Web development evolution: the business perspective on security

Protection of data, information, and knowledge is a hot topic in today’s business environment. Societal, legislative and consumer pressures are forcing companies to examine business strategies, modify processes and acknowledge security to accept and defend accountability. Research indicates that a significant portion of the financial losses is due to straight forward software design errors. Security should be addressed throughout the application development process via an independent methodology containing customizable components. The methodology is designed to integrate with an organization’s existing software development processes while providing structure to implement secure applications, helping companies mitigate hard and soft costs

On compliance of business processes with business contracts

This paper addresses the problem of ensuring compliance of business processes, implemented within and across organisational boundaries, with the constraints stated in related business contracts. In order to deal with the complexity of this problem we propose two solutions that allow for a systematic and increasingly automated support for addressing two specific compliance issues. One solution provides a set of guidelines for progressively transforming contract conditions into business processes that are consistent with contract conditions thus avoiding violation of the rules in contract. Another solution compares rules in business contracts and rules in business processes to check for possible inconsistencies. Both approaches rely on a computer interpretable representation of contract conditions that embodies contract semantics. This semantics is described in terms of a logic based formalism allowing for the description of obligations, prohibitions, permissions and violations conditions in contracts. This semantics was based on an analysis of typical building blocks of many commercial, financial and government contracts. The study proved that our contract formalism provides a good foundation for describing key types of conditions in contracts, and has also given several insights into valuable transformation techniques and formalisms needed to establish better alignment between these two, traditionally separate areas of research and endeavour. The study also revealed a number of new areas of research, some of which we intend to address in near future

Autonomic Protocol-based Coordination in Dynamic Inter-Organizational Workflow

International audienceGiven the maturity of Internet standards, inter-organizational workflow is expected to be deployed in environments that are more dynamic and open than before. This paper addresses Inter Organizational Workflow (IOW) coordination in such a context, mainly investigating autonomic coordination managed at run-time. It is based on the idea that an agent-based approach is suitable to deal with this issue. More precisely, this paper introduces a framework for dynamic IOW in which involved processes are encapsulated into agents, called Process Agents (PA) in order to give them the capability to autonomously decide with whom, when and how to cooperate, and in which involved processes can access protocol components for their coordination needs. Our approach is based on the capability of PAs in playing different coordination protocols in order to take part in new business opportunities. This solution has numerous advantages. First, it provides extendable and reusable coordination components. Then, it supports run-time protocol integration. Finally, it eases openness since it imposes very few constraints

Feedback information and consumer motivation: The moderating role of positive and negative reference values in self-regulation

Marketers spend considerable resources to motivate people to consume their products and services as a means of goal attainment (Bagozzi and Dholakia, 1999). Why people increase, decrease, or stop consuming some products is based largely on how well they perceive they are doing in pursuit of their goals (Carver and Scheier, 1992). Yet despite the importance for marketers in understanding how current performance influences a consumer’s future efforts, this topic has received little attention in marketing research. Goal researchers generally agree that feedback about how well or how poorly people are doing in achieving their goals affects their motivation (Bandura and Cervone, 1986; Locke and Latham, 1990). Yet there is less agreement about whether positive and negative performance feedback increases or decreases future effort (Locke and Latham, 1990). For instance, while a customer of a gym might cancel his membership after receiving negative feedback about his fitness, the same negative feedback might cause another customer to visit the gym more often to achieve better results. A similar logic can apply to many products and services from the use of cosmetics to investing in mutual funds. The present research offers managers key insights into how to engage customers and keep them motivated. Given that connecting customers with the company is a top research priority for managers (Marketing Science Institute, 2006), this article provides suggestions for performance metrics including four questions that managers can use to apply the findings

The ‘Curiouser and curiouser’ legal nature of non-UN sanctions : the case of the US sanctions against Russia

A

Proposing an integrated indicator to measure product repairability

Repairing is one of the most relevant strategies within the Circular Economy (CE) concept since it contributes to waste prevention and extends product and components' lifespan. Thus, reparability becomes an essential issue from the early product design phases, where materials, geometries, and joints are defined. Despite some repairability indicators that can be found in the literature and are applied worldwide, there is a lack of connection between repairability and the early decision-making process for improving it from the design of components of subsystems of a product. To contribute in that research direction, this article presents the Product Repairability Index (PRI), which considers the intrinsic repairability of the product components, their assembly/disassembly complexity, repairing instructions, availability of spare parts, and the self-diagnosis aids provided by the product. The PRI also considers components' relative functional importance to identify those with higher repairability requirements concerning their functional importance in the whole product assembly. The proposed indicator has been applied to a coffee machine as a case study, following a step-to-step methodology and calculation criteria to generate a quantitative value and detect the possible aspects to redesign to make a product more repairable