An Ontological Framework for Context-Aware Collaborative Business Process Formulation

In cross-enterprise collaborative environment, we have dealt with challenges in business process integration for common business goals. Research directions in this domain range from business to business integration (B2Bi) to service-oriented augmentation. Ontologies are used in Business Process Management (BPM) to reduce the gap between the business world and information technology (IT), especially in the context of cross enterprise collaboration. For a dynamic collaboration, virtual enterprises need to establish collaborative processes with appropriate matching levels of tasks. However, the problem of solving the semantics mismatching is still not tackled or even harder in case of querying space between different enterprise profiles as considered as ontologies. This article presents a framework based on the ontological and context awareness during the task integration and matching in order to form collaborative processes in the manner of cross enterprise collaboration

Situational Enterprise Services

The ability to rapidly find potential business partners as well as rapidly set up a collaborative business process is desirable in the face of market turbulence. Collaborative business processes are increasingly dependent on the integration of business information systems. Traditional linking of business processes has a large ad hoc character. Implementing situational enterprise services in an appropriate way will deliver the business more flexibility, adaptability and agility. Service-oriented architectures (SOA) are rapidly becoming the dominant computing paradigm. It is now being embraced by organizations everywhere as the key to business agility. Web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX on the other hand provide good user interactions for successful service discovery, selection, adaptation, invocation and service construction. They also balance automatic integration of services and human interactions, disconnecting content from presentation in the delivery of the service. Another Web technology, such as semantic Web, makes automatic service discovery, mediation and composition possible. Integrating SOA, Web 2.0 Technologies and Semantic Web into a service-oriented virtual enterprise connects business processes in a much more horizontal fashion. To be able run these services consistently across the enterprise, an enterprise infrastructure that provides enterprise architecture and security foundation is necessary. The world is constantly changing. So does the business environment. An agile enterprise needs to be able to quickly and cost-effectively change how it does business and who it does business with. Knowing, adapting to diffident situations is an important aspect of today’s business environment. The changes in an operating environment can happen implicitly and explicitly. The changes can be caused by different factors in the application domain. Changes can also happen for the purpose of organizing information in a better way. Changes can be further made according to the users' needs such as incorporating additional functionalities. Handling and managing diffident situations of service-oriented enterprises are important aspects of business environment. In the chapter, we will investigate how to apply new Web technologies to develop, deploy and executing enterprise services

Supply chain integration in broiler contract farming and business performance: Knowledge based view perspective

This concept paper aims to investigate the relationship between knowledge sharing practices within and between business partners as a framework for integration, and to examine the effect of these practices on business performance. Data will be collected from broiler contract industry in Malaysia.SPSS (Statistical Package of Social Sciences) will be used for data analysis. Three knowledge related constructs (internal knowledge integration, knowledge integration with growers, and knowledge integration with integrators) will be examined towards business performance.Further, these three variables collectively will explain relationship towards business performance.The relationships will be identified to support for the effectiveness of knowledge based collaboration. Managers can use this as a tool to conceptualize how their business can develop internal integration and collaborative relationships with their trading partners

A Strategy For Promoting Business-It Fusion To Enhance Management Of Enterprise Applications

This paper is based upon a research study conducted to determine the significance of managerial leadership practices in a corporation’s transformation during the period from 2004 to 2006. The study attempted to discover how business-IT fusion enhances organizational performance. The study answered two questions: how managerial leadership practices effectively advance business-IT fusion of an inclusive and collaborative organization and how business-IT fusion affects risks and profitability. The intention of this study was to contribute to the field of management of information technology grounded on propositions involving organizational development roles, IT governance, and collaborative organizations. Triangulated inquiry from documents and a survey of 24 participants who included 2 women and 22 men comprising a chief information officer, 7 functional managers, 8 project managers, and 8 engineers of a corporation in the northeastern United States confirmed the propositions. The findings indicated that horizontal integration has begun in transition from being separate toward becoming collaborative. This paper will reveal how disparate images that are subculture bound could be enhanced by collaborative and integrative leadership practices. Moreover, the horizontal integration of common financial and technical applications allows work to be transferred across different locations, thus reducing risks and increasing return on investment.  This paper will present a collaborative and integrative model integrating organizational development roles, IT governance, and relationship management across organizational settings for transforming effective business-IT fusion

