Sustainable customer relationship management

Purpose – Sustainable customer relationship management (SCRM) is a combination of business strategy, customer-oriented business processes and computer systems that seeks to integrate sustainability into customer relationship management. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the body of knowledge of marketing, business management and computer systems research domains by classifying in research categories the current state of knowledge on SCRM, by analysing the major research streams and by identifying a future research agenda in each research category. Design/methodology/approach – To identify, select, collect, synthesise, analyse and evaluate all research published on SCRM, providing a complete insight in this research area, the PRISMA methodology, content analysis and bibliometric tools are used. Findings – In total, 139 papers were analysed to assess the trend of the number of papers published and the number of citations of these papers; to identify the top contributing countries, authors, institutions and sources; to reveal the findings of the major research streams; to develop a classification framework composed by seven research categories (CRM as a key factor for enterprise sustainability, SCRM frameworks, SCRM computer tools and methods, case studies, SCRM and sustainable supply chain management, sustainable marketing and knowledge management) in which academics could expand SCRM research; and to establish future research challenges. Social implications – This paper have an important positive social and environmental impact for society because it will lead to an increase in the number of green and socially conscious customers with an ethical behavior, while also transforming business processes, products and services, making them more sustainable. Originality/value – Customer relationship management in the age of sustainable development is an increasing research area. Nevertheless, to the authors’ knowledge, there are no systematic literature reviews that identify the major research streams, develop a classification framework, analyse the evolution in this research field and propose a future research agenda

Distribution pattern-driven development of service architectures

Distributed systems are being constructed by composing a number of discrete components. This practice is particularly prevalent within the Web service domain in the form of service process orchestration and choreography. Often, enterprise systems are built from many existing discrete applications such as legacy applications exposed using Web service interfaces. There are a number of architectural configurations or distribution patterns, which express how a composed system is to be deployed in a distributed environment. However, the amount of code required to realise these distribution patterns is considerable. In this paper, we propose a distribution pattern-driven approach to service composition and architecting. We develop, based on a catalog of patterns, a UML-compliant framework, which takes existing Web service interfaces as its input and generates executable Web service compositions based on a distribution pattern chosen by the software architect

A model based approach to systems requirements for event driven enterprise architecture

Business and ICT strategic alignment remains an ongoing challenge facing organizations as they react to changing requirements by adapting or introducing new technologies to existing infrastructure. Activity around Enterprise Architecture (EA) has increasingly become relevant to these demands and as a consequence numerous methods and frameworks for pursuing EA have emerged. However these approaches remain bloated, time-consuming and lacking in precision. This paper proposes a light-weight method for enterprise architecture and introduces a language for representing EA components that lends itself to modeling “As Is” and “To Be” EA with a concrete aim to providing a simulation environment that delivers an un-ambiguous description to what changes need to be made to an EA with respect to emerging requirements. The LEAP method and the language is illustrated with a detailed case study of business change currently being addressed by UK higher education institutions

Using scrum together with UML models: a collaborative university-industry R&D software project

Conducting research and development (R&D) software projects, in an environment where both industry and university collaborate, is challenging due to many factors. In fact, industrial companies and universities have generally different interests and objectives whenever they collaborate. For this reason, it is not easy to manage and negotiate the industrial companies’ interests, namely schedules and their expectations. Conducting such projects in an agile framework is expected to decrease these risks, since partners have the opportunity to frequently interact with the development team in short iterations and are constantly aware of the characteristics of the system under development. However, in this type of collaborative R&D projects, it is often advantageous to include some waterfall practices, like upfront requirements modeling using UML models, which are not commonly used in agile processes like Scrum, in order to better prepare the implementation phase of the project. This paper presents some lessons learned that result from experience of the authors in adopting some Scrum practices in a R&D project, like short iterations, backlogs, and product increments, and simultaneously using UML models, namely use cases and components.This research is sponsored by the Portugal Incentive System for Research and Technological Development PEst-UID/CEC/00319/2013 and by project in co–promotion nº 36265/2013 (Project HMIExcel - 2013-2015)

