Business Process Assessment and Evaluation in Public Administrations using Activity Based Costing

Public administrations in Germany currently face challenges of cost reduction and modernization. Furthermore, Pan-European directives foster process harmonization and introduction of IT-supported and optimized processes. Hereby activity-based costing can be a useful instrument for process assessment and evaluation. Especially through the introduction of New Public Management and double-entry accounting Public Administrations in Germany now get the opportunity to use cost-centered accounting mechanisms to assess process performance and evaluate their activities in a holistic concept. Process Modeling can be a useful instrument to help the public administrations to structure their activities and capture information about them and thereby create a basis for activity-based costing. Therefore, the aim of this article is combining the domain specific process modeling method PICTURE and concept of activity-based costing for supporting Public Administrations in process assessment and evaluation

Ontological Evaluation of Conceptual Models

The objective of this paper is to present a philosophically sound approach to conceptual model evaluation. Accordingly, the ontological evaluation of conceptual models is enriched with a linguistic interpretivist perspective. The need for such an approach to evaluation is justified by the substantial economic importance of conceptual models. The quality of a conceptual model has a significant impact on other IT artefacts and, thus, on the costs of IT projects. However, little research has so far focused on their evaluation. In the course of this paper, we develop a framework which describes the current state of research and recognizes neglected research fields. With the aid of this framework we identify a notable shortcoming in conceptual model evaluation research, especially with respect to philosophically sound evaluation procedures. Based on these findings we address the following research questions: What are the shortcomings in current evaluation research, what are the merits of ‘ontological evaluation’ in this context, and how can the linguistic interpretivist approach help to form a comprehensive and philosophically sound conceptual model evaluation approach

Model Instantiation and Type Checking in UMLX

OMG's MDA initiative encourages the use of meta-model based transformations and re-usable specifications. We discuss how Graphical Transformation Notations such as UMLX reduce opportunities for errors in this programming domain