A Survey on Economic-driven Evaluations of Information Technology

The economic-driven evaluation of information technology (IT) has become an important instrument in the management of IT projects. Numerous approaches have been developed to quantify the costs of an IT investment and its assumed profit, to evaluate its impact on business process performance, and to analyze the role of IT regarding the achievement of enterprise objectives. This paper discusses approaches for evaluating IT from an economic-driven perspective. Our comparison is based on a framework distinguishing between classification criteria and evaluation criteria. The former allow for the categorization of evaluation approaches based on their similarities and differences. The latter, by contrast, represent attributes that allow to evaluate the discussed approaches. Finally, we give an example of a typical economic-driven IT evaluation

The First 25 Years of the Bled eConference: Themes and Impacts

The Bled eConference is the longest-running themed conference associated with the Information Systems discipline. The focus throughout its first quarter-century has been the application of electronic tools, migrating progressively from Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) via Inter-Organisational Systems (IOS) and eCommerce to encompass all aspects of the use of networking facilities in industry and government, and more recently by individuals, groups and society as a whole. This paper reports on an examination of the conference titles and of the titles and abstracts of the 773 refereed papers published in the Proceedings since 1995. This identified a long and strong focus on categories of electronic business and corporate perspectives, which has broadened in recent years to encompass the democratic, the social and the personal. The conference\u27s extend well beyond the papers and their thousands of citations and tens of thousands of downloads. Other impacts have included innovative forms of support for the development of large numbers of graduate students, and the many international research collaborations that have been conceived and developed in a beautiful lake-side setting in Slovenia

Time4: Time for SDN

With the rise of Software Defined Networks (SDN), there is growing interest in dynamic and centralized traffic engineering, where decisions about forwarding paths are taken dynamically from a network-wide perspective. Frequent path reconfiguration can significantly improve the network performance, but should be handled with care, so as to minimize disruptions that may occur during network updates. In this paper we introduce Time4, an approach that uses accurate time to coordinate network updates. Time4 is a powerful tool in softwarized environments, that can be used for various network update scenarios. Specifically, we characterize a set of update scenarios called flow swaps, for which Time4 is the optimal update approach, yielding less packet loss than existing update approaches. We define the lossless flow allocation problem, and formally show that in environments with frequent path allocation, scenarios that require simultaneous changes at multiple network devices are inevitable. We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of a Time4-enabled OpenFlow prototype. The prototype is publicly available as open source. Our work includes an extension to the OpenFlow protocol that has been adopted by the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), and is now included in OpenFlow 1.5. Our experimental results show the significant advantages of Time4 compared to other network update approaches, and demonstrate an SDN use case that is infeasible without Time4.Comment: This report is an extended version of "Software Defined Networks: It's About Time", which was accepted to IEEE INFOCOM 2016. A preliminary version of this report was published in arXiv in May, 201

Service Systems and Value Modeling from an Appreciative System Perspective

Since its inception Service Science has created a substantial body of knowledge about services and their provision. Most notably, the concept of Service System was defined in order to describe the co-creation of value by the service provider and customer. We introduce the concept of Appreciative System defined by Vickers in the study of the way individuals and organizations apprehend and act on their environment. We show how the appreciative system concept can be applied to a service system model with the SEAM enterprise architecture method

The integration of international supply chain management and E-business

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program; and, (S.M. in Ocean Systems Management)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (p. 104-105).Internet technology has changed this world rapidly in the past decade. The influence of E-business on the economy and business practice has been tremendous. The focus of many companies has been on improving the extended enterprise transactions including Business-to Customer (B2C) and Business-to-Business (B2B). Facing this shift in corporate focus, more and more companies realize the importance of supply chain management in the global E-business environment. The purpose of this thesis is to understand the relationship between supply chain management and E-business, especially from international point of view. The analysis started from the review of supply chain management and E-business, further continued on the strategic impact of E-business on supply chain management and discussed the associate issues during the integration of E-business and supply chain. Finally, some future opportunities will be introduced to illustrate new developments in the E-supply chain environment, especially for small business.by Yujun (Eugene) Xiao.S.M.in Ocean Systems ManagementS.M