Infrastructure-as-a-Service Usage Determinants in Enterprises

The thesis focuses on the research question, what the determinants of Infrastructure-as-a-Service usage of enterprises are. A wide range of IaaS determinants is collected for an IaaS adoption model of enterprises, which is evaluated in a Web survey. As the economical determinants are especially important, they are separately investigated using a cost-optimizing decision support model. This decision support model is then applied to a potential IaaS use case of a large automobile manufacturer

Human-building interaction towards a sustainable built environment: A review

Human Building Interaction (HBI), a recently introduced emerging area, can be used for various purposes, including the development of better designs, constructions, and operations, as well as the support of building managers and occupants in meeting their goals. The expanding community of HBI researchers seeks to investigate the future of HBI research and design for an interactive built environment. Building managers and owners strive for energy-efficient, sustainable, and more livable buildings to improve and become 'smart.' Diverse buildings and urban spaces are individually designed and outfitted with various systems, components, and accessories. With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), these devices form a network of internet-connected 'things' that generate massive amounts of data. We can collect vast volumes of data in unprecedented numbers, providing critical insights that allow buildings to care for us by learning from acquired data and adjusting to our requirements. This paper contributes to HBI by surveying various efforts to interact with buildings using IoT sensors and interconnected things to gain useful insights. Buildings, in our perspective, have distinct personalities and obligations to achieve their objectives. So, we are trying to incorporate them into reality. Considering a building to be a bio-inspired living architecture, we compare human anatomy to building anatomy to understand better the functions and operations that buildings can perform in their built environment. Thinking from this outlook allows us to investigate how sensors can help us achieve such building sustainability standards and what operations they perform to create an interactive built environment. This review paper aims to investigate the role of sensors in particular and to what extent they can provide various useful insights to building occupants and users to meet sustainability standards. We examine the most recent work on how people engage with and interact with buildings via various interfaces to achieve sustainability goals. Finally, some domain-specific challenges that limit human engagement and interactions with the built environment are discussed

A conceptual framework for capability sourcing modeling

Companies need to acquire the right capabilities from the right source, and the right shore, at the right cost to improve their competitive position. Capability sourcing is an organizing process to gain access to best-in-class capabilities for all activities in a firm's value chain to ensure long-term competitive advantage. Capability sourcing modeling is a technique that helps investigating sourcing alternative solutions to facilitate strategic sourcing decision making. Our position is applying conceptual models as intermediate artifacts which are schematic descriptions of sourcing alternatives based on organization's capabilities. The contribution of this paper is introducing a conceptual framework in the form of five views (to organize all perspectives) and a conceptualisation (to formulate a language) for capability sourcing modelling

The creation of business architecture heat maps to support strategy-aligned organizational decisions

The realization of strategic alignment within the business architecture has become increasingly important for companies. Indeed, it facilitates business-IT alignment as a well-designed business architecture helps both to identify the appropriate requirements for IT systems and to discover new business opportunities that can be realized by IT. However, there is a lack of alignment techniques that support organizational (re) design decisions during the operation phase as the actual performance of business architecture elements is neglected. Capability heat maps provide a useful starting point in this respect as they focus on the creation of a hierarchy of prioritized capabilities, which are characterized by a performance measure. In this paper, these techniques will be extended to support strategy-aligned decisions within the business architecture. The identification of the relevant business architecture elements is based on state-of-the-art enterprise modelling languages, which enable the development of enterprise models on distinct layers of the business architecture. Strategic alignment between these elements will be realized by using prioritization according to the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), while performance measurement will enable the creation of a proper decision support system. Afterwards, the proposed heat map will be applied on a case example to illustrate its potential use. This results in the completion of a first build-and-evaluate loop within the Design Science methodology