Effect of Stakeholders-Oriented Behavior on the Performance of Sustainable Business

This study focuses on stakeholder-oriented behavior, throughout organizational culture and organizational behavior, and its effects on the performance of sustainable organizations managed according to Corporative Social Responsibility (CSR) criteria. The investigation demonstrates that the sustainability efforts of a wide range of stakeholders exert various effects on business performance. This investigation tests two integrated conceptual models: (a) Stakeholder Orientation Model estimates the relationships among organizational culture components and their effects on stakeholder-oriented organizational behavior. That is, it estimates the influence of values on norms and artifacts, and their effects on stakeholder-oriented organizational behavior; (b) Performance model estimates the association between stakeholder-oriented organizational behavior and financial and market performance, reputation, and commitment. Using Structural Equation Modelling, both models were estimated from primary data collected from large- and medium-sized multi-sector Colombian companies involved in business sustainability practices. The findings reveal that values are antecedents of norms, but neither values nor norms are predictors of artifacts. Furthermore, norms and artifacts exert direct effects on stakeholder-oriented organizational behavior. In turn, stakeholder-oriented organizational behaviors are predictors of both market performance and commitment. Nevertheless, stakeholder-oriented organizational behaviors are not direct antecedents of both financial performance and reputation.S

Effect of stakeholders-oriented behavior on the performance of sustainable business

This study focuses on stakeholder-oriented behavior, throughout organizational culture and organizational behavior, and its effects on the performance of sustainable organizations managed according to Corporative Social Responsibility (CSR) criteria. The investigation demonstrates that the sustainability efforts of a wide range of stakeholders exert various effects on business performance. This investigation tests two integrated conceptual models: (a) Stakeholder Orientation Model estimates the relationships among organizational culture components and their effects on stakeholder-oriented organizational behavior. That is, it estimates the influence of values on norms and artifacts, and their effects on stakeholder-oriented organizational behavior; (b) Performance model estimates the association between stakeholder-oriented organizational behavior and financial and market performance, reputation, and commitment. Using Structural Equation Modelling, both models were estimated from primary data collected from large- and medium-sized multi-sector Colombian companies involved in business sustainability practices. The findings reveal that values are antecedents of norms, but neither values nor norms are predictors of artifacts. Furthermore, norms and artifacts exert direct effects on stakeholder-oriented organizational behavior. In turn, stakeholder-oriented organizational behaviors are predictors of both market performance and commitment. Nevertheless, stakeholder-oriented organizational behaviors are not direct antecedents of both financial performance and reputation

Automating correctness verification of artifact-centric business process models

Context: The artifact-centric methodology has emerged as a new paradigm to support business process management over the last few years. This way, business processes are described from the point of view of the artifacts that are manipulated during the process. Objective: One of the research challenges in this area is the verification of the correctness of this kind of business process models where the model is formed of various artifacts that interact among them. Method: In this paper, we propose a fully automated approach for verifying correctness of artifact-centric business process models, taking into account that the state (lifecycle) and the values of each artifact (numerical data described by pre and postconditions) influence in the values and the state of the others. The lifecycles of the artifacts and the numerical data managed are modeled by using the Constraint Programming paradigm, an Artificial Intelligence technique. Results: Two correctness notions for artifact-centric business process models are distinguished (reachability and weak termination), and novel verification algorithms are developed to check them. The algorithms are complete: neither false positives nor false negatives are generated. Moreover, the algorithms offer precise diagnosis of the detected errors, indicating the execution causing the error where the lifecycle gets stuck. Conclusion: To the best of our knowledge, this paper presents the first verification approach for artifact-centric business process models that integrates pre and postconditions, which define the behavior of the services, and numerical data verification when the model is formed of more than one artifact. The approach can detect errors not detectable with other approaches.Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia TIN2009-1371

Universal Resource Lifecycle Management

This paper presents a model and a tool that allows Web users to define, execute, and manage lifecycles for any artifact available on the Web. In the paper we show the need for lifecycle management of Web artifacts, and we show in particular why it is important that non-programmers are also able to do this. We then discuss why current models do not allow this, and we present a model and a system implementation that achieves lifecycle management for any URI-identifiable and accessible object. The most challenging parts of the work lie in the definition of a simple but universal model and system (and in particular in allowing universality and simplicity to coexist) and in the ability to hide from the lifecycle modeler the complexity intrinsic in having to access and manage a variety of resources, which differ in nature, in the operations that are allowed on them, and in the protocols and data formats required to access them

