Financiële informatiesystemen (Deel 3)

Financiële informatiesystemen kennen een buitenkant (de functionaliteit) en een binnenkant (de architectuur). In de architectuur van informatiesystemen wordt onderscheid gemaakt tussen architectuurcomponenten voor verantwoordelijkheden, de opbouw uit subsystemen, samenwerkingregels voor subsystemen en de technische infrastructuur. Voor het onderscheiden van de verschillende subsystemen worden onder meer gebruikt het congruentiebeginsel, de functiescheiding en de taakverdeling in de informatische keten. In de architectuur van financiële informatiesystemen moet aandacht worden besteed aan controletechnische functiescheiding binnen het geheel van informatiesystemen, aparte opslag van wet- en regelgeving, scheiding van programmatuur en gegevens, en de toelevering van informatie voor beslissingen via twee wegen. Bij de ontwikkeling van informatiesystemen kunnen organisaties in een verouderingsfuik terechtkomen. Bij de uitvoering van informatiseringsprojecten moet er een evenwicht zijn tussen de verschillende betrokken partijen, te weten: de manager, de gebruiker, de automatiseerder en de systeembeheerder. Daarnaast moet men bij de automatiseerders onderscheid maken tussen informatie-architecten en bouwaannemers. Binnen de besturing van informatisering zijn verschillende vormen mogelijk op grond van een keuze voor top-down dan wel bottom-up ontwikkelingsprocessen en de keuze van de nagestreefde architectuur. Door de versnelling in de ontwikkeling van informatiesystemen die mogelijk is gemaakt door moderne technologie is in veel gevallen een aanzienlijke besparing op de informatiesysteemontwikkeling mogelijk

Theories about architecture and performance of multi-agent systems

Multi-agent systems are promising as models of organization because they are based on the idea that most work in human organizations is done based on intelligence, communication, cooperation, and massive parallel processing. They offer an alternative for system theories of organization, which are rather abstract of nature and do not pay attention to the agent level. In contrast, classical organization theories offer a rather rich source of inspiration for developing multi-agent models because of their focus on the agent level. This paper studies the plausibility of theoretical choices in the construction of multi-agent systems. Multi-agent systems have to be plausible from a philosophical, psychological, and organizational point of view. For each of these points of view, alternative theories exist. Philosophically, the organization can be seen from the viewpoints of realism and constructivism. Psychologically, several agent types can be distinguished. A main problem in the construction of psychologically plausible computer agents is the integration of response function systems with representational systems. Organizationally, we study aspects of the architecture of multi-agent systems, namely topology, system function decomposition, coordination and synchronization of agent processes, and distribution of knowledge and language characteristics among agents. For each of these aspects, several theoretical perspectives exist.

Relevance of ASR for the Automatic Generation of Keywords Suggestions for TV programs

Semantic access to multimedia content in audiovisual archives is to a large extent dependent on quantity and quality of the metadata, and particularly the content descriptions that are attached to the individual items. However, given the growing amount of materials that are being created on a daily basis and the digitization of existing analogue collections, the traditional manual annotation of collections puts heavy demands on resources, especially for large audiovisual archives. One way to address this challenge, is to introduce (semi) automatic annotation techniques for generating and/or enhancing metadata. The NWO funded CATCH-CHOICE project has investigated the extraction of keywords form textual resources related to the TV programs to be archived (context documents), in collaboration with the Dutch audiovisual archives, Sound and Vision. Besides the descriptions of the programs published by the broadcasters on their Websites, Automatic Speech Transcription (ASR) techniques from the CATCH-CHoral project, also provide textual resources that might be relevant for suggesting keywords. This paper investigates the suitability of ASR for generating such keywords, which we evaluate against manual annotations of the documents and against keywords automatically generated from context documents

The integration of stimulation and knowledge systems: a semiotic perspective

In a time of rapid change of technological possibilities and of internationalization, organizations need to experiment with these new possibilities, and to understand their potential for change and improvement. This potential for change and improvement can only be revealed by organizational thinking, thinking using existing and novel organization concepts. Organizational thinking can be stimulated and supported by formalization of existing theories, in order to analyze their range of expressiveness and logical structure (Gazendam, 1993), as well as by simulation models that show emergent organizational phenomena, especially related to interagent communication and knowledge in organizations

The concept of equilibrium in organization theory

Many organization theories consist of an interpretation frame and an idea about the ideal equilibrium state. This article explains how the equilibrium concept is used in four organization theories: the theories of Fayol, Mintzberg, Morgan, and Volberda. Equilibrium can be defined as balance, fit or requisite variety. Equilibrium is related to observables dependent on the definition of organization as work organization, formal organization or artifact organization. Equilibrium can be explicitly related to performance in the theory used, enabling cross-sectional research. The discussed theories can be mapped on a state space model in a way that clarifies the equilibrium concept, namely a mu-space (Fayol and Morgan), or a gamma-space (Mintzberg and Volberda)