Towards a flexible service integration through separation of business rules

Driven by dynamic market demands, enterprises are continuously exploring collaborations with others to add value to their services and seize new market opportunities. Achieving enterprise collaboration is facilitated by Enterprise Application Integration and Business-to-Business approaches that employ architectural paradigms like Service Oriented Architecture and incorporate technological advancements in networking and computing. However, flexibility remains a major challenge related to enterprise collaboration. How can changes in demands and opportunities be reflected in collaboration solutions with minimum time and effort and with maximum reuse of existing applications? This paper proposes an approach towards a more flexible integration of enterprise applications in the context of service mediation. We achieve this by combining goal-based, model-driven and serviceoriented approaches. In particular, we pay special attention to the separation of business rules from the business process of the integration solution. Specifying the requirements as goal models, we separate those parts which are more likely to evolve over time in terms of business rules. These business rules are then made executable by exposing them as Web services and incorporating them into the design of the business process.\ud Thus, should the business rules change, the business process remains unaffected. Finally, this paper also provides an evaluation of the flexibility of our solution in relation to the current work in business process flexibility research

The impact of enterprise application integration on information system lifecycles

Information systems (IS) have become the organisational fabric for intra-and inter-organisational collaboration in business. As a result, there is mounting pressure from customers and suppliers for a direct move away from disparate systems operating in parallel towards a more common shared architecture. In part, this has been achieved through the emergence of new technology that is being packaged into a portfolio of technologies known as enterprise application integration (EAI). Its emergence however, is presenting investment decision-makers charged with the evaluation of IS with an interesting challenge. The integration of IS in-line with the needs of the business is extending their identity and lifecycle, making it difficult to evaluate the full impact of the system as it has no definitive start and/or end. Indeed, the argument presented in this paper is that traditional life cycle models are changing as a result of technologies that support their integration with other systems. In this paper, the need for a better understanding of EAI and its impact on IS lifecycles are discussed and a classification framework proposed.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Grant Ref: (GR/R08025) and Australian Research Council (DP0344682)

Towards technological rules for designing innovation networks: a dynamic capabilities view.

Inter-organizational innovation networks provide opportunities to exploit complementary resources that reside beyond the boundary of the firm. The shifting locus of innovation and value creation away from the “sole firm as innovator” poses important questions about the nature of these resources and the capabilities needed to leverage them for competitive advantage. The purpose of this paper is to describe research into producing design-oriented knowledge, for configuring inter-organizational networks as a means of accessing such resources for innovation

Improving a tutor’s feedback assessment tool: transforming Open Mentor following two recent deployments

Evidence shows the vital role that the quality of feedback plays on students’ performance and on the overall increase of learning opportunities that good feedback creates for students. Based on this evidence, the Open University developed Open Mentor (OM), a system to support tutors enhance their feedback practice. Open Mentor Technology transfer (OMTetra), a JISC funded project, took OM and deployed it in two Higher Education institutions with the purpose of evaluating the process of transferability and continue the development of the tools available to tutors within the system. This paper describes the original OM and the enhancements identified after use and evaluations from tutors of the institutions involved

Revisiting objective tests: A case study in integration at honours level

This paper examines the background to computer‐assisted assessment and shows how certain misconceptions or ‘myths’ have arisen around its use. It then discusses an actual implementation of computerized multiple‐choice question (MCQ) tests, addressing both the main theoretical issues, and the practicalities of the design and administration process. It confirms that honours‐level learning can be appropriately assessed using summative computer‐based objective tests, not just in the eyes of the adopting academic, but also in the eyes of the students. Care should, however, be taken to adopt a flexible implementation that is responsive to unforeseen problems

A Documentary Analysis of Nursing Degree Curricula

This twelve month study was undertaken by a research team based at University College Suffolk and aimed to compare the learning outcomes and content of pre and post registration nursing degrees. Curriculum doccuments from 50 pre and post registration degree programmes from 32 instutions were catalogued and coded for descriptive characteristics. A subset of 15 doccuments was subject to in-depth analysis. This subset was selected to reflect the characteristics of the main sample of doccuments. The Research Highlights outline the context in which this study was undertaken and presents summaries of both the descriptive , and categorical data and the findings of the indepth analysis. Finally, the major implications of these findings are summarised

Product customisation: an empirical study of competitive advantage and repeat business

Empirical evidence is presented from 24 UK based manufacturing companies, all offering a degree of product customisation, with most having a significant Engineer-to-order (ETO) element. The majority of the companies are SME’s, with the associated limited managerial resources. The evidence addresses the issues of competitive advantage, including a detailed investigation of the strategic importance of repeat business. It contrasts its results with those generally found in the literature and concludes that there are significant differences in the order winners/ qualifiers. In particular, the evidence suggests that customisation is an order qualifier rather than an order winner; as it is increasingly unlikely that competitors will only offer a more standard product. Thus alternative order winners are needed and often price becomes the most significant factor, rather than being a mere order qualifier. Four different types of repeat business are then identified and the strategic importance of repeat business is discussed. It is indicated that for some ETO companies, repeat business is perceived to be an important method to reduce costs and achieve business stability. However, a number of the other companies studied saw repeat business as infeasible and hence need to find other ways to reduce costs and improve company performance measures, such as lead times. Future research to extend this work into a longitudinal study is proposed. Issues to explore are how the importance of repeat business has changed, and how the companies have evolved in terms of the degree of customisation offered versus that offered by their competitors