Improving cross-functional communication about product architecture

Product architecture decisions, such as product modularity, component commonality, and design reuse, are important for balancing costs, responsiveness, quality, and other important business objectives. Firms are challenged with complex tradeoffs between competing design priorities, face the need to facilitate communication between functional silos, and to learn from past experiences. In this paper we present a qualitative approach for systematically evaluating the product architecture of an existing product or product family, linking the original architecture objectives and actual experiences. The intended contribution of our research is to present a framework that brings together a diverse set of product architecture-related decisions that are relevant from a business point of view (and not from a technical point of view) and a set of business performance elements. This framework can be used in workshop that improves cross-functional communication about the product architecture of an existing product family, and this results in practical improvement actions for future architecture design projects. Initial experiences with this approach have been obtained in pilots with Philips domestic appliances & personal care, and Philips consumer electronics

Polish grid infrastructure for science and research

Structure, functionality, parameters and organization of the computing Grid in Poland is described, mainly from the perspective of high-energy particle physics community, currently its largest consumer and developer. It represents distributed Tier-2 in the worldwide Grid infrastructure. It also provides services and resources for data-intensive applications in other sciences.Comment: Proceeedings of IEEE Eurocon 2007, Warsaw, Poland, 9-12 Sep. 2007, p.44

The evolutionary origins of volition

It appears to be a straightforward implication of distributed cognition principles that there is no integrated executive control system (e.g. Brooks 1991, Clark 1997). If distributed cognition is taken as a credible paradigm for cognitive science this in turn presents a challenge to volition because the concept of volition assumes integrated information processing and action control. For instance the process of forming a goal should integrate information about the available action options. If the goal is acted upon these processes should control motor behavior. If there were no executive system then it would seem that processes of action selection and performance couldn’t be functionally integrated in the right way. The apparently centralized decision and action control processes of volition would be an illusion arising from the competitive and cooperative interaction of many relatively simple cognitive systems. Here I will make a case that this conclusion is not well-founded. Prima facie it is not clear that distributed organization can achieve coherent functional activity when there are many complex interacting systems, there is high potential for interference between systems, and there is a need for focus. Resolving conflict and providing focus are key reasons why executive systems have been proposed (Baddeley 1986, Norman and Shallice 1986, Posner and Raichle 1994). This chapter develops an extended theoretical argument based on this idea, according to which selective pressures operating in the evolution of cognition favor high order control organization with a ‘highest-order’ control system that performs executive functions

The Country-specific Organizational and Information Architecture of ERP Systems at Globalised Enterprises

The competition on the market forces companies to adapt to the changing environment. Most recently, the economic and financial crisis has been accelerating the alteration of both business and IT models of enterprises. The forces of globalization and internationalization motivate the restructuring of business processes and consequently IT processes. To depict the changes in a unified framework, we need the concept of Enterprise Architecture as a theoretical approach that deals with various tiers, aspects and views of business processes and different layers of application, software and hardware systems. The paper outlines a wide-range theoretical background for analyzing the re-engineering and re-organization of ERP systems at international or transnational companies in the middle-sized EU member states. The research carried out up to now has unravelled the typical structural changes, the models for internal business networks and their modification that reflect the centralization, decentralization and hybrid approaches. Based on the results obtained recently, a future research program has been drawn up to deepen our understanding of the trends within the world of ERP systems.Information System; ERP; Enterprise Resource Planning; Enterprise Architecture; Globalization; Centralization; Decentralization; Hybrid

Strategic perspectives on modularity

In this paper we argue that the debate on modularity has come to a point where a consensus is slowly emerging. However, we also contend that this consensus is clearly technology driven. In particular, no room is left for firm strategies. Typically, technology is considered as an exogenous variable to which firms have no choices but to adapt. Taking a slightly different perspective, our main objective is to offer a conceptual framework enabling to shed light on the role of corporate strategies in the process of modularization. From interviews with academic design engineers, we show that firms often consider product architecture as a critical variable to fit their strategic requirements. Based on design sciences, we build an original approach to product modularity. This approach, which leaves an important space for firms' strategic choices, proves also to seize a large part of the industrial reality of modularity. Our framework, which is a first step towards the consideration of strategies within the framework of modularity, gives an account for the diversity of industrial logics related to product modularization.product modularity ; corporate strategy ; technological determinism

Aligning a Service Provisioning Model of a Service-Oriented System with the ITIL v.3 Life Cycle

Bringing together the ICT and the business layer of a service-oriented system (SoS) remains a great challenge. Few papers tackle the management of SoS from the business and organizational point of view. One solution is to use the well-known ITIL v.3 framework. The latter enables to transform the organization into a service-oriented organizational which focuses on the value provided to the service customers. In this paper, we align the steps of the service provisioning model with the ITIL v.3 processes. The alignment proposed should help organizations and IT teams to integrate their ICT layer, represented by the SoS, and their business layer, represented by ITIL v.3. One main advantage of this combined use of ITIL and a SoS is the full service orientation of the company.Comment: This document is the technical work of a conference paper submitted to the International Conference on Exploring Service Science 1.5 (IESS 2015