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

OperA/ALIVE/OperettA

Comprehensive models for organizations must, on the one hand, be able to specify global goals and requirements but, on the other hand, cannot assume that particular actors will always act according to the needs and expectations of the system design. Concepts as organizational rules (Zambonelli 2002), norms and institutions (Dignum and Dignum 2001; Esteva et al. 2002), and social structures (Parunak and Odell 2002) arise from the idea that the effective engineering of organizations needs high-level, actor-independent concepts and abstractions that explicitly define the organization in which agents live (Zambonelli 2002).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Early aspects: aspect-oriented requirements engineering and architecture design

This paper reports on the third Early Aspects: Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Architecture Design Workshop, which has been held in Lancaster, UK, on March 21, 2004. The workshop included a presentation session and working sessions in which the particular topics on early aspects were discussed. The primary goal of the workshop was to focus on challenges to defining methodical software development processes for aspects from early on in the software life cycle and explore the potential of proposed methods and techniques to scale up to industrial applications

Consciosusness in Cognitive Architectures. A Principled Analysis of RCS, Soar and ACT-R

This report analyses the aplicability of the principles of consciousness developed in the ASys project to three of the most relevant cognitive architectures. This is done in relation to their aplicability to build integrated control systems and studying their support for general mechanisms of real-time consciousness.\ud To analyse these architectures the ASys Framework is employed. This is a conceptual framework based on an extension for cognitive autonomous systems of the General Systems Theory (GST).\ud A general qualitative evaluation criteria for cognitive architectures is established based upon: a) requirements for a cognitive architecture, b) the theoretical framework based on the GST and c) core design principles for integrated cognitive conscious control systems

E-Administration as a Way of Increasing the Managerial Capacity in Public Sector

This paper deals with a developing concept, that of public sector reform, and explores it within the boundaries of e-administration practices. International competition and internal raising expectations have lead governments across the world to reconfigure their relationships with the surrounding environments. In doing so, they mostly switched to a newer paradigm, based not on affirmation and mechanical theories, but on the concept of a living, biological system. Following this trend, many governments and their subsequent organizations choose to become flexible and decentralized, to recognize once again the importance of horizontal collaboration and internal partnerships and to value information. In this trend, ITC represents one of the modern instruments that may help implementing democracy and developing current public services as well as educational systems. Fully aware of the need for a revolution in the organizational culture of public administration and of a transition towards a horizontal, service-oriented administration with intensive information exchange among all its partners, Romania has adopted the European vision on e-government and e-governance, preparing itself for a complete transformation that the new technologies both produce and allow. In this context, 'The Government’s Strategy concerning the National Action Plan e-administration', enacted in October 2001 by the Romanian Parliament supports the European idea of getting the governance closer to its citizens. As this vision is described within the paper, the authors will analyze the Romanian solutions to increasing administrative efficiency. In doing so, the most relevant scientific contributions to defining the 'e-administration' concept are to be summarized and implications of its content, exercised against a Romanian backgroundpublic sector reform, e-administration, ITC

Using Ethical Guidelines for Defining Critical Quality Requirements of AI Solutions

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a fast-growing trend and an increasing number of companies are interested in developing AI solutions. Many companies have realised that black box nature of AI technologies can raise ethical questions. And they are defining ethical guidelines which can be utilised when developing AI solutions. The goal of this thesis was to explore how companies can solve potential ethical issues of AI solutions during requirements engineering activities. The main research method used in this thesis was a multiple-case study approach. Semi-structured interviews and document analysis were carried out to discover the AI ethical guidelines in three Finnish companies. The results are based on the open coding of the interview data and the ethical guidelines of the case companies. The ethical guidelines developed by the case companies focus on solving potential ethical issues like accountability, fairness, privacy, safety, security, transparency and trust. All three case companies devised ethical guideline relating to fairness, transparency and trust. To capture different views on critical ethical issues, two of the case companies recommend using multi-disciplinary development teams consisting of experts like data scientists, designers, and sociologists. The results of this thesis suggest that companies can utilise the ethical guidelines of AI solutions to identify and prioritise the essential quality requirements of AI solutions