An agile business process and practice meta-model

Business Process Management (BPM) encompasses the discovery, modelling, monitoring, analysis and improvement of business processes. Limitations of traditional BPM approaches in addressing changes in business requirements have resulted in a number of agile BPM approaches that seek to accelerate the redesign of business process models. Meta-models are a key BPM feature that reduce the ambiguity of business process models. This paper describes a meta-model supporting the agile version of the Business Process and Practice Alignment Methodology (BPPAM) for business process improvement, which captures process information from actual work practices. The ability of the meta-model to achieve business process agility is discussed and compared with other agile meta-models, based on definitions of business process flexibility and agility found in the literature. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V

An agile business process improvement methodology

Adoption of business process improvement strategies are now a concern of most organisations. Organisations are still facing challenges and finding transient solutions to immediate problems. The misalignment between IT solutions and organisational aspects evolves across space and time showing discrepancies. Unfortunately, existing business process approaches are not according with continuous business process improvement involving business stakeholders. Considering this limitation in well-known Business Process (BP) methodologies, this paper presents a comparative study of some approaches and introduces agility in the Business Process and Practice Alignment Methodology (BPPAM). Our intention is to present observed problems in existing approaches and introduce agility in our proposal to address features, like the alignment between daily work practices and business process descriptions, in a simple and agile way. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V

Digital Model-Based Engineering: Expectations, Prerequisites, and Challenges of Infusion

Digital model-based engineering (DMbE) is the use of digital artifacts, digital environments, and digital tools in the performance of engineering functions. DMbE is intended to allow an organization to progress from documentation-based engineering methods to digital methods that may provide greater flexibility, agility, and efficiency. The term 'DMbE' was developed as part of an effort by the Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) Infusion Task team to identify what government organizations might expect in the course of moving to or infusing MBSE into their organizations. The Task team was established by the Interagency Working Group on Engineering Complex Systems, an informal collaboration among government systems engineering organizations. This Technical Memorandum (TM) discusses the work of the MBSE Infusion Task team to date. The Task team identified prerequisites, expectations, initial challenges, and recommendations for areas of study to pursue, as well as examples of efforts already in progress. The team identified the following five expectations associated with DMbE infusion, discussed further in this TM: (1) Informed decision making through increased transparency, and greater insight. (2) Enhanced communication. (3) Increased understanding for greater flexibility/adaptability in design. (4) Increased confidence that the capability will perform as expected. (5) Increased efficiency. The team identified the following seven challenges an organization might encounter when looking to infuse DMbE: (1) Assessing value added to the organization. Not all DMbE practices will be applicable to every situation in every organization, and not all implementations will have positive results. (2) Overcoming organizational and cultural hurdles. (3) Adopting contractual practices and technical data management. (4) Redefining configuration management. The DMbE environment changes the range of configuration information to be managed to include performance and design models, database objects, as well as more traditional book-form objects and formats. (5) Developing information technology (IT) infrastructure. Approaches to implementing critical, enabling IT infrastructure capabilities must be flexible, reconfigurable, and updatable. (6) Ensuring security of the single source of truth (7) Potential overreliance on quantitative data over qualitative data. Executable/ computational models and simulations generally incorporate and generate quantitative vice qualitative data. The Task team also developed several recommendations for government, academia, and industry, as discussed in this TM. The Task team recommends continuing beyond this initial work to further develop the means of implementing DMbE and to look for opportunities to collaborate and share best practices

Unlocking Agility: Building Learning Capabilities Within A Consumer Healthcare Organization

Pharmaceutical companies are increasingly infusing the concept of agility to strive for continuous improvement. Significant exploration and research have focused on more technical-driven departments, like Information Technology and Research and Development. However, there has been little research with the focus on more process-driven functions, like Learning and Organizational Development. This action research study presents a case study of the implementation of a new training solution within a consumer healthcare organization from the lens of the project leader. Building upon the case study, this capstone includes a review of existing research and literature of agility with a focus on the healthcare sector, change management, adult learning, and organizational learning. The overall goal of this study is to explore the value of agility in building learning capacities within the pharmaceutical industry. Looking forward, the aim is to provide insights on how agility can be developed to facilitate an organization’s transformation to become a learning organization

Remote Elderly Monitoring Systems on a Human-centric Perspective

Information systems based on the Internet of Things (IoT) are driving revolutionary solutions in innumerable domains, as the sensitive domain of healthcare. Indicatively, remote monitoring of patients and real-time diagnosis are anticipated as complex systems, offering various services to the associated humans (e.g. patients and caregivers). While researchers focus on the technology necessary to implement remote healthcare systems, such as Remote Elderly Monitoring System (REMS), human concerns restricting their wider adoption are often neglected. Such concerns are transformed into criticalities, that should be considered during system design. In this work, a human-centric perspective on REMS design is explored. Following this perspective, supported tasks are decodified, human concerns associated to REMS usage are identified and revealed criticalities, that stem from human concerns, are extracted. Furthermore, existing REMS implementations are examined, based on the tasks supported and criticalities addressed, resulting in the identification of ways to further improve such systems

Integration of outside-in and inside-out entrepreneurial marketing capabilities, marketing agility, and resources for entrepreneurial firms performance

Peer reviewedPostprin

Towards a Service-Oriented Enterprise: The Design of a Cloud Business Integration Platform in a Medium-Sized Manufacturing Enterprise

This case study research followed the two-year transition of a medium-sized manufacturing firm towards a service-oriented enterprise. A service-oriented enterprise is an emerging architecture of the firm that leverages the paradigm of services computing to integrate the capabilities of the firm with the complementary competencies of business partners to offer customers with value-added products and services. Design science research in information systems was employed to pursue the primary design of a cloud business integration platform to enable the secondary design of multi-enterprise business processes to enable the dynamic and effective integration of business partner capabilities with those of the enterprise. The results from the study received industry acclaim for the designed solutions innovativeness and business results in the case study environment. The research makes contributions to the IT practitioner and scholarly knowledge base by providing insight into key constructs associated with service-oriented design and deployment of a cloud enterprise architecture and cloud intermediation model to achieve business results. The study demonstrated how an outside-in service-oriented architecture adoption pattern and cloud computing model enabled a medium-sized manufacturing enterprise to focus on a comprehensive approach to business partner integration and collaboration. The cloud integration platform has enabled a range of secondary designs that leveraged business services to orchestrate inter-enterprise business processes for choreography into service systems and networks for the purposes of value creation. The study results demonstrated enhanced levels of business process agility enabled by the cloud platform leading to secondary designs of transactional, differentiated, innovative, and improvisational business processes. The study provides a foundation for future scholarly research on the role of cloud integration platforms in enterprise computing and the increased importance of service-oriented secondary designs to exploit cloud platforms for sustained business performance

Supply chain resilience and risk management strategies and methods

Abstract. The changing global market due to Industry 4.0 and the recent pandemic effect has created a need for more responsiveness in an organization’s supply chain. Supply chain resilience offers the firm not only to avoid disruptions but also to withstand the losses due to a disruption. The objective of this research is to find out how resilience is defined so far in other literature and find out the strategies available to gain the resilience fit for an organization. First, in the literature review, the previous studies on resilience were studied to understand what supply chain resilience means. Then, the key results and findings are discussed and conclusions are presented. The research found some interesting strategies for gaining the resilience fit. The benefits and the stakeholders for each strategy are also pointed out. These strategies can be used according to the organization’s business strategy. These strategies aligned with the business strategy can make a huge difference to withstand potential disruption and gaining a competitive advantage against the market competitors

DevOps for Digital Leaders

DevOps; continuous delivery; software lifecycle; concurrent parallel testing; service management; ITIL; GRC; PaaS; containerization; API management; lean principles; technical debt; end-to-end automation; automatio