these two criteria are important in COTS software evaluation and selection. Therefore, this study aims to develop a new framework of COTS software evaluation and selection that focuses on handling COTS software mismatches and integrating the nonfunctional requirements. The study is conducted using mixed-mode methodology which involves survey and interview. The study is conducted in four main phases: a survey and interview of 63 organizations to identify COTS software evaluation criteria, development of COTS software evaluation and selection framework using Evaluation Theory, development of a new decision making technique by integrating Analytical Hierarchy Process and Gap Analysis to handle COTS software mismatches, and validation of the practicality and reliability of the proposed COTS software Evaluation and Selection Framework (COTS-ESF) using experts’ review, case studies and yardstick validation. This study has developed the COTS-ESF which consists of five categories of evaluation criteria: Quality, Domain, Architecture, Operational Environment and Vendor Reputation. It also provides a decision making technique and a complete process for performing the evaluation and selection of COTS software. The result of this study shows that the evaluated aspects of the framework are feasible and demonstrate their potential and practicality to be applied in the real environment. The contribution of this study straddles both the research and practical perspectives of software evaluation by improving decision making and providing a systematic guidelines for handling issue in purchasing viable COTS software

Early Quantitative Assessment of Non-Functional Requirements

Non-functional requirements (NFRs) of software systems are a well known source of uncertainty in effort estimation. Yet, quantitatively approaching NFR early in a project is hard. This paper makes a step towards reducing the impact of uncertainty due to NRF. It offers a solution that incorporates NFRs into the functional size quantification process. The merits of our solution are twofold: first, it lets us quantitatively assess the NFR modeling process early in the project, and second, it lets us generate test cases for NFR verification purposes. We chose the NFR framework as a vehicle to integrate NFRs into the requirements modeling process and to apply quantitative assessment procedures. Our solution proposal also rests on the functional size measurement method, COSMIC-FFP, adopted in 2003 as the ISO/IEC 19761 standard. We extend its use for NFR testing purposes, which is an essential step for improving NFR development and testing effort estimates, and consequently for managing the scope of NFRs. We discuss the advantages of our approach and the open questions related to its design as well

Reconciling agility and discipline in COTS selection processes

Currently, information systems are mainly built by integrating or customizing commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components acquired or licensed from the marketplace. The processes necessary to steer a suitable acquisition are different from traditional software development processes. Among them, we are interested in the process of selection of COTS components. COTS selection requires discipline to coordinate the selection team and the set of new activities that are necessary to support a successful selection. The Capability Maturity Model (CMM) contains important guidelines for process improvement, and specifiesPeer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Service-Oriented Process Models in Telecommunication Business

The thesis concentrates on to evaluate challenges in the business process management and the need for Service-oriented process models in telecommunication business to alleviate the integration work efforts and to reduce total costs of ownership. The business aspect concentrates on operations and business support systems which are tailored for communication service providers. Business processes should be designed in conformance with TeleManagement Forum's integrated business architecture framework. The thesis rationalizes the need to transform organizations and their way of working from vertical silos to horizontal layers and to understand transformational efforts which are needed to adopt a new strategy. Furthermore, the thesis introduces service characterizations and goes deeper into technical requirements that a service compliant middleware system needs to support. At the end of the thesis Nokia Siemens Networks proprietary approach – Process Automation Enabling Suite is introduced, and finally the thesis performs two case studies. The first one is Nokia Siemens Networks proprietary survey which highlights the importance of customer experience management and the second one is an overall research study whose results have been derived from other public surveys covering application integration efforts

Metrics-Guided Quality Management for Component-Based Software Systems

The growing reliance on commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components for developing large-scale projects introduces a new paradigm in software Engineering; which requires the design of new software development and business processes. Large scale component reuse leads to savings in development resources, enabling these resources to be applied to areas such as quality improvement. These savings come at the price of integration difficulties, performance constraints, and incompatibility of components from multiple vendors. Relying on COTS components also increases the system\u27\u27s vulnerability to risks arising from third-party development, which can negatively affect the quality of the system, as well as causing expenses not incurred in traditional software development. We aim to alleviate such concerns by using software metrics to accurately quantify factors contributing to the overall quality of a component-based system, guiding quality and risk management by identifying and eliminating sources of ris