Eco‐Holonic 4.0 Circular Business Model to Conceptualize Sustainable Value Chain Towards Digital Transition

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize a circular business model based on an Eco-Holonic Architecture, through the integration of circular economy and holonic principles. A conceptual model is developed to manage the complexity of integrating circular economy principles, digital transformation, and tools and frameworks for sustainability into business models. The proposed architecture is multilevel and multiscale in order to achieve the instantiation of the sustainable value chain in any territory. The architecture promotes the incorporation of circular economy and holonic principles into new circular business models. This integrated perspective of business model can support the design and upgrade of the manufacturing companies in their respective industrial sectors. The conceptual model proposed is based on activity theory that considers the interactions between technical and social systems and allows the mitigation of the metabolic rift that exists between natural and social metabolism. This study contributes to the existing literature on circular economy, circular business models and activity theory by considering holonic paradigm concerns, which have not been explored yet. This research also offers a unique holonic architecture of circular business model by considering different levels, relationships, dynamism and contextualization (territory) aspects

Cloud Computing Adoption: An SME Case Study

Cloud Computing is a paradigm shift in IT services delivery. This shift promises large gains in agility, efficiency and flexibility at a time when demands on data centres are growing exponentially. Despite the importance of Cloud Technology there is a dearth of research of Cloud Technology adoption in Small and Medium Enterprises. This paper seeks to address this challenge by conducting Case Study research based on Design Science and Engaged Scholarship on an SME who is in the process of developing a capability in this area. A framework called the IT-CMF was used. The framework enabled a measurement capability that will be an invaluable tool for the company as it ensures that risks are mitigated and the opportunities created by cloud computing are maximized in a planned and controlled way

Accessible user interface support for multi-device ubiquitous applications: architectural modifiability considerations

The market for personal computing devices is rapidly expanding from PC, to mobile, home entertainment systems, and even the automotive industry. When developing software targeting such ubiquitous devices, the balance between development costs and market coverage has turned out to be a challenging issue. With the rise of Web technology and the Internet of things, ubiquitous applications have become a reality. Nonetheless, the diversity of presentation and interaction modalities still drastically limit the number of targetable devices and the accessibility toward end users. This paper presents webinos, a multi-device application middleware platform founded on the Future Internet infrastructure. Hereto, the platform's architectural modifiability considerations are described and evaluated as a generic enabler for supporting applications, which are executed in ubiquitous computing environments

Understanding and Supporting Cloud Computing Adoption in Irish Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises

Cloud Computing adoption has experienced a considerable rate of growth since its emergence in 2006. In 2011, it had become the top technology priority for organizations worldwide and according to some leading industry reports the cloud computing market is estimated to reach $241 billion by 2020. Reasons for adoption are multi-fold, including for example the expected realisation of benefits pertaining to cost reduction, improved scalability, improved resource utilization, worker mobility and collaboration, and business continuity, among others. Research into the cloud computing adoption phenomenon has to date primarily focused on its impact on the larger, multinational enterprises. However, one key area of the market where cloud computing is expected to hold considerable promise is that of the Small and Medium Sized Enterprise (SME). SMEs are recognized as being inherently different from their larger enterprise counterparts, not least from a resource constraint perspective and for this reason, cloud computing is reported to offer significant benefits for SMEs through, for example, facilitating a reduction of the financial burden associated with new technology adoption. This paper reports findings from a recent study of Cloud Computing adoption among Irish SMEs. Despite its suggested importance, this study found that almost half of the respondents had not migrated any services or processes to the cloud environment. Further, with respect to those who had transitioned to the cloud, the data suggests that many of these SMEs did not rigorously assess their readiness for adopting cloud computing technology or did not adopt in-depth approaches for managing the cloud life cycle. These findings have important implications for the development/improvement of national strategies or policies to support the successful adoption of Cloud Computing technology among the SME market. This paper puts forward recommendations to support the SME cloud adoption journey