To join or not to join?–A framework for the evaluation of enterprise blockchain consortia

Within the past years, enterprise blockchain solutions were frequently developed within different industry consortia. In most cases, this resulted in isolated solutions competing against each other due to similar approaches and goals. Today, decision makers do not necessarily need to establish entirely new blockchain consortia, as established ones already exist, and participation is a considerable way to avoid unreasonable efforts. In this paper, we apply an iterative literature review to identify different factors relevant for practitioners, who face the challenge of joining an existing enterprise blockchain consortium. In a second step, we discuss these factors utilizing supply chain management as a role model. As a main finding, we propose an evaluation framework for the purpose of enterprise blockchain consortium analysis. Additionally, we provide several questions relevant for practitioners during their evaluation stages. With our evaluation framework we contribute to blockchain research, where - despite its high relevance - the topic of consortium evaluation has so far been neglected. We also contribute to research in the field of technology evaluation by proposing and merging five different evaluation dimensions

A framework and tool to manage Cloud Computing service quality

Cloud Computing has generated considerable interest in both companies specialized in Information and Communication Technology and business context in general. The Sourcing Capability Maturity Model for service (e-SCM) is a capability model for offshore outsourcing services between clients and providers that offers appropriate strategies to enhance Cloud Computing implementation. It intends to achieve the required quality of service and develop an effective working relationship between clients and providers. Moreover, quality evaluation framework is a framework to control the quality of any product and/or process. It offers a tool support that can generate software artifacts to manage any type of product and service efficiently and effectively. Thus, the aim of this paper was to make this framework and tool support available to manage Cloud Computing service quality between clients and providers by means of e-SCM.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2013-46928-C3-3-RJunta de Andalucía TIC-578

Patterns for distributed real-time stream processing

In recent years, big data systems have become an active area of research and development. Stream processing is one of the potential application scenarios of big data systems where the goal is to process a continuous, high velocity flow of information items. High frequency trading (HFT) in stock markets or trending topic detection in Twitter are some examples of stream processing applications. In some cases (like, for instance, in HFT), these applications have end-to-end quality-of-service requirements and may benefit from the usage of real-time techniques. Taking this into account, the present article analyzes, from the point of view of real-time systems, a set of patterns that can be used when implementing a stream processing application. For each pattern, we discuss its advantages and disadvantages, as well as its impact in application performance, measured as response time, maximum input frequency and changes in utilization demands due to the pattern.This work been partially supported by Distributed Java Infrastructure for Real-Time Big Data (CAS14/00118). It has been also partially funded by eMadrid (S2013/ICE-2715), HERMES-MARTDRIVER (TIN2013-46801-C4-2-R) and AUDACity (TIN2016-77158-C4-1-R); and also by European Union's 7th Framework Program under Grant Agreement FP7-IC6-318763. We are also in debt with our anonymous reviewers that improved the quality of the article

Migrating from proprietary tools to open-source software for EAST-ADL metamodel generation and evolution

Open-source software has numerous advantages over proprietary commercial-off-The-shelf (COTS) software. However, there are modeling languages, tool chains, and tool frameworks that are developed and maintained in an open-source manner but still incorporate COTS tools. Such an incorporation of COTS tools into an overall open-source approach completely annihilates the actual open-source advantages and goals. In this tool paper, we demonstrate how we eliminated a COTS tool from the otherwise open-source-based generation and evolution workflow of the domain-specific modeling language East-Adl, used in the automotive industry to describe a variety of interdisciplinary aspects of vehicle systems. By switching to a pure open-source solution, East-Adl becomes easier to inspect, evolve, and develop a community around. We compare both the mixed COTS/open-source and the open-source-only workflows, outline the advantages of the open-source-only solution, and show that we achieve equivalent tooling features compared to the original approach