Software Requirements: Update, Upgrade, Redesign : Towards a Theory of Requirements Change

Veer, G.C. van der [Promotor]Vliet, J.C. van [Promotor

Balancing Data, Time, and Expectations : the Complex Decision-Making Environment of Enrollment Management

As a growing entity within higher education organizational structures, enrollment managers (EMs) are primarily tasked with projecting, recruiting, and retaining the student population of their campuses. Enrollment managers are expected by institutional presidents as well as through industry standards to make data-driven planning decisions to reach their goals. However, despite the availability of data, some enrollment managers revealed a different reality from traditional, rational decision-making models. This study explored the factors that contributed to or influenced the decision-making process of six enrollment managers working in either two or four-year public colleges and universities located in the Midwestern United States. Interviews, including a word association exercise, documents and artifacts of tools utilized to make enrollment management decisions, and observational field notes were gathered and analyzed in this qualitative study grounded in constructionism. Using the theories of Bounded Rationality and the Garbage Can model as lenses, EMs in this study seemed to reflect a highly stressful, competitive, and complex environment where rational decision-making gave way to satisficing, or "good-enough" decisions as expectations to meet enrollment goals governed their motives. Decisions also appeared to be closely associated to the Garbage Can Model due to the ambiguity of goal setting and the mixture of participants, problems, and solutions where temporal proximity appeared to be more of a factor in terms of what received attention first. With multiple interruptions into an EM's daily schedule, the ability for the enrollment manager to maintain consistent efforts on desired projects and plans was severely hindered. Enrollment managers in this study shared through multiple examples that they did not feel they had enough time to accomplish their tasks as thoroughly as they preferred and often addressed their problems without full consideration of all possible options, much less the optimal one.Educatio

EJP-CONCERT. D3.7 Second joint roadmap for radiation protection research

EJP-CONCERT Work Package 3, Deliverable 3.7

A Reference Architecture for Service Lifecycle Management – Construction and Application to Designing and Analyzing IT Support

Service-orientation and the underlying concept of service-oriented architectures are a means to successfully address the need for flexibility and interoperability of software applications, which in turn leads to improved IT support of business processes. With a growing level of diffusion, sophistication and maturity, the number of services and interdependencies is gradually rising. This increasingly requires companies to implement a systematic management of services along their entire lifecycle. Service lifecycle management (SLM), i.e., the management of services from the initiating idea to their disposal, is becoming a crucial success factor. Not surprisingly, the academic and practice communities increasingly postulate comprehensive IT support for SLM to counteract the inherent complexity. The topic is still in its infancy, with no comprehensive models available that help evaluating and designing IT support in SLM. This thesis presents a reference architecture for SLM and applies it to the evaluation and designing of SLM IT support in companies. The artifact, which largely resulted from consortium research efforts, draws from an extensive analysis of existing SLM applications, case studies, focus group discussions, bilateral interviews and existing literature. Formal procedure models and a configuration terminology allow adapting and applying the reference architecture to a company’s individual setting. Corresponding usage examples prove its applicability and demonstrate the arising benefits within various SLM IT support design and evaluation tasks. A statistical analysis of the knowledge embodied within the reference data leads to novel, highly significant findings. For example, contemporary standard applications do not yet emphasize the lifecycle concept but rather tend to focus on small parts of the lifecycle, especially on service operation. This forces user companies either into a best-of-breed or a custom-development strategy if they are to implement integrated IT support for their SLM activities. SLM software vendors and internal software development units need to undergo a paradigm shift in order to better reflect the numerous interdependencies and increasing intertwining within services’ lifecycles. The SLM architecture is a first step towards achieving this goal.:Content Overview List of Figures....................................................................................... xi List of Tables ...................................................................................... xiv List of Abbreviations.......................................................................xviii 1 Introduction .................................................................................... 1 2 Foundations ................................................................................... 13 3 Architecture Structure and Strategy Layer .............................. 57 4 Process Layer ................................................................................ 75 5 Information Systems Layer ....................................................... 103 6 Architecture Application and Extension ................................. 137 7 Results, Evaluation and Outlook .............................................. 195 Appendix ..........................................................................................203 References .......................................................................................... 463 Curriculum Vitae.............................................................................. 498 Bibliographic Data............................................................................ 49

EJP-CONCERT. D2.13 Updating the SRAs of MELODI, ALLIANCE, NERIS, EURADOS and EURAMED

EJP-CONCERT Work Package 2, Deliverable 2.13