The ORION Project: Staged Business Process Reengineering at FedEx

Technical innovation, process reengineering, and organizational adaptation of the ORION project are described

Collaborative 3D Modeling: Conceptual and Technical Issues

peer reviewedThe need of 3D city models increases day by day. However, 3D modeling still faces some impediments to be generalized. Therefore, new solutions such as collaboration should be investigated. The paper presents a new vision of collaboration applied on 3D modeling through the definition of the concept of a 3D collaborative model. The paper highlights basic questions to be considered for the definition and the development of that model then argues the importance of reuse of 2D data as a promising solution to reconstruct 3D data and to upgrade to integrated 3D solutions in the future. This idea is supported by a case study, to demonstrate how 2D/2.5D data collected from different providers in Walloon region in Belgium can be integrated and reengineered to match the specifications of a 3D building model compatible with the CityGML standard

Privacy-Preserving Reengineering of Model-View-Controller Application Architectures Using Linked Data

When a legacy system’s software architecture cannot be redesigned, implementing additional privacy requirements is often complex, unreliable and costly to maintain. This paper presents a privacy-by-design approach to reengineer web applications as linked data-enabled and implement access control and privacy preservation properties. The method is based on the knowledge of the application architecture, which for the Web of data is commonly designed on the basis of a model-view-controller pattern. Whereas wrapping techniques commonly used to link data of web applications duplicate the security source code, the new approach allows for the controlled disclosure of an application’s data, while preserving non-functional properties such as privacy preservation. The solution has been implemented and compared with existing linked data frameworks in terms of reliability, maintainability and complexity

IT-business strategic alignment in the context of business process reengineering : case studies of large organisations in Lesotho.

Master of Commerce in Information Ssytems and Technology. University KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2018.The alignment of IT strategy and business strategy is an ongoing topic of interest for many researchers. In the same light is Business Process Re-engineering (BPR). The existing literature considers these two topics separately in the context of developed countries. This study taps into this gap by investigating how IT-business alignment at a strategic level can be achieved in BPR by considering the influential factors that drive this alignment in large organisations in Lesotho. The study empirically builds on centrally placing IT-business strategic alignment at the heart of BPR. Consequently, the findings show that IT-business alignment plays a pivotal role in the success or failure of a BPR project. New directions for future studies are suggested and discussed

Enterprise systems for innovation in products and processes : beyond operational efficiency

It has been widely accepted now in industry and academia that Enterprise Systems (ES) can create value for adopting organizations by enabling operational efficiency. However, given the enormous investments they warrant, the potential of such systems to deliver more than improving operations is emerging as a popular area of investigation. This paper reports a research-in-progress that proposes innovation as a means of creating business value with Enterprise Systems. The primary contribution of this paper is a process model that proposes that Enterprise Systems can enable innovation - in products and processes, and supports it with empirical evidence using three case studies. The intention is to test this model further with more case studies and a survey.<br /

Aggregate Farming in the Cloud: The AFarCloud ECSEL project

Farming is facing many economic challenges in terms of productivity and cost-effectiveness. Labor shortage partly due to depopulation of rural areas, especially in Europe, is another challenge. Domain specific problems such as accurate monitoring of soil and crop properties and animal health are key factors for minimizing economical risks, and not risking human health. The ECSEL AFarCloud (Aggregate Farming in the Cloud) project will provide a distributed platform for autonomous farming that will allow the integration and cooperation of agriculture Cyber Physical Systems in real-time in order to increase efficiency, productivity, animal health, food quality and reduce farm labor costs. Moreover, such a platform can be integrated with farm management software to support monitoring and decision-making solutions based on big data and real-time data mining techniques.publishedVersio

The Trilogy of Science: Filling the Knowledge Management Gap with Knowledge Science and Theory

