15,365 research outputs found
Legislative Intent: The Use of Positive Political Theory in Statutory Interpretation
The usefulness of legislative history has been brought into question concerning how judges interpret the intent of legislation. The structure of the legislative process is examined in order to identify how legislators solve the problem of instability of majority rule
Information Technology as Coordination Infrastructure
Business information technology is traditionally viewed as information provision technology. In this view, organizations use their IT to implement databases that provide people with information when they want it. This view is persistent even though information provision is never an end in itself but always has the further purpose to support the coordination of activities of people. The role if IT as coordination technology became more prominent in the 1980s with the advent of network technology, that allowed activities across different businesses to be coordinated. This trend has accellerated since the growth of Internet usage, and today IT is used to support an increasingly varied range of processes performed by a variety of partners that do not all have a hierarchical relation to each other. This makes it difficult to analyze requirements for IT support and specify IT solutions: Business processes may not be well-defined, and interests of different businesses may clash. This report argues that to deal with this in requirements engineering and IT solution specification, business information technology should not be viewed as IT support for business processes but as IT support for the coordination of activities in one or more businesses. We will identify three basic coordination mechanisms, namely coordination by price, by management, and by shared norms, and for each of these mechanisms, we will identify requirements for IT support. The advent of flexible and standardized networking technology has facilitated the creation of novel coordination mechanisms within these three general paradigms, and we will give an inventory of generalized coordination mechanisms made possible by current IT. Finally, we will draw conclusions for requirements engineering methods for IT support for each of the coordination mechanisms identified by the framework
Processes, Roles and Their Interactions
Taking an interaction network oriented perspective in informatics raises the
challenge to describe deterministic finite systems which take part in networks
of nondeterministic interactions. The traditional approach to describe
processes as stepwise executable activities which are not based on the
ordinarily nondeterministic interaction shows strong centralization tendencies.
As suggested in this article, viewing processes and their interactions as
complementary can circumvent these centralization tendencies.
The description of both, processes and their interactions is based on the
same building blocks, namely finite input output automata (or transducers).
Processes are viewed as finite systems that take part in multiple, ordinarily
nondeterministic interactions. The interactions between processes are described
as protocols.
The effects of communication between processes as well as the necessary
coordination of different interactions within a processes are both based on the
restriction of the transition relation of product automata. The channel based
outer coupling represents the causal relation between the output and the input
of different systems. The coordination condition based inner coupling
represents the causal relation between the input and output of a single system.
All steps are illustrated with the example of a network of resource
administration processes which is supposed to provide requesting user processes
exclusive access to a single resource.Comment: In Proceedings IWIGP 2012, arXiv:1202.422
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