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

A Case Study Examination into How Charities Enhance Fundraising Effectiveness through Managing Relationship with Donors and Beneficiaries

It is becoming increasingly apparent that nonprofit organisations are more focused on raising funds through relationships that they have built with their donors. Nonprofit organisations have borrowed from business management concepts and theories for example Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Services Management for guidance on how to effectively build and maintain relationships with their donors. This trend of applying business concepts in nonprofit context in particular for the purpose of generating fundraising income has attracted attention of researchers. Due to the lack of research in this area, this research builds on existing CRM literature by addressing a number of gaps. Firstly, little empirical evidence exists as to the relevance of CRM to nonprofit organisations. Secondly little investigation was carried out on the challenges and barriers facing charities. Thirdly, there are insufficient empirical data to serve as evidence to assess the outcomes of implementing CRM practices in a nonprofit context. In the process of investigating these research gaps as identified above, it is found that a considerable amount of donation to nonprofit organisations are contributed by service beneficiaries or people who have close relationship with them. This finding implies a certain connection between beneficiary service satisfaction and their giving behavior thus triggering the second phase of study within the area of Services Management. In this research, the case study method is adopted to encourage the use of multiple research techniques. The case study was carried out in a Devon-based charity over a period of two years. Firstly, the findings of this research empirically validate the relevance of key CRM implementation areas suggested by existing literature in nonprofit organisation and contribute to a fuller understanding of how CRM can be implemented in charities. The results identify six key factors which are critical to the success of CRM implementation in nonprofit organisation as well as the impact of CRM in four major areas. Further investigation carried out on the complexity of the relationship between main stakeholders for example service beneficiaries and donors indicate a positive connection between beneficiary service satisfaction and their willingness to donate. This important finding suggests the relevance of Services Management concepts especially the Service Profit Chain to nonprofit organisations. Whilst this thesis contributes to a better understanding of how CRM and services management are related to the effectiveness of fundraising in the nonprofit sector, further research in particular on the strength of the relationship between beneficiaries’ service satisfaction and their donation will be needed in the future

Extracting Business Value from IT: A Sensemaking Perspective of Post-Adoptive Use

How can firms extract value from already-implemented information technologies (IT) that support the work processes of employees? One approach is to stimulate employees to engage in post-adoptive extended use, i.e.,to learn and apply more of the available functions of the implemented technologies to support their work. Such learning behavior of extending functions in use is ingrained in a process by which users make sense of the technologies in the context of their work system.This study draws on sensemaking theory to develop a model to understand the antecedents, contingencies, and consequences of customer service employees’ extended use of customer relationship management (CRM)technologies. The model is tested using multi-source longitudinal data collected through a field study of one of the world’s largest telecommunications service providers. Our results suggest that employees engage in post-adoptive sensemaking at two levels: technology and work system. We found that sensemaking at both of these levels impacts the extended use of CRM technologies. Employees’ sensemaking at the technology level is influenced by employees’ assessment of technology quality,while employees’ sensemaking at the work system level is influenced by customers’ assessment of servicequality. Moreover, in the case of low technology quality and low service quality, specific mechanisms for employee feedback should be conceptualized and aligned at two levels: through employee participation at the technology level and through work system coordination at the work system level. Such alignment can mitigate the undesirable effect of low technology quality and low service quality,thereby facilitating extended use. Importantly, we found that extended use amplifies employees’ service capacity, leading to better objective performance. Put together, our findings highlight the critical role of employees’ sensemaking about the implemented technologies in promoting their extended use of IT and improving their work performance

CyberResearch on the Ancient Near East and Eastern Mediterranean

CyberResearch on the Ancient Near East and Neighboring Regions provides case studies on archaeology, objects, cuneiform texts, and online publishing, digital archiving, and preservation. Eleven chapters present a rich array of material, spanning the fifth through the first millennium BCE, from Anatolia, the Levant, Mesopotamia, and Iran. Customized cyber- and general glossaries support readers who lack either a technical background or familiarity with the ancient cultures. Edited by Vanessa Bigot Juloux, Amy Rebecca Gansell, and Alessandro Di Ludovico, this volume is dedicated to broadening the understanding and accessibility of digital humanities tools, methodologies, and results to Ancient Near Eastern Studies. Ultimately, this book provides a model for introducing cyber-studies to the mainstream of humanities research

Semantic Domains in Akkadian Text

The article examines the possibilities offered by language technology for analyzing semantic fields in Akkadian. The corpus of data for our research group is the existing electronic corpora, Open richly annotated cuneiform corpus (ORACC). In addition to more traditional Assyriological methods, the article explores two language technological methods: Pointwise mutual information (PMI) and Word2vec.Peer reviewe

The Evolution of Sociology of Software Architecture

The dialectical interplay of technology and sociological development goes back to the early days of human development, starting with stone tools and fire, and coming through the scientific and industrial revolutions; but it has never been as intense or as rapid as in the modern information age of software development and accelerating knowledge society (Mansell and Wehn, 1988; and Nico, 1994, p. 1602-1604). Software development causes social change, and social challenges demand software solutions. In turn, software solutions demand software application architecture. Software architecture (“SA”) (Fielding and Taylor, 2000) is a process for “defining a structural solution that meets all the technical and operations requirements...” (Microsoft, 2009, Chapter I). In the SA process, there is neither much emphasis on the sociological requirements of all social stakeholders nor on the society in w hich these stakeholders use, operate, group, manage, transact, dispute, and resolve social conflicts. For problems of society demanding sociological as well as software solutions, this study redefines software application architecture as “the process of defining a structured solution that meets all of the sociological , technical, and operational requirements…” This investigation aims to l ay the groundwork for, evolve, and develop an innovative and novel sub-branch of scientific study we name the “Sociology of Software Architecture” (hereinafter referred to as “SSA”). SSA is an interdisciplinary and comparative study integrating, synthesizing, and combining elements of the disciplines of sociology, sociology of technology, history of technology, sociology of knowledge society, epistemology, science methodology (philosophy of science), and software architecture. Sociology and technology have a strong, dynamic, and dialectical relationship and interplay, especially in software development. This thesis investigates and answers important and relevant questions, evolves and develops new scientific knowledge, proposes solutions, demonstrates and validates its benefits, shares its case studies and experiences, and advocates, promotes, and helps the future and further development of this novel method of science