A conceptual model of enterprise application integration in higher education institutions

Copyright @ 2013 EMCIS.It is eminent that several applications’ systems are deployed at different levels in Higher Education (HE), ranging from academic and administrative to staff and students record systems. Many of these systems suffer from different problems due to the lack of integration such as data redundancy, inconsistency and maintenance cost. Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) can provide substantial benefits to these systems, such as assisting with business process integration, facilitating e-service based transformation and supporting collaborative decision-making. However, some factors that influence EAI adoption process in HE will be defined. This paper introduces a conceptual model to explain the outcome of using EAI in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). Analyzing the combination of the existing classification of EAI factors with the HE factors will enhance the implementation of EAI in HEI at both organizational and operational levels. A pilot study at King Abdulaziz University (KAU), Kingdom of Saudi Arabia will be presented in this paper to show that the integration of the multiple information systems gives an integrated view to facilitate information access and reuse. Moreover data from different information systems is combined to gain a more comprehensive basis to satisfy the educational needs

Teaching Supply Chain Operations Planning Using Actual Industry Data Across Multiple Organizations

The purpose of this case study is to provide a pedagogical teaching tool from a business-oriented viewpoint for an undergraduate supply chain management class. Students are provided with challenging questions and problems to solve which enriches their analytical skills in assessing product assortments, developing effective forecasting techniques and collaborative decision making skills with operation managers and supply chain partners. This case examines supply chain management as a collaborative function intertwined with other organizational tasks and provides future supply chain managers lessons on interactions and integration of multiple business units using the latest business practice examples in supply chain management. The case was developed through interviews with eight supply chain professionals across six organizations and uses actual POS data from a retailer

Detecting semantically related concepts in a SOA integration scenario

In this paper, we present an approach to detecting semantically related concepts in a service oriented environment. This method is essential when creating collaborative business processes. Standard enterprise application systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM) etc. offer a lot of opportunities for application interoperability. System integrators assign a set of services from various application systems to the integration scenario. A well defined discovery process can detect these services. Nevertheless, building an operable business process requires the mapping of these services in the data schema used in the business process. This mapping results in a global understanding of relevant business concepts in the integration scenario. This paper focuses on the identification of semantically relevant concepts in different schemas in the participating services. A short overview of our integration platform and methodology is also included

Commenting on Interorganizational Relationship in Franchising Systems: Governance for Learning and Collaborative Research

Abstract. Inter-organizational relationship is increasingly important for modern business world because of its benefits for efficient integration for resources from various parties, facilitation for new knowledge creation, and synergetic use of the collective decision, action and idiosyncratic capabilities. I tend to offer a conceptual discussion for the connections among inter-organizational relationship, governance for organizational learning, and collaborative research in a franchising system context. Important research imperatives were proposed finally.Keywords. Interorganizational relationship, Franchising system, Governance for learning, Collaborative research.JEL. M10, M11, M14

Commenting on Interorganizational Relationship in Franchising Systems: Governance for Learning and Collaborative Research

Abstract. Inter-organizational relationship is increasingly important for modern business world because of its benefits for efficient integration for resources from various parties, facilitation for new knowledge creation, and synergetic use of the collective decision, action and idiosyncratic capabilities. I tend to offer a conceptual discussion for the connections among inter-organizational relationship, governance for organizational learning, and collaborative research in a franchising system context. Important research imperatives were proposed finally.Keywords. Interorganizational relationship, Franchising system, Governance for learning, Collaborative research.JEL. M10, M11, M14