The international knowledge management field has different ways of investigating, developing, believing, and studying knowledge management. Knowledge management (KM) is distinguished deductively by know-how, and its intangible nature establishes different approaches to KM concepts, practices, and developments. Exploratory research and theoretical principles have formed functional intelligences from 1896 to 2013, leading to a knowledge management knowledge science (KMKS) concept that derived a grounded theory of knowledge activity (KAT). This study addressed the impact of knowledge production problems on KM practice. The purpose of this qualitative meta-analysis study was to fit KM practice within the framework of knowledge science (KS) study. Themed questions and research variables focused on field mechanisms, operative functions, principle theory, and relationships of KMKS. The action research used by American practitioners has not established a formal structure for KS. The meta-data-analysis examined 385 transdisciplinary peer-reviewed articles using social science, service science, and systems science databases, with a selection of interdisciplinary studies that had a practice-research-theory framework. Key attributes utilizing Boolean limiters, words, phrases and publication dates, along with triangulation, language analysis and coding through analytic software identified commonalities of the data under study. Findings reflect that KM has not become a theoretically saturated field. KS as the forensic science of KM creates a paradigm shift, causes social change that averts rapid shifts in management direction and uncertainty, and connects KM philosophy and science of knowledge. These findings have social change implications by informing the work of managers and academics to generate a methodical applied science

3rd EGEE User Forum

We have organized this book in a sequence of chapters, each chapter associated with an application or technical theme introduced by an overview of the contents, and a summary of the main conclusions coming from the Forum for the chapter topic. The first chapter gathers all the plenary session keynote addresses, and following this there is a sequence of chapters covering the application flavoured sessions. These are followed by chapters with the flavour of Computer Science and Grid Technology. The final chapter covers the important number of practical demonstrations and posters exhibited at the Forum. Much of the work presented has a direct link to specific areas of Science, and so we have created a Science Index, presented below. In addition, at the end of this book, we provide a complete list of the institutes and countries involved in the User Forum

Information Technology in Healthcare: HHC-MOTES, a Novel Set of Metrics to Analyse IT Sustainability in Different Areas

Sustainability, as a science, is the guideline of the present work. It aims to analyse, by means of a literature review, various areas of healthcare in which information technology (IT) has been- or could be-used, leading to several sources of sustainability, for example, cost savings, better teamwork, higher quality and efficiency of medical care. After a brief introduction analysing the strategic contexts in which innovation in general, and IT in particular, can be a source of general improvements in efficiency, cost savings and service quality, the research focuses on the healthcare system by discussing the different nature of private and public organizations in terms of adopting innovations and changes and discussing the issue of consumer health costs and consumer choices. The following part focuses on the qualitative benefits of IT in healthcare and discusses the importance of metrics for measuring performance, costs and efficiency in this area. The work then qualitatively introduces a new set of Key Performance Indicators (KPI), partly based on literature from different topics and existing and validated sets of metrics, analysing, under the point of view of sustainability, the implementation of IT in healthcare, namely in management, organization, technology, environment and social fields (HHC-MOTES framework). The model, inspired by and to sustainability, can be used as a decision support at the strategic management level as well as for the analysis and investigation of the effects of IT systems in the healthcare sector from various perspectives

BPR initiatives: The impacts of IT and organisational customs and practices

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University, 28/02/2002.This research is designed to investigate the relationship between IT and Organisational customs and practices in Business Process Reengineering (BPR) projects based on a research framework, which consists of organisational culture, IT and the outcome of BPR initiatives together with the inextricable interdependence between them. The focus is on developing a process oriented, context-based description and explanation of the BPR phenomenon in Arab Gulf Cooperation Council (AGCC) countries. The study strives to describe and explain the process of adopting and implementing BPR initiatives in petrochemical and utilities industries in AGCC countries in terms of interaction of contextual conditions, actions and consequences. The research methodology of this thesis focuses on the pragmatics of conducting case studies as a rigorous and effective method of research. The study emphasises on conducting positivist inquiry of three case studies' data to deductively test the researcher's understanding on BPR and her assumptions of 'Blueprints' for successful BPR in AGCC countries. Two of the case studies organisations are sister companies operating in the oil and gas industry, whereas the third case study organisation is a utility company operating in the field of water and electricity generation and supply. This study resulted in a framework that could serve as a prescription to achieve a successful BPR initiative. It has identified a number of organisational elements that emphasised the necessity to pay attention to cultural and IT issues prior to undertaking BPR projects. These include the development of strategy and sound stimuli for the project, the availability of leadership, top management vision, availability of required skills and expertise and the maturity of the IT infrastructure. In addition, the study has empirically emphasised a number of BPR project implementation elements that should be in place to ensure successful implementation and management of the project including: the availability of an appropriately composed project team, continuous communication, users' involvement and usage of communication technologies