Living IT infrastructures: designing purposeful artefacts for investigating IT infrastructures and business processes fit

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An Ontologically Innovative Design of CSR Strategies: Enabling Value Added Institutional Collaborations

This chapter introduces an ontological design of a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) framework. Enterprise ontology contributes to CSR conceptualization enabling institutional collaborations and arbitrage. In a post financial crisis era where corporate budgets are limited there is an increasing interest from organisational stakeholders to focus on the practical aspect of managerial applications of CSR. The specific objectives of this paper are: firstly, to design a framework entailing long term Critical Success Factors (CSFs) necessary for a sustainable CSR design, secondly, to identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) necessary for the implementation of a CSR strategy, and finally, to realise internal and external socio-economic and political forces of the indicated stakeholders that shape the CSR policies and collaborations

ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE AS A MEANS FOR COORDINATION – AN EMPIRICAL STUDY ON ACTUAL AND POTENTIAL PRACTICE

Enterprise architecture management (EAM) is considered a means to guide the alignment of business- and IT-related concerns from an enterprise-wide perspective. Our goal in this paper is to understand by which means EAM supports this coordination task today and potentially in the future. We designed a questionnaire and conducted an empirical study (n=95) with participants from the field of EAM. Based on common coordination mechanisms from literature, we analyze (1) the relation between coordination mechanism and their current EAM support, (2) to what degree participants are aware of opportunities of EAM supporting coordination mechanisms, and (3) what the perceived gap between potential and realized EAM coordination support is. An exploratory factor analysis leads to three factors that represent coordination mechanisms in enterprises. Using these factors, we group participating enterprises in three different clusters: (1) non-coordinators, (2) dominators and (3) negotiators. We find that a similar awareness of opportunities exists in all three clusters, yet there are gaps in the realization of EAM coordination support: non-coordinators show the lowest realization, negotiators the highest. Based on this clustering, we provide implications on further EAM development options

Using Enterprise Ontology Methodology to Assess the Quality of Information Exchange

Increasing networked business brings complexities to information sharing, including the requirements for the quality information to use when needed. Information exchange becomes a significant routine but receives little attention. To address this, we propose a method based on Design Engineering Methodology for Organizations (DEMO) – a sophisticate methodology for organizational dynamics analysis – to assess the information exchange quality. A demonstration was accomplished within the Emergency Medical Service, where the information exchange is considered a key issue for the healthcare efficiency. Evaluation was carried out by means of interviews, the Four Principles from Österle, and the Moody and Shanks Quality Framework. Results proves that the method yields an adequate and clear process view and is reliable when it comes to assessing and redesigning the information exchange

Engineering Crowdsourced Stream Processing Systems

A crowdsourced stream processing system (CSP) is a system that incorporates crowdsourced tasks in the processing of a data stream. This can be seen as enabling crowdsourcing work to be applied on a sample of large-scale data at high speed, or equivalently, enabling stream processing to employ human intelligence. It also leads to a substantial expansion of the capabilities of data processing systems. Engineering a CSP system requires the combination of human and machine computation elements. From a general systems theory perspective, this means taking into account inherited as well as emerging properties from both these elements. In this paper, we position CSP systems within a broader taxonomy, outline a series of design principles and evaluation metrics, present an extensible framework for their design, and describe several design patterns. We showcase the capabilities of CSP systems by performing a case study that applies our proposed framework to the design and analysis of a real system (AIDR) that classifies social media messages during time-critical crisis events. Results show that compared to a pure stream processing system, AIDR can achieve a higher data classification accuracy, while compared to a pure crowdsourcing solution, the system makes better use of human workers by requiring much less manual work effort

A Learning Perspective on Enterprise Architecture Management

Enterprise architecture management (EAM) has long been propagated in research and practice as an approach for keeping local information systems projects in line with enterprise-wide, long-term objectives. EAM literature predominantly promotes strictly governed and centralized coordination mechanisms to achieve the promised alignment contributions. Notwithstanding the increasing maturity levels in practice, organizations still struggle with the successful establishment of EAM, mainly due to the inherent challenges of a firmly centralized approach in complex organizational settings. This study opts for cooperative learning as a theoretical lens to afford a distinctive, non-centralized conceptualization of EAM. We empirically demonstrate EAM as a stage-wise learning process in which knowledge acquisition and cooperative interactions among individuals contribute to project performance on the local level. Projects that benefit from this particular learning process, in turn, are found to significantly leverage enterprise-wide performance

A Method for Improving Healthcare Management Using Enterprise Ontology

ABSTRACT The global healthcare spending has constantly increased in the last decades, and there is data showing inefficiency in resource consumption that is not reflected in healthcare improvement. The need to introduce new ways to do the same at a lower cost is rational. To address this, we propose a method based on Enterprise Ontology to find non value-added transactions that must be redesigned to improve the healthcare management. This methodology was chosen as a basis for our solution because it provides a better understanding of the dynamics of an organization, and allows a good alignment between the enterprise design and operation. Demonstrations were accomplished within National Health System, making it possible to find transactions that can be refined or improved. Evaluation was carried out by means of interviews, the Four Principles from Österle et al., the Moody and Shanks Quality Framework, the framework from Pries-Heje et al., and the feedback from the scientific community. Results prove that the method yields an adequate and clear process view and is reliable when it comes to improving healthcare operational processes

An Exploration of Enterprise Architecture Research

Management of the enterprise architecture has become increasingly recognized as a crucial part of both business and IT management. Still, a common understanding and methodological consistency seems far from being developed. Acknowledging the significant role of research in moving the development process along, this article employs different bibliometric methods, complemented by an extensive qualitative interpretation of the research field, to provide a unique overview of the enterprise architecture literature. After answering our research questions about the collaboration via co-authorships, the intellectual structure of the research field and its most influential works, and the principal themes of research, we propose an agenda for future research based on the findings from the above analyses and their comparison to empirical insights from the literature. In particular, our study finds a considerable degree of co-authorship clustering and a positive impact of the extent of co-authorship on the diffusion of works on enterprise architecture. In addition, this article identifies three major research streams and shows that research to date has revolved around specific themes, while some of high practical relevance receive minor attention. Hence, the contribution of our study is manifold and offers support for researchers and practitioners alike