Focus Issue on Legacy Information Systems and Business Process Change: Introduction

This editorial is an introduction to a focus issue on legacy information systems research that has been conducted under the aegis of the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) research programme into systems engineering and business process change. An overview of the legacy information systems problem is presented in terms of its scale, definition, and relevance to practicing managers and academics. It is shown that legacy systems represent a critical area of study in both software engineering and strategic information systems. The legacy system issues include the software methods and costs of maintaining and evolving existing systems, the technical problems of migrating complex legacy systems to new technology, and the difficulties of designing and implementing novel business processes in the context of existing structures, strategies and systems. In addition to the problems associated with legacy systems, the strategic opportunities of exploiting legacy systems are also outlined. Six related papers, which together cover the identification of the problem, planning and modelling of change, and the implementation of new systems and business processes, are described

Seeking the Goal in the Process, the Process for the Goal: Organizational Learning in a Public Sector Change Project

This paper describes how a combination of process modelling and goal modelling techniques has been used to facilitate organizational learning. The case study comes from the public sector in the UK. The modelling techniques have helped users to rationalise about the existing processes and then to design how they would like the process to work. The paper describes how the users have been able to confront the complex issues involved. The experience suggests that the combination of the modelling techniques is important to the learning experience of the users involved

Defining user perception of distributed multimedia quality

This article presents the results of a study that explored the human side of the multimedia experience. We propose a model that assesses quality variation from three distinct levels: the network, the media and the content levels; and from two views: the technical and the user perspective. By facilitating parameter variation at each of the quality levels and from each of the perspectives, we were able to examine their impact on user quality perception. Results show that a significant reduction in frame rate does not proportionally reduce the user's understanding of the presentation independent of technical parameters, that multimedia content type significantly impacts user information assimilation, user level of enjoyment, and user perception of quality, and that the device display type impacts user information assimilation and user perception of quality. Finally, to ensure the transfer of information, low-level abstraction (network-level) parameters, such as delay and jitter, should be adapted; to maintain the user's level of enjoyment, high-level abstraction quality parameters (content-level), such as the appropriate use of display screens, should be adapted

In search of a model for assessing CRM demand in the government context

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