A review of data visualization: opportunities in manufacturing sequence management.

Data visualization now benefits from developments in technologies that offer innovative ways of presenting complex data. Potentially these have widespread application in communicating the complex information domains typical of manufacturing sequence management environments for global enterprises. In this paper the authors review the visualization functionalities, techniques and applications reported in literature, map these to manufacturing sequence information presentation requirements and identify the opportunities available and likely development paths. Current leading-edge practice in dynamic updating and communication with suppliers is not being exploited in manufacturing sequence management; it could provide significant benefits to manufacturing business. In the context of global manufacturing operations and broad-based user communities with differing needs served by common data sets, tool functionality is generally ahead of user application

Applying Real Options Thinking to Information Security in Networked Organizations

An information security strategy of an organization participating in a networked business sets out the plans for designing a variety of actions that ensure confidentiality, availability, and integrity of company’s key information assets. The actions are concerned with authentication and nonrepudiation of authorized users of these assets. We assume that the primary objective of security efforts in a company is improving and sustaining resiliency, which means security contributes to the ability of an organization to withstand discontinuities and disruptive events, to get back to its normal operating state, and to adapt to ever changing risk environments. When companies collaborating in a value web view security as a business issue, risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis techniques are necessary and explicit part of their process of resource allocation and budgeting, no matter if security spendings are treated as capital investment or operating expenditures. This paper contributes to the application of quantitative approaches to assessing risks, costs, and benefits associated with the various components making up the security strategy of a company participating in value networks. We take a risk-based approach to determining what types of security a strategy should include and how much of each type is enough. We adopt a real-options-based perspective of security and make a proposal to value the extent to which alternative components in a security strategy contribute to organizational resiliency and protect key information assets from being impeded, disrupted, or destroyed

Community structure of complex software systems: Analysis and applications

Due to notable discoveries in the fast evolving field of complex networks, recent research in software engineering has also focused on representing software systems with networks. Previous work has observed that these networks follow scale-free degree distributions and reveal small-world phenomena, while we here explore another property commonly found in different complex networks, i.e. community structure. We adopt class dependency networks, where nodes represent software classes and edges represent dependencies among them, and show that these networks reveal a significant community structure, characterized by similar properties as observed in other complex networks. However, although intuitive and anticipated by different phenomena, identified communities do not exactly correspond to software packages. We empirically confirm our observations on several networks constructed from Java and various third party libraries, and propose different applications of community detection to software engineering