The Further Education Maturity Model: Development and Implementation of a Maturity Model for the Selection of Further Education Offerings in the Field of IT Management and IT Consulting

The permanently changing information and communication technology (IT) makes it inevitable for IT professionals to keep up-to-date. However, the market for further education presents itself as being diversified and opaque at the same time. Especially for young professionals, the selection of the “right” training offering is difficult. This entails the necessity to develop methods and models to create the further education market in a more comprehensible and transparent way. This article describes the development of the Further Education Maturity Model (FEMM). It enables users to assign IT training offerings to certain maturity levels and consequently to make decisions about the quality of the further education offering. A proven procedure is used to develop the FEMM, implement it into an online tool, and evaluate it. Results show the appropriateness of the proposed model

Multi-flow Optimization via Horizontal Message Queue Partitioning

Integration flows are increasingly used to specify and execute data-intensive integration tasks between heterogeneous systems and applications. There are many different application areas such as near real-time ETL and data synchronization between operational systems. For the reasons of an increasing amount of data, highly distributed IT infrastructures, as well as high requirements for up-to-dateness of analytical query results and data consistency, many instances of integration flows are executed over time. Due to this high load, the performance of the central integration platform is crucial for an IT infrastructure. With the aim of throughput maximization, we propose the concept of multi-flow optimization (MFO). In this approach, messages are collected during a waiting time and executed in batches to optimize sequences of plan instances of a single integration flow. We introduce a horizontal (value-based) partitioning approach for message batch creation and show how to compute the optimal waiting time. This approach significantly reduces the total execution time of a message sequence and hence, it maximizes the throughput, while accepting moderate latency time

Teaching the Chief Information Officers: An Assessment of the Interrelations within their Skill Set

Due to the high volatility in the field of information technology (IT) and the rapid technological advancements, all IT professionals constantly have to be able to evaluate trends and put them into context. This is especially true for those who fulfill the role of a company’s chief information officer (CIO). But if there is a gap between the required set of skills and those needed, training becomes necessary. In order to plan training programs, one has to know the skill set of current CIOs. We investigate this by conducting workshops with 21 CIOs from a diverse set of companies. The purpose of this paper is to better understand the skill items of CIOs and how they interrelate

Invisible Deployment of Integration Processes

Due to the changing scope of data management towards the management of heterogeneous and distributed systems and applications, integration processes gain in importance. This is particularly true for those processes used as abstractions of workflow-based integration tasks; these are widely applied in practice. In such scenarios, a typical IT infrastructure comprises multiple integration systems with overlapping functionalities. The major problems in this area are high development effort, low portability and inefficiency. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce the vision of invisible deployment that addresses the virtualization of multiple, heterogeneous, physical integration systems into a single logical integration system. This vision comprises several challenging issues in the fields of deployment aspects as well as runtime aspects. Here, we describe those challenges, discuss possible solutions and present a detailed system architecture for that approach. As a result, the development effort can be reduced and the portability as well as the performance can be improved significantly

Cost-Based Vectorization of Instance-Based Integration Processes

The inefficiency of integration processes - as an abstraction of workflow-based integration tasks - is often reasoned by low resource utilization and significant waiting times for external systems. With the aim to overcome these problems, we proposed the concept of process vectorization. There, instance-based integration processes are transparently executed with the pipes-and-filters execution model. Here, the term vectorization is used in the sense of processing a sequence (vector) of messages by one standing process. Although it has been shown that process vectorization achieves a significant throughput improvement, this concept has two major drawbacks. First, the theoretical performance of a vectorized integration process mainly depends on the performance of the most cost-intensive operator. Second, the practical performance strongly depends on the number of available threads. In this paper, we present an advanced optimization approach that addresses the mentioned problems. Therefore, we generalize the vectorization problem and explain how to vectorize process plans in a cost-based manner. Due to the exponential complexity, we provide a heuristic computation approach and formally analyze its optimality. In conclusion of our evaluation, the message throughput can be significantly increased compared to both the instance-based execution as well as the rule-based process vectorization

Model-Driven Development of Complex and Data-Intensive Integration Processes

Due to the changing scope of data management from centrally stored data towards the management of distributed and heterogeneous systems, the integration takes place on different levels. The lack of standards for information integration as well as application integration resulted in a large number of different integration models and proprietary solutions. With the aim of a high degree of portability and the reduction of development efforts, the model-driven development—following the Model-Driven Architecture (MDA)—is advantageous in this context as well. Hence, in the GCIP project (Generation of Complex Integration Processes), we focus on the model-driven generation and optimization of integration tasks using a process-based approach. In this paper, we contribute detailed generation aspects and finally discuss open issues and further challenges

The concept of danzo : "Sandalwood images" in Japanese Buddhist sculpture of the 8th to 14th centuries.

This thesis examines Buddhist images known as danzo (sandalwood sculptures) in Japan from the 8th to 14th centuries in terms of the types of material used to make them, their distinctive form (as determined by iconography and style), and the religious functions for which they were used. All three of these fundamental defining elements are considered essential for a comprehensive understanding of danzo as religious icons, but for the clarification of crucial issues the first two chapters examine each of these elements separately. Chapters One and Two consider issues concerning definitions of materials, form according to different iconographic types and period styles, the expression of shogon (sublime adornment) and religious functions. Chapter Three provides a classification of the various types of dangan (portable sandalwood shrines). Chapters Four to Six examine the various iconographic types classified according to Nyorai, Kannon, and other Bosatsu and tutelary deities. This dissertation proposes a new definition of the form of danzo based on the distinction between the type-style and period-style, in which the expression of the aesthetic-religious concept of shogon is argued to be of central significance and danzo are considered as objects of shogon par excellence. Furthermore, textual evidence is presented to suggest that the two most common religious functions of danzo were as icons in ceremonies and for personal devotion for high-ranking monks, aristocrats, and members