An Ontology for Product-Service Systems

Industries are transforming their business strategy from a product-centric to a more service-centric nature by bundling products and services into integrated solutions to enhance the relationship between their customers. Since Product- Service Systems design research is currently at a rudimentary stage, the development of a robust ontology for this area would be helpful. The advantages of a standardized ontology are that it could help researchers and practitioners to communicate their views without ambiguity and thus encourage the conception and implementation of useful methods and tools. In this paper, an initial structure of a PSS ontology from the design perspective is proposed and evaluated

Past, present and future of information and knowledge sharing in the construction industry: Towards semantic service-based e-construction

The paper reviews product data technology initiatives in the construction sector and provides a synthesis of related ICT industry needs. A comparison between (a) the data centric characteristics of Product Data Technology (PDT) and (b) ontology with a focus on semantics, is given, highlighting the pros and cons of each approach. The paper advocates the migration from data-centric application integration to ontology-based business process support, and proposes inter-enterprise collaboration architectures and frameworks based on semantic services, underpinned by ontology-based knowledge structures. The paper discusses the main reasons behind the low industry take up of product data technology, and proposes a preliminary roadmap for the wide industry diffusion of the proposed approach. In this respect, the paper stresses the value of adopting alliance-based modes of operation

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

A new approach in Business Process Management

The new wave of BPM (Business Process Management) is not Business Process Reenginering, enterprise application integration, workflow management or another packaged application – it's the synthesis and extension of all these technologies and techniques into a unified whole. This unified whole becomes a new foundation upon which the enterprise is built, an enterprise more in tune with the true nature of business processes and their management. In a competitive economy, where margins continue to narrow and the pressure to respond to market shifts is greater than ever, the business rules approach is a great paradigm shift toward the process-managed enterprise and a significant enabler for reinventing ERP and the whole enterprise applications system.integration, business rules (BR), Business Process Management (BPM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), information technology (IT)

Improving Public Administration Performance through Electronic Government Applications

Electronic Government applications have been the focus of hundreds of local and national government administrations all over the world during the past decade. The emphasis of most of these applications lies in their effort to improve the experience of the user in interacting with public administration services and to minimise waiting times in completing transactions public services and citizens. Early applications were relying mainly on the speed and simplicity of submitting a request by the user while most of the work beyond the web based interaction was carried out as in the era before the introduction of the web based applications. The benefits from such endeavours have been short lived as citizens are looking for real enhancements in they way public administration serves their needs and responds to their requests. The authors argue that for e-government applications to succeed changes would have to be effected in the way public administration organizes itself and how it utilizes information management systems to respond to user / citizen requirements including and addressing the goals of all stakeholders involved. Currently the number of successful applications to that end is quite low when compared to the projects implemented so far. The authors propose steps that would maintain the focus of future implementations in doing so