E-Customs control procedures redesign methodology: model-based Application

Growing trade volumes and increased security, health and financial control regulations require customs administrations to change their working practices worldwide. An existing dilemma however, is that governments would like on the one hand to reduce the administrative burden for businesses and on the other hand to increase security and control. The traditional single side power-posing by customs administrations to trade parties is not appropriate any more. The European Union is now realizing the potential benefits of establishing Customs-and-Business partnerships. To achieve such collaboration, current customs procedures need to be redesigned, and ICT is a key enabler for the redesign. In this paper we present a model-based approach using two levels of abstraction – value and process levels – to support domain experts in investigating how customs procedures can be redesigned while coping with business and administrative challenges. Especially, we focus on a methodological application of control principles from accounting and auditing literature, to redesign procedures. We discuss our “AAD”† approach and its application in an e- Customs procedure redesign case study

Rethinking EU Trade Procedures – The Beer Living Lab

The EU is currently reshaping its customs legislation and practices. Main pillars in the new vision are an intensive use of IT (Customs becomes e-Customs), partnerships between Customs administrations and businesses, and collaboration between national Customs administrations. These concepts should support coping with the dilemma of on the one hand increasing security, safety, financial and health requirements, and on the other hand the need to reduce administrative burden, to keep the EU a competitive economic zone. Two main concepts in coping with this challenge are Single Window and Authorized Economic Operators. The EU is investigating how to transform these abstract concepts into a tangible reality. The Beer Living Lab is an EU-funded pilot research project that implements this EU vision in the beer industry. In this paper we provide results from the Beer Living Lab and we introduce the fourth step in e3-control, a theoretical framework for procedure redesign. We discuss the application of e3- control in the Beer Living Lab, where modeling is a means to facilitate innovation and network transformation

eCustoms Innovation and Transformation: A Research Approach

A major challenge for European governments is solving the dilemma of increasing security and control of international trade, while at the same time reducing the administrative overhead carried by commercial and public administration organisations. Electronic Customs, the transformation of paper-based trade documents to electronic ones, and the corresponding redesign of customs procedures, seems to be very promising approach to deal with this dilemma. However, while ICT is widely perceived as a key component of a solution, we argue in this paper that the complexity of the redesign of these electronic documents and procedures for international trade is far more problematic than traditional business process and network innovations. We identify key challenges facing the development and introduction of innovative eCustoms solutions and we outline conceptual and methodological approaches to address these challenges. In such a way, we outline a research approach for eCustoms innovation and transformation

Music Rights Clearance Business Analysis and Delivery

Semantic Web Services can be seen as remote Problem Solving Methods offered via the Web through platform and language independent interfaces. They can be seamlessly integrated to achieve more complex functionality by composing pre-existing software components. Despite technical advantages surrounding Semantic Web Services technologies, their perspective overlooks the commercial aspects of services in the real – non-IT – world, and is therefore incomplete and limiting. Real-world services – business activities such as insurances, medical services, ADSL etc – have nowadays an increasing social and economic importance. Important trends are the bundling of services and a growing customer-need orientation. Thus, there is a need for a computational background for describing real-world services and applying knowledge-based technologies for reasoning about them: configuring composite services and analysing them from a business perspective. We have developed ontologies and software tools to fill this gap, and applied them to industrial case studies. We present here a case study from the music industry, going from the analysis of a new business scenario to the development of an application called Xena that coordinates IT infrastructures in order to provide a profitable service that reflects major business principles. As opposed to currently proposed solutions in the Semantic Web Services community, our system is an automated implementation of a real-world service where important business decisions can be traced back

40 years of multi-faceted change in the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration

A major challenge for European governments is solving the dilemma of increasing security and control of international trade, while at the same time reducing the administrative overhead carried by commercial and public administration organizations. Process redesign and use of ICT are widely perceived as key components of a solution. Thus, we see that many ICT-driven change efforts have taken and continue to take place under the header of eGovernment. These changes are not always successful, however, and not yet wellunderstood. In this article, we provide an interpretive longitudinal account of the strategic IS efforts at the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration (DTCA). Instead of focusing on IS that supports the government itself or the relations between governments and citizens, we seek to contribute to the sparse literature that is specifically directed at the interactions between EU initiatives in eGovernment, national governments, and businesses. By providing a narrative of DTCA that spans multiple levels and multiple time frames, we seek to explore eGovernment developments from the 1960s to now. We discuss our findings by examining the changes at DTCA building primarily on Van de Ven & Poole's (1995) work "Explaining development and change in organizations" in which they describe four "motors of change" – life cycle, teleology, dialectics, and evolution – and we combine it with some of Pettigrew's ideas on change. This combinatory theory offers a way of thinking about the occurrence of change in a dynamic context, both for researchers and practitioners. A key implication is that the theory is not only useful retrospectively, but can also be used to identify "running motors" and as such, awareness of the complexities and dynamics of these change processes can provide an impetus for managers and action researchers to identify challenges and opportunities to influence change. Keywords: eGovernment, eCustoms, regulation, organizational change, longitudinal, historical, interpretiv

Stakeholders and Their Concerns In Software Architectures

An architect who writes an architecture document is not the only one involved in the process of building the architecture. And many more people are involved in the process of information systems development, which can be seen as a chain of activities, one of which is building the architecture. All these people are influenced by the decisions the architect makes when writing his architecture document. As a result, all these people must be taken into consideration when writing the architecture document. This paper is about identifying these people and the type of their involvement in the process