Enterprise Engineering and Management at the Crossroads

The article provides an overview of the challenges and the state of the art of the discipline of Enterprise Architecture (EA), with emphasis on the challenges and future development opportunities of the underlying Information System (IS), and its IT implementation, the Enterprise Information System (EIS). The first challenge is to overcome the narrowness of scope of present practice in IS and EA, and re-gain the coverage of the entire business on all levels of management, and a holistic and systemic coverage of the enterprise as an economic entity in its social and ecological environment. The second challenge is how to face the problems caused by complexity that limit the controllability and manageability of the enterprise as a system. The third challenge is connected with the complexity problem, and describes fundamental issues of sustainability and viability. Following from the third, the fourth challenge is to identify modes of survival for systems, and dynamic system architectures that evolve and are resilient to changes of the environment in which they live. The state of the art section provides pointers to possible radical changes to models, methodologies, theories and tools in EIS design and implementation, with the potential to solve these grand challenges.Griffith Sciences, School of Information and Communication TechnologyNo Full Tex

Building on successes in African agriculture:

CONTENTS: 1. African Agriculture: Past Performance, Future Imperatives / Steven Haggblade, Peter Hazell, Ingrid Kirsten, and Richard Mkandawire; 2. Generalizing from Past Successes / Steven Haggblade; 3. Recent Growth in African Cassava / Felix Nweke, Steven Haggblade, and Ballard Zulu; 4. Maize Breeding in East and Southern Africa, 1900–2000 / Melinda Smale and T. S. Jayne; 5. Mali's White Revolution: Smallholder Cotton from 1960 to 2003 / James Tefft; 6. Smallholder Dairy in Kenya / Margaret Ngigi; 7. Are Kenya's Horticultural Exports a Replicable Success Story? / Nicholas Minot and Margaret Ngigi; 8. Strategies for Sustainable Natural Resource Management / Steven Franzel, Frank Place, Chris Reij, and Gelson Tembo; 9. The Changing Policy Environment Facing African Agriculture / Francis Chigunta, Ross Herbert, Michael Johnson, and Richard Mkandawire; 10. The Pretoria Statement on the Future of African AgricultureCollective behavior, Property rights, Public goods, Agroforestry, Irrigation, Fisheries, Forest management, Rangelands, plant genetic resources, Pests Management, Watersheds, agribusiness, extension activities, extension-research linkages, Collective action,

Digital transformation of peatland eco-innovations (‘Paludiculture’): Enabling a paradigm shift towards the real-time sustainable production of ‘green-friendly’ products and services

The world is heading in the wrong direction on carbon emissions where we are not on track to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C; Ireland is among the countries where overall emissions have continued to rise. The development of wettable peatland products and services (termed 'Paludiculture') present significant opportunities for enabling a transition away from peat-harvesting (fossil fuels) to developing 'green' eco-innovations. However, this must be balanced with sustainable carbon sequestration and environmental protection. This complex transition from 'brown to green' must be met in real time by enabling digital technologies across the full value chain. This will potentially necessitate creation of new green-business models with the potential to support disruptive innovation. This timely paper describes digital transformation of paludiculture-based eco-innovation that will potentially lead to a paradigm shift towards using smart digital technologies to address efficiency of products and services along with future-proofing for climate change. Digital transform of paludiculture also aligns with the 'Industry 5.0 -a human-centric solution'. However, companies supporting peatland innovation may lack necessary standards, data-sharing or capabilities that can also affect viable business model propositions that can jeopardize economic, political and social sustainability. Digital solutions may reduce costs, increase productivity, improve produce develop, and achieve faster time to market for paludiculture. Digitisation also enables information systems to be open, interoperable, and user-friendly. This constitutes the first study to describe the digital transformation of paludiculture, both vertically and horizontally, in order to inform sustainability that includes process automation via AI, machine learning, IoT-Cloud informed sensors and robotics, virtual and augmented reality, and blockchain for cyber-physical systems. Thus, the aim of this paper is to describe the applicability of digital transformation to actualize the benefits and opportunities of paludiculture activities and enterprises in the Irish midlands with a global orientation.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Internet of Things Strategic Research Roadmap

Internet of Things (IoT) is an integrated part of Future Internet including existing and evolving Internet and network developments and could be conceptually defined as a dynamic global network infrastructure with self configuring capabilities based on standard and interoperable communication protocols where physical and virtual “things” have identities, physical attributes, and virtual personalities, use intelligent interfaces, and are seamlessly integrated into the information network

Water in the Green Economy: Capacity Development Aspects

This book discusses needs related to capacity development for water resources management, including water supply and sanitation, in the context of the green economy. It showcases theoretical and practical approaches with proven success. Most contributions come from members and partners within the interagency mechanism, UN-Water. The 11 case studies in this book range from innovative design and delivery of capacity development programs related to water in the green economy, market mechanisms, and quality control procedures supporting capacity development success towards the practical implementation of programs to enhance individual and institutional capacity

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

An Adaptive Framework for Improving the Effectiveness of Virtual Enterprises in the Supply Chain

This thesis describes a research project that develops an adaptive framework for improving the effectiveness of virtual enterprises in the supply chains in Mongolia. The research takes empirical and quantitative approach to study the phenomenon of virtual enterprises. Based on a literature review, the factors that influence organisations to join in virtual enterprises are studied by a higher-order factor analysis. As a result, agility is identified as one of the main benefits organisations can gain by joining a virtual enterprise temporarily and changes in business performance are conceived as the measures of effectiveness. Next, a taxonomy of enterprises is developed with five distinguishing clusters that achieve differing levels of agility and business performance. This study suggests that enterprises that are monitoring changes in their business environment take most advantage of agility and achieve the best levels of performance. These findings then allow an adaptive framework based on common reference architectures to be developed as a main contribution of this study. The framework includes a breeding environment as a ‘pool’ of prepared enterprises with the ability to form temporary collaborations to react responsively, rapidly and effectively to the fast-changing opportunities. A structural equation model was used to examine the model fit with the supporting hypotheses, based on the observed data. Then, a powerful clustered expectation maximisation algorithm was applied to the analysis of the grouped enterprises. Finally, a simulation-based case study was conducted to validate the developed framework. The results provide rich empirical evidence of the beneficial impact of virtual enterprises on agile supply chains. The research provides rich empirical evidence of the beneficial impact of virtual enterprises on agile supply chains. It also provides theoretical and managerial insights that can be used to strengthen the drivers, enablers and capabilities that enhance the effectiveness of virtual enterprises collaboration in agile supply chains that can be translated to a global context. These are major contributions the ‘body of knowledge’ in themselves, but the research also adds usefully to the study of applied research methodologies in the area