Interconnecting Governments, Businesses and Citizens – A Comparison of Two Digital Infrastructures

Part 2: Services and InteroperabilityInternational audiencePublic and private organizations in various areas are setting up digital Information Infrastructures (IIs) for interconnecting government, businesses and citizens. IIs can create value by sharing and integrating data of multiple actors. This can be the basis for value added services and especially collaborations of public and private partners can make IIs thrive. Easier access to integrated services and products (jointly) offered by government and businesses may stimulate transparency and innovations. IIs are under development in many domains, including for open data and international trade. However, there are notable differences in the design, characteristics and implementation of the IIs. The objective of this paper is to compare two diverse IIs in order to obtain a better understanding of common and differing elements in the IIs and their impact. Among the differences are the roles of government, businesses and users, in driving, developing and exploitation of the IIs

The Challenges of Creativity in Software Organizations

Part 1: Creating ValueInternational audienceManaging creativity has proven to be one of the most important drivers in software development and use. The continuous changing market environment drives companies like Google, SAS Institute and LEGO to focus on creativity as an increasing necessity when competing through sustained innovations. However, creativity in the information systems (IS) environment is a challenge for most organizations that is primarily caused by not knowing how to strategize creative processes in relation to IS strategies, thus, causing companies to act ad hoc in their creative endeavors. In this paper, we address the organizational challenges of creativity in software organizations. Grounded in a previous literature review and a rigorous selection process, we identify and present a model of seven important factors for creativity in software organizations. From these factors, we identify 21 challenges that software organizations experience when embarking on creative endeavors and transfer them into a comprehensive framework. Using an interpretive research study, we further study the framework by analyzing how the challenges are integrated in 27 software organizations. Practitioners can use this study to gain a deeper understanding of creativity in their own business while researchers can use the framework to gain insight while conducting interpretive field studies of managing creativity

Designing Security Requirements Models through Planning

The quest for designing secure and trusted software has led to refined Software Engineering methodologies that rely on tools to support the design process. Automated reasoning mechanisms for requirements and software verification are by now a well-accepted part of the design process, and model driven architectures support the automation of the refinement process. We claim that we can further push the envelope towards the automatic exploration and selection among design alternatives and show that this is concretely possible for Secure Tropos, a requirements engineering methodology that addresses security and trust concerns. In Secure Tropos, a design consists of a network of actors (agents, positions or roles) with delegation/permission dependencies among them. Accordingly, the generation of design alternatives can be accomplished by a planner which is given as input a set of actors and goals and generates alternative multiagent plans to fulfill all given goals.We validate our claim with a case study using a state-of-the-art planner

Facilitators and Inhibitors in the Assimilation of Complex Information Systems

Part 8: Poster PapersInternational audienceComplex information systems may be viewed as systems that cut across functional boundaries within an organization and even organizational boundaries. These include enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, supply chain management (SCM) systems, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, product lifecycle management (PLM) systems and business-to-business (B2B) systems. Such systems pose significant knowledge barriers for assimilation, require coordination with internal and external actors, and entail reengineering of both cross-functional and inter-organizational business processes. Moreover, organizations progress through various stages of assimilation such as initiation, experimentation, implementation, and routinization in assimilating complex systems.An often-overlooked consideration when dealing with such systems is that organizations may not completely assimilate them and even abandon them midway through the assimilation process. Such stories are well-documented in the popular press (e.g., failed projects, cancelled contracts) but generally do not provide insightful explanations of the accompanying assimilation process. However, there is not much evidence in prior empirical literature as to how assimilation processes came together in real-world organizations or the differences in the assimilation processes between organizations that succeeded or failed when dealing with complex information systems.Conceptualizing assimilation as a process by which organizations move from the initiation through the routinization stages, this research strives to uncover facilitators that enable an organization to move to the next stage and inhibitors that may force organizations to stay in the current stage or completely abandon the assimilation process. Employing a multiple case-study approach involving both successful and failed projects of different complex systems with data provided by key informants, this research aims to uncover usable knowledge for researchers and practitioners

Impact of diversity on open source software

This paper examines the relationship between open source project diversity and success. The sample of open source projects includes all mature projects driven by the Eclipse Foundation as of February 2008. Three types of project diversity were used: i) organizational - measured by number of committers per organization per project, ii) contribution - measured by the number of commits made per organization per project, and iii) technical - measured by the number of commits made per given software file type. Success was measured by means of i) economic metrics, including the number of corporate adoptions and the number of jobs postings including the project name, and ii) development metrics, including the project popularity and the growth of the intensity of members' activity. The paper makes two main contributions. First, we contribute to the literature on open source software and diversity. Second, we introduce economic success metrics to the empirical assessment of open source software project success