Why and How Your Traceability Should Evolve: Insights from an Automotive Supplier

Traceability is a key enabler of various activities in automotive software and systems engineering and required by several standards. However, most existing traceability management approaches do not consider that traceability is situated in constantly changing development contexts involving multiple stakeholders. Together with an automotive supplier, we analyzed how technology, business, and organizational factors raise the need for flexible traceability. We present how traceability can be evolved in the development lifecycle, from early elicitation of traceability needs to the implementation of mature traceability strategies. Moreover, we shed light on how traceability can be managed flexibly within an agile team and more formally when crossing team borders and organizational borders. Based on these insights, we present requirements for flexible tool solutions, supporting varying levels of data quality, change propagation, versioning, and organizational traceability.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, accepted in IEEE Softwar

Component-aware Orchestration of Cloud-based Enterprise Applications, from TOSCA to Docker and Kubernetes

Enterprise IT is currently facing the challenge of coordinating the management of complex, multi-component applications across heterogeneous cloud platforms. Containers and container orchestrators provide a valuable solution to deploy multi-component applications over cloud platforms, by coupling the lifecycle of each application component to that of its hosting container. We hereby propose a solution for going beyond such a coupling, based on the OASIS standard TOSCA and on Docker. We indeed propose a novel approach for deploying multi-component applications on top of existing container orchestrators, which allows to manage each component independently from the container used to run it. We also present prototype tools implementing our approach, and we show how we effectively exploited them to carry out a concrete case study

Boundary Objects and their Use in Agile Systems Engineering

Agile methods are increasingly introduced in automotive companies in the attempt to become more efficient and flexible in the system development. The adoption of agile practices influences communication between stakeholders, but also makes companies rethink the management of artifacts and documentation like requirements, safety compliance documents, and architecture models. Practitioners aim to reduce irrelevant documentation, but face a lack of guidance to determine what artifacts are needed and how they should be managed. This paper presents artifacts, challenges, guidelines, and practices for the continuous management of systems engineering artifacts in automotive based on a theoretical and empirical understanding of the topic. In collaboration with 53 practitioners from six automotive companies, we conducted a design-science study involving interviews, a questionnaire, focus groups, and practical data analysis of a systems engineering tool. The guidelines suggest the distinction between artifacts that are shared among different actors in a company (boundary objects) and those that are used within a team (locally relevant artifacts). We propose an analysis approach to identify boundary objects and three practices to manage systems engineering artifacts in industry

Dynamic Model-based Management of Service-Oriented Infrastructure.

Models are an effective tool for systems and software design. They allow software architects to abstract from the non-relevant details. Those qualities are also useful for the technical management of networks, systems and software, such as those that compose service oriented architectures. Models can provide a set of well-defined abstractions over the distributed heterogeneous service infrastructure that enable its automated management. We propose to use the managed system as a source of dynamically generated runtime models, and decompose management processes into a composition of model transformations. We have created an autonomic service deployment and configuration architecture that obtains, analyzes, and transforms system models to apply the required actions, while being oblivious to the low-level details. An instrumentation layer automatically builds these models and interprets the planned management actions to the system. We illustrate these concepts with a distributed service update operation

Knowledge Nodes: the reification of organizational communities. A case study

In our work a new approach, the Distributed Knowledge Management (DKM) approach, is used and organizations are seen as constellations of communities, which \own" local knowledge and exchange it through meaning negotiation coordination processes. In order to reify communities within a DKM system, the concept of Knowledge Node (KN) is used and then applied in a case study: a complex Italian national firm, the Impresa Pizzarotti & C. S.p.A. All communities of practices are un-veiled and rei ed as KNs within a high level architecture of a DKM system. In this paper it is argued that, even if knowledge has to be organized and made useful to the whole organization, there are types of knowledge that must be managed in an autonomous way, and the DKM approach is a good system which to deal with coordination/negotiation processes