Developing an inter-enterprise alignment maturity model: research challenges and solutions

Business-IT alignment is pervasive today, as organizations strive to achieve competitive advantage. Like in other areas, e.g., software development, maintenance and IT services, there are maturity models to assess such alignment. Those models, however, do not specifically address the aspects needed for achieving alignment between business and IT in inter-enterprise settings. In this paper, we present the challenges we face in the development of an inter-enterprise alignment maturity model, as well as the current solutions to counter these problems

Peripatetic electronic teachers in higher education

This paper explores the idea of information and communications technology providing a medium enabling higher education teachers to act as freelance agents. The notion of a ‘Peripatetic Electronic Teacher’ (PET) is introduced to encapsulate this idea. PETs would exist as multiple telepresences (pedagogical, professional, managerial and commercial) in PET‐worlds; global networked environments which support advanced multimedia features. The central defining rationale of a pedagogical presence is described in detail and some implications for the adoption of the PET‐world paradigm are discussed. The ideas described in this paper were developed by the author during a recently completed Short‐Term British Telecom Research Fellowship, based at the BT Adastral Park

Validation of agent-based models

The automatic collection of customer transaction data, through either online shops or reward cards, is producing very large databases which contain much information about consumer behaviour. What kind of information and how exploitable it is are very relevant questions. Two approaches are being used. Either one concentrates on individual behaviour and tries to apply various theoretical frameworks and results of the literature on discrete choice, or one uses clustering algorithms in order to determine several classes of customers. The very existence of such categories is likely to be the result of social interactions and influences. The literature on discrete choice cannot easily be generalised to networked interactions, which are known to be widely present in various contexts. Another approach is to use toy models of individual behaviour and concentrate on global, aggregate quantities such as market share or demand fluctuations. This raises the question of how to validate such kind of model, hence the request of Unilever. The latter should also be understood with respect to the contribution of ESGI 2004, where a very sophisticated agent-based model of consumer behaviour was proposed (but not much studied)

Formalization of the partnering structure for networked businesses

Rapidly changing market demands and increasing competitive pressure cause many businesses implement changes to the way they conduct business. One of these changes is the decision to collaborate with other businesses, forming what we call a 'networked business'. Networked businesses are formed by different organizations working together to reach a common goal. For the participating organizations in a networked business to be able to promptly react to their customers' needs, they must set up as cornerstone a well-defined collaborative partnering structure. In this report we discuss the partnering structure of networked businesses and present a framework for its formalization. Using a case study, we illustrate that existing approaches for value modeling, roles specification, and responsibilities definition can be used successfully if employed in a unifying way to address this structure concept

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications