Beyond enterprise resource planning projects: innovative strategies for competitive advantage

ABSTRACT A rapidly changing business environment and legacy IT problems has resulted in many organisations implementing standard package solutions. This 'common systems' approach establishes a common IT and business process infrastructure within organisations and its increasing dominance raises several important strategic issues. These are to what extent do common systems impose common business processes and management systems on competing firms, and what is the source of competitive advantage if the majority of firms employ almost identical information systems and business processes? A theoretical framework based on research into legacy systems and earlier IT strategy literature is used to analyse three case studies in the manufacturing, chemical and IT industries. It is shown that the organisations are treating common systems as the core of their organisations' abilities to manage business transactions. To achieve competitive advantage they are clothing these common systems with information systems designed to capture information about competitors, customers and suppliers, and to provide a basis for sharing knowledge within the organisation and ultimately with economic partners. The importance of these approaches to other organisations and industries is analysed and an attempt is made at outlining the strategic options open to firms beyond the implementation of common business systems

A Component-based Software Infrastructure for Ubiquitous Computing

(c) IEEE - The original publication is available at http://www.ieee.orgInternational audienceMultiplication of mobile devices and generalized use of wireless networks imply changes on the design and execution of distributed software applications targeting ubiquitous computing. Many strong requirements have to be addressed: heterogeneity and limited resources of wireless networks and mobile devices, networked communications between distributed applications, dynamic discovery and automatic deployment on mobile devices. In this paper, we present a component-based software infrastructure to design, discover, deploy, and execute ubiquitous contextual services, i.e. distributed applications providing services to mobile end-users but only available from a particular place. These ubiquitous contextual services are designed as assemblies of distributed software components. These assemblies are dynamically discovered according to end-users' physical location and device capabilities. Then, appropriate assemblies are automatically deployed on users' devices. We have implemented this approach (the software infrastructure and a ubiquitous application example) on top of the OMG CORBA Component Model and the OpenCCM open source platform

AGILE SOLUTIONS & DATA ANALITICS FOR LOGISTICS PROVIDERS BASED ON SIMULATION

The current advances are enabling the development of new solutions in data analytics and decision making in many fields; it is quite interesting to analyze the impact of this approach on logistics providers; this paper proposes examples of these challenges in this context as well as an example of a simulation based solution able to interconnect the different information sources and to fuse the data in order to analyze the logistics processes and support decisions. The proposed solution is based on web services and web application that are adopting the MSaaS concept (Modeling & Simulation as a Service) by using stochastic models

A Generative Programming Framework for Adaptive Middleware

Historically, many distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) systems were developed manually from scratch, leading to stove-piped solutions that while correct in both functional and QoS properties were very expensive to develop and difficult to maintain and extend. First-generation middleware technologies such as CORBA 2.x [1], XML [2], and SOAP [3], served to shield application developers from low-level platform details, thus raising the level of abstraction at which distributed systems are developed and supporting reuse of infrastructure to amortize development costs over the lifetime of a system. However, interdependencies between services and object interfaces resulting from these programming models significantly limited the degree of reuse that could be achieved in practice. Component middleware technologies such as the CORBA Component Model (CCM) [4], J2EE [5], and .NET [6], were developed to address many of these limitations. In CCM, for example, standardization of component containers, ports, and homes offered a framework within which reuse of server as well as client infrastructure was facilitated. Component-oriented middleware has addressed a wide range of application domains, but unfortunately for DRE systems, the focus of these technologies has been primarily on functional and not QoS properties. For example, although CCM supports configuration of functional component attributes like their interconnections, key QoS attributes for DRE systems, such as execution times and invocation rates are inadequately configurable through conventional CCM [7]. Research on QoS-aware component models such as the CIAO project [8, 7] is showing significant promise in making QoS configuration a first-class part of the component pro-gramming model, thus further reducing accidental complex-ities of building DRE systems. However, it is important to note a fundamental difference between configuration of functional and QoS properties even within such a unified compo-nent model: the dominant decomposition of functional properties is essentially object-oriented, while the dominant decomposition of QoS properties is essentially aspect-oriented. That is, functional properties tend to be stable with respect to component boundaries and configuration lifecycle stages, while QoS properties tend to cross-cut component boundaries, and may be revised as more information is known in later configuration stages [7]. In this paper, we describe how a focus on aspect frameworks for configuring QoS properties both com-plements and extends QoS-aware component models. This paper makes three main contributions to the state of the art in DRE systems middleware. First, it describes a simple but representative problem for configuring QoS aspects that cross-cut both architectural layers and system lifecycle boundaries, which motivates our focus on aspect frameworks. Second, it provides a formalization of that problem using first order logic, which both guides the design of aspect configuration infrastructure, and offers a way to connect these techniques with model-integrated computing [9] approaches to further reduce the programming burden on DRE system developers. Third, it describes alternative mechanisms to ensure correct configuration of the aspects involved, and notes the phases of the DRE system lifecycle at which each such configuration mechanism is most appropriate

Successful Mobile Application Development: Towards a Taxonomy of Domain-Specific Process Models and Methodologies

Mobile applications and mobile application development issues receive an increasing attention for practitioners and academics. The development of mobile applications is connected with a number of domain-specific issues and challenges (e.g., fulfilment of customer requirements or the prevention of high development costs). Consequently, the decision of the most effective process model to develop a mobile application plays a crucial role for software and mobile application development teams. With the help of a structured taxonomy-building methodology, we contribute to the extant literature by creating and presenting a taxonomy for process models and methodologies in software engineering and the mobile application development domain. The taxonomy enrich the existing knowledge base and can help mobile application developers to choose the most suitable process model or methodology. Based on our examination, our results indicate new directions for mobile application research and implications for mobile application development

Meaningful Use of Electronic Health Records for Physician Collaboration: A Patient Centered Health Care Perspective

EHRs (Electronic Health Records), can contribute greatly to improving care and managing the rising costs of healthcare. The use and the integration of EHRs (Electronic Health Records) in supporting collaboration to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare remains a challenge. It appears that the physicians are at the center of this bottleneck. As healthcare is provided by interdisciplinary teams of clinicians and collaboration and coordination are key to success. Literature suggests reasons for the limited use relate to policy, financial and usability considerations, but it does not provide an understanding of reasons for physicians\u27 limited interaction and adaptation of EHR. This paper investigates how meaningful use of EHRs by physicians enable patient centered healthcare to be achieved. Following an analysis of qualitative data, collected in a case study at a hospital using interviews, this research shows how a collaborative technology architecture can enable the reduction in the costs of healthcare and improvements in the quality of care by enabling more patient centered health care

A Component-based Software Infrastructure for Ubiquitous Computing

(c) IEEE - The original publication is available at http://www.ieee.orgInternational audienceMultiplication of mobile devices and generalized use of wireless networks imply changes on the design and execution of distributed software applications targeting ubiquitous computing. Many strong requirements have to be addressed: heterogeneity and limited resources of wireless networks and mobile devices, networked communications between distributed applications, dynamic discovery and automatic deployment on mobile devices. In this paper, we present a component-based software infrastructure to design, discover, deploy, and execute ubiquitous contextual services, i.e. distributed applications providing services to mobile end-users but only available from a particular place. These ubiquitous contextual services are designed as assemblies of distributed software components. These assemblies are dynamically discovered according to end-users' physical location and device capabilities. Then, appropriate assemblies are automatically deployed on users' devices. We have implemented this approach (the software infrastructure and a ubiquitous application example) on top of the OMG CORBA Component Model and the OpenCCM open source platform