Introduction to Cloud Computing

This paper describes cloud computing, its main characteristics and the models that are currently used for both deployment and delivery. It examines the benefits and business issues with using the cloud, and how they can be addressed. It describes some of the early adapters of cloud computing, together with their experiences

Risk Management Considerations in Cloud Computing Adoption

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) plays a pivotal role in enabling organizational capability and productivity, and in initiating and facilitating innovation across all industry sectors. In recent years, cloud computing has emerged as a growing trend because it serves as an enabler of scalable, flexible and powerful computing. Consequently, each year significant global investment is made in migrating to the cloud environment. However, despite its growing popularity, several risks and security concerns surround the cloud computing model. Therefore, understanding an organization’s readiness and ability to mitigate associated risks is critical prior to embarking on the cloud computing journey. One approach to determining an organization’s ability to effectively migrate to the cloud is to determine the current maturity of both its cloud computing capabilities and its risk management capabilities. As such, the Cloud Computing tool and the Risk Management (RM) Critical Capability of the IT Capability Maturity Framework (IT-CMF) are proposed as effective maturity assessment instruments to enable organizations to establish future roadmaps that will improve their maturity with respect to their cloud computing readiness. Increasing the level of maturity improves organizational practices surrounding the identification and mitigation of risks/threats that pertain to the cloud environment

Factors That Affect The Adoption Of Cloud Computing For An Enterprise: A Case Study Of Cloud Adoption Within Intel Corporation

With so much hype about cloud computing, it’s easy to lose sight of why it’s such an important trend. Cloud Computing (CC) has the potential to offer enterprise IT management and their employee’s tremendous opportunities to solve critical challenges to better serve business. This research explores the current barriers to entries that are preventing wide scale enterprise adoption of Cloud services for critical business services and what is required to overcome such challenges and uses a case study approach to examine the actual adoption of Cloud Computing in Intel Corporation. The results of the study indicates the key factors that IT organisations and business leaders alike across an enterprise will need to consider when making Cloud Computing adoption more pervasive across their enterprise. Intel identified barriers to Cloud Adoption such as (i) the need to work closely with suppliers to commit to a timeline of when they will be in a position to support their applications in the cloud (ii) the presence of redundant configurations that are not fully proven in such highly virtual multi-tenant virtual environments that require load balanced highly available web front ends, and (iii) application security validation which is a big concern for enterprise IT organisation such as Intel in their private cloud, and (iv) having a complete understanding of application workloads and behaviours

Information Management and Big Data: a Framework for Success

More than ever before, information can create significant competitive advantage for organizations across all industry sectors. More data is available to organizations from multiple sources, from within the organization and from external sources. However, data may not always be available in the right format or when it is needed, or organizations may not have the skills to make best use of the large data volumes or various data formats available including unstructured data. Additionally new terminology is emerging. The term ‘Big Data’ is generally used to describe data with significant volume, velocity and variety. Irrespective of whether the business priority is to improve information management generally or to understand and make best use of ‘Big Data’, the key is to get right the basics of information management (such as strategy, policies, data quality and life cycle management), as well as the new and changing considerations of information security, privacy, controls and skills. Consequently, organizations need a mechanism to integrate all these aspects of data management in order to understand their current position, agree their target position, and develop a structured approach to achieve their goals

Service Provisioning: Insights in a digital business context

This position paper presents an overview of key insights in relation to the provisioning of IT services in the digital business context. These insights, as derived from relevant academic and practitioner literature and engagement with patrons and members of the Innovation Value Institute (IVI) global consortium, have informed the development of IVI’s IT-CMF Service Provisioning (SRP) Critical Capability (CC). Additionally, changes to the SRP CC improve the alignment of the capability with the ISO 20000 standard and the ITIL framework. They also reflect digital changes such as the virtualization, automation, and orchestration of IT infrastructure, and support the growing prevalence of Agile and DevOps approaches [1]