IBM: Building a Smarter Planet (Interview with Sandy Dochan and Jeff Tieszen)

A candid discussion is presented with two IBM corporate managers regarding IBM‘s history and current involvement in sustainable global development. This frank interview travels from the roots of the organization through the changing leadership of today, explores dilemmas experienced and lessons learned, and identifies the challenges and successes of one of the largest multi-national corporate entities in the world marketplace

Situational Enterprise Services

The ability to rapidly find potential business partners as well as rapidly set up a collaborative business process is desirable in the face of market turbulence. Collaborative business processes are increasingly dependent on the integration of business information systems. Traditional linking of business processes has a large ad hoc character. Implementing situational enterprise services in an appropriate way will deliver the business more flexibility, adaptability and agility. Service-oriented architectures (SOA) are rapidly becoming the dominant computing paradigm. It is now being embraced by organizations everywhere as the key to business agility. Web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX on the other hand provide good user interactions for successful service discovery, selection, adaptation, invocation and service construction. They also balance automatic integration of services and human interactions, disconnecting content from presentation in the delivery of the service. Another Web technology, such as semantic Web, makes automatic service discovery, mediation and composition possible. Integrating SOA, Web 2.0 Technologies and Semantic Web into a service-oriented virtual enterprise connects business processes in a much more horizontal fashion. To be able run these services consistently across the enterprise, an enterprise infrastructure that provides enterprise architecture and security foundation is necessary. The world is constantly changing. So does the business environment. An agile enterprise needs to be able to quickly and cost-effectively change how it does business and who it does business with. Knowing, adapting to diffident situations is an important aspect of today’s business environment. The changes in an operating environment can happen implicitly and explicitly. The changes can be caused by different factors in the application domain. Changes can also happen for the purpose of organizing information in a better way. Changes can be further made according to the users' needs such as incorporating additional functionalities. Handling and managing diffident situations of service-oriented enterprises are important aspects of business environment. In the chapter, we will investigate how to apply new Web technologies to develop, deploy and executing enterprise services

A characteristics framework for Semantic Information Systems Standards

Semantic Information Systems (IS) Standards play a critical role in the development of the networked economy. While their importance is undoubted by all stakeholders—such as businesses, policy makers, researchers, developers—the current state of research leaves a number of questions unaddressed. Terminological confusion exists around the notions of “business semantics”, “business-to-business interoperability”, and “interoperability standards” amongst others. And, moreover, a comprehensive understanding about the characteristics of Semantic IS Standards is missing. The paper addresses this gap in literature by developing a characteristics framework for Semantic IS Standards. Two case studies are used to check the applicability of the framework in a “real-life” context. The framework lays the foundation for future research in an important field of the IS discipline and supports practitioners in their efforts to analyze, compare, and evaluate Semantic IS Standard

Proceedings of the African Diaspora Conference on Sustainable Development

The authors urge the Western donor organizations to facilitate and support the take up of such more sustainable models

Blogs, Wikis and Official Statistics: New Perspectives on the Use of Web 2.0 by Statistical Offices

This paper explains the roles that blogs, wikis and social networking play in the provision and dissemination of official statistics.Official statistics, internet, web

Productive Collaboration Through Corporate Portal

The objectives for this project are to study the concepts of productive collaboration through corporate portal and to develop a corporate portal that can be implemented easily in any organization. Several problems have been identified during the early research and finally have come up with three main issues occurred in traditional company to be solved by the system, which are time consuming practice, bureaucratic barrier and high operating cost. Manually done job has created these problems. How the system will solve the problems recognized will be explained. This project concerns on developing a corporate portal to enable productive collaboration between personnel working in an organization. System development will consists of five phases namely research and analysis, system requirements identification, functionalities identification, interface designing and coding phase. Result and discussion will show the output of the methodology used in completing the project. Finally, conclusion will summarized all the work been done and some recommendations for future expansion are also included inthe final chapter