Enterprise Architecture: What Aspects is Current Research Targeting

Enterprise architecture is an approach to aligning business and IT within a company. In this paper we present the state of the art in enterprise architecture (EA) research, our survey is based on an analysis of the publicly available publications. Our research methodology defines the analysis criteria. These criteria are: the distribution of the papers over time, their topics, authors, reference disciplines and their dispersion over the lifecycle activities, which will be defined. The evaluation included 80 papers (all referencing explicitly the term "enterprise architecture"). The results of our survey are: EA is a young discipline, but the interest in it is growing. Although a wide range of topics is covered, the discipline is lacking basic research. The main contributers to EA are consulting companies and academics. But academics do not contribute very much to the basic research in EA. Furthermore, very few other disciplines are used to enhance enterprise architecture. In addition enterprise architecture is a new discipline and it will not mature unless substantial basic research will be made

Enterprise Resource Planning Systems Research: An Annotated Bibliography

Despite growing interest, publications on ERP systems within the academic Information Systems community, as reflected by contributions to journals and international conferences, is only now emerging. This article provides an annotated bibliography of the ERP publications published in the main Information Systems journals and conferences and reviews the state of the ERP art. The publications surveyed are categorized through a framework that is structured in phases that correspond to the different stages of an ERP system lifecycle within an organization. We also present topics for further research in each phase

Formal patterns for Web-based systems design

The ubiquitous and simple interface of Web browsers has opened the door for the devel- opment of a new class of distributed applications which they have been known as Web applications. As more and more systems become Web-enabled we become increasingly dependent on the Web applications. Therefore, reliability of such systems is a very crucial factor for successful operation of many modern organisations and institutes. In the ¯rst part of this thesis we review how Web systems have evolved from simple static pages, in their early days, to their current situation as distributed applications with sophisticated functionalities. We also ¯nd out how the design methods have evolved to align with the rapid changes both in the new emerging technologies and growing functionalities. Although design approaches for Web applications have improved during the last decade we conclude that dependability should be given more consideration. In Chapter 2 we explain how this could be achieved through the application of formal methods. Therefore, we have provided an overview of dependability and formal methods in this chapter. In the second part of this research we follow a practical approach to the formal modelling of Web Applications. Accordingly, in Chapter 3 we have developed a series of formal models for an integrated holiday booking system. Our main objectives are to gain some common knowledge of the domain and to identify some key areas and features with regard to our formal modelling approach. Formal modelling of large Web applications could be a very complex process. In Chapter 4 we have introduced the idea of formal patterns for speci¯cation and re¯nement to accelerate the modelling process and to help alleviate the burden of formal modelling. In a further attempt to tackle the complexity of the formal modelling of Web applica- tions, we have introduced the idea of speci¯cation partitioning in Chapter 5. Speci¯- cation partitioning is closely related to the notion of composition. In this chapter we have extended some CSP-like composition techniques to build the system speci¯cation from subsystems or parts. The summary of our research, related ¯ndings and some suggestions for the future work are presented in Chapter 6.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo