Dimensions of Partial Completion of Activities in Workflow Management

Process and workflow management have become well accepted methods for helping to increase efficiency in companies. However the experience has been that highly structured workflows need to be more flexible to meet the requirements of dynamic businesses today. Recently Lin and Orlowska [2005] have addressed this topic by introducing partially complete-able activities. In contrast to classic workflows the activities do not show an all- or-nothing behaviour (they are fully completed or not) but can be completed on different levels. The decision as to whether or not the process can be continued is then the responsibility of the process owner. In our paper we extend this concept by the introduction of fuzzy and probably complete-able activities. Moreover we show that a process memory can further increase the flexibility of the workflow

A Comparative Analysis of MOOC - Australia’s Position in the International Education Market

Tertiary education is one of the most important industries in Australia and a crucial source of income for its universities. Therefore, any new form of tertiary education that may have impact on Australian universities should be closely watched for implications on their business models. In the past decade, MOOC-Massive Open Online Courses have emerged with the promise to offer world class education accessible anywhere and anytime for free or at very reasonable costs. MOOC not only provide opportunities for lifelong learning, they are also designed to enrich, compliment and even (partly) substitute classic tertiary education. Hence, it is of crucial importance how and where Australia takes its stand in this rapidly evolving market. In this paper, Australia’s international position as a provider of MOOC is analysed and compared, in particular to Germany and the US

Analysing Questionnaires on IT Project Status - Complexity Reduction by the Application of Rough Concepts

Since its introduction half a century ago IT has become one of the most important infrastructure components of virtually any organisation. An important key area of qualitative research in information systems is interviewing decision makers. These interviews aim to disclose hidden structures within IT projects and usage to increase their efficiency and effectiveness. In this context, the definition and analysis of critical success factors for information technology projects are well established areas for qualitative research in information systems. The analysis of critical success factors is of special importance since the IT projects still suffer from high failures rates. Therefore it is an important research goal within information systems to better understand IT projects to improve their success rates. The interviews of critical success factors provide a good data basis to disclose hidden structures in this domain. Besides only quantitatively interpreting such interviews the analysis can be enriched by some qualitative methods to support quantitative analysis and may disclose formerly hidden structures within the data. Therefore the objective of the paper is to enrich the analysis of IT projects and evaluate rough sets based quantitative analysis techniques for symbolic data which are characteristic in the domain of critical success factors analysis

Current trends in product lifecycle management

Efficient and effective Product Lifecycle Management, as an evolution and enhancement of Product Data Management, is of strategic importance for virtually any company. Hence, it is crucial for companies to analyze and evaluate recent trends in information technology (IT) and their implications on Product Lifecycle Management. In this paper, the results of an interdisciplinary study conducted by Siemens AG, a major international technologies firm, and two universities are presented. The study identifies four current trends in IT and then evaluates their potential implications on Product Lifecycle Management. Finally, the IT trends are ranked according to their short and medium term effects on Product Lifecycle Management.<br /

Specifying OCL Constraints on Process Instantiations

Due to the variety of concerns affecting software development in large organisations, processes have to be adapted to project specific needs to be effectively applicable in individual projects. We describe a project aiming to provide tool support for this individualised instantiation of reference processes, based on an OCL-based specification of instantiation operations. The aim is not only to execute instantiation decisions made by humans but to automatically ensure correctness of the resulting process, potentially resulting in followup actions being executed or suggested

Complementary Organizational Mechanisms: A Case Study on Information Technology Business Value

The complex relationships between organizational practices have been the focus of information technology business value (ITBV) research in recent years. There appears to be a discernible trend toward a more nuanced view in which the effects of information technology (IT), various organizational practices and their relationships are systematically investigated. There is also emerging evidence of recent focus in organizational factors and an increasing shift towards “complementarities” in which organizational performance is linked to combining organizational practices in synergistic ways. The objective of this paper is to investigate important issues in ITBV research by examining complementarities of various resources within an organization. The goal of this paper is to establish a framework for analyzing different configurations of complementarities. The Configuration and Interestingness framework (CIF) proposed in this paper provides evidence on how important the understanding of those complex relationship structures amongst organizational practices is to maximizing business value. This framework serves as a preliminary attempt to reveal different possible classes of complementarities structures