THE IMPACT OF COLLABORATIVE SYSTEMS ON ACADEMIA, e-BUSINESS AND INFORMATION SOCIETY

The economic impact of the digital revolution is highly important. Without www, globalization and outsourcing would have not been possible. The impact of the IT technological boom, especially on the higher education process is highly important. The facilities offered by the IT technological environments allow major changes both at the level of the teaching materials’ design and the projection of the learning environment, by using new systems and collaborative-participative technologies, student-oriented with distributed resources and a real fluidity of the roles in the learning process. Nowadays, small and middle – sized enterprises use the same collaborative systems (or their components) known by abbreviations such as ERP, CRM, SCM, HRS, etc. in order to provide data and information to the decision-making bodies at all levels, in due time. One of the problems in using collaborative systems has been the complexity of large-scale systems and, therefore, the main topics of this paper are: basic components, development of collaborative systems, benefits, costs, replacing/ re-implementing, e-Business, structuring the manufacturing Database, achievement of these systems successfully etc, and integration of these systems into the academic curriculum.Collaborative Systems, e-Learning, m-Learning, i-Click Technologies, Globalization, e- Business, Information Society

Tried and True - but Late! Using Lean Six-Sigma Problem Solving to Analyze ERP Software Change Management Performance

One of the most common challenges that businesses face today is the constant pressure of global competition. Technology is the tool of choice for executing excellence in the marketplace. As a result, the dilemma of needing to deliver software change at an accelerated pace is extremely normal and many organization struggle to identify what approach will work best for them. At the same time, it is not unusual for humans to jump to conclusions before thoroughly examining a problem and taking in all available facts. After viewing a few symptoms, conclusions are made, action plans are formed and then wonderment arrives when the problem remains unsolved. The intention of this project was to partner with a large organization immersed in this struggle and use Lean Six Sigma as the mechanism for learning why their software delivery is tried and true – but late. The goal of this specific project is to discover and define performance requirements and associated metrics by employing a problem solving method commonly used in Six Sigma initiatives referred to as the DMAIC method. The result of this research project was a surprising mix of outcomes that speak to the need to balance culture, process, and architecture. The project client did not have any internal service level agreements. When outlining the factors critical to quality, they were confused and struggled to define quality of process. The idea of learning how to improve software change management through the use of metrics was new for them and produced some fear mixed with hopeful excitement. The historical data proved incredibly difficult to acquire and convert into usable form. This was due to the architectural choices made when the software change management system was created. A short-term focus on an incomplete set of use cases rendered the system forever hostile for reporting and analysis. The content of the historical data was minimal in value. There was no data to use for comparing due dates with delivery dates. Effort was not being tracked. The only means of measuring work activities was to measure the time duration within work flow steps. The strength of DMAIC is the discipline of following the data. This helps teams avoid pursuing erroneous leads or tempting short-cuts that ultimately leave the problem unresolved. Despite obstacles, the goal of defining software performance metrics was met. This was due to the fact that DMAIC works well as a tool for learning because it is a disciplined approach with a wide array of tools that also serve a need for flexibility under certain conditions

Process-driven data and information quality management in the financial service sector

Highly regulated sectors face challenges on data and information quality management (DIQM) to conform to increasing regulations. With the financial service sector, as the most highly regulated industry, we are interested in current and future DIQM challenges. For a sustaining improvement, data quality should be managed process-driven. Process-driven data quality management (PDDQM) provides continuous improvement of data quality by redesigning processes that create or modify data. Therefore, business process management (BPM) is a basis for PDDQM. In an information systems’ context, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems offer a platform for integrating processes and data. We examine market developments and IT trends by conducting semi-structured expert interviews with participants in IT-strategic decision making. We present current trends in the insurance sector and identify three main DIQM challenges: The IT-independent management of data, an increasing need to engage in PDDQM, and guiding existing and future measures by a data governance framework

ADEPT2 - Next Generation Process Management Technology

If current process management systems shall be applied to a broad spectrum of applications, they will have to be significantly improved with respect to their technological capabilities. In particular, in dynamic environments it must be possible to quickly implement and deploy new processes, to enable ad-hoc modifications of single process instances at runtime (e.g., to add, delete or shift process steps), and to support process schema evolution with instance migration, i.e., to propagate process schema changes to already running instances. These requirements must be met without affecting process consistency and by preserving the robustness of the process management system. In this paper we describe how these challenges have been addressed and solved in the ADEPT2 Process Management System. Our overall vision is to provide a next generation process management technology which can be used in a variety of application domains

Cloud migration

Migrating on-premises applications to cloud environment has become a popular task for organizations. In this thesis, cloud migration is defined to be an action where one or more parts of an application are migrated to a cloud platform. Multiple motivations are mentioned for such migration like reducing costs, flexibility, and scalability of the application. This thesis also goes through different strategies for cloud migration. After that, a literature-based, generalized migration process for cloud migration was created. This created migration process was then validated against case process. Phases in the case process were investigated through interviews. Interviews were done in two parts. First, all interviewees were interviewed one at a time. From these interviews, a draft of the case process was done. This draft was then validated and supplemented with a group interview. After creating both processes, they were compared. It was found that the literature-based process had a lot of similarities with the case process. Also, it was found that the case process had a few tasks that were not mentioned in the literature-based process. These tasks were discussing future of the application, estimating workload and project end date, defining migration scope, and familiarizing customers with application. These can be said to be important tasks, and they should have been in the literature-based process too

Evaluating cloud database migration options using workload models

A key challenge in porting enterprise software systems to the cloud is the migration of their database. Choosing a cloud provider and service option (e.g., a database-as-a-service or a manually configured set of virtual machines) typically requires the estimation of the cost and migration duration for each considered option. Many organisations also require this information for budgeting and planning purposes. Existing cloud migration research focuses on the software components, and therefore does not address this need. We introduce a two-stage approach which accurately estimates the migration cost, migration duration and cloud running costs of relational databases. The first stage of our approach obtains workload and structure models of the database to be migrated from database logs and the database schema. The second stage performs a discrete-event simulation using these models to obtain the cost and duration estimates. We implemented software tools that automate both stages of our approach. An extensive evaluation compares the estimates from our approach against results from real-world cloud database migrations

Migrating learning management systems: A case of a large public university

In the past 20 years, institutions of higher education have made major investments in Learning Management Systems (LMSs). As institutions have integrated the LMS into campus culture, the potential of migrating to not only an upgraded version of the LMS, but also an entirely different LMS, has become a reality. This qualitative research study examines the perspectives of five stakeholders involved with the migration of an LMS at a major research institution in the southeastern United States. Using Lewin’s (1947) Change Management Model and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Model as analogies, this research seeks to understand the role and responsibilities of the various stakeholders, their decision-making, and the implications of the decisions on the migration process. Using Glaser and Strauss’s (1967) constant comparative method and Charmaz’s (2006) work related to grounded theory, four major categories emerged from our data: time as a catalyst for change, power of communication, compatibility of technologies, and faith in the system. The categories contribute to a preliminary model that may assist other institutions as they consider whether to migrate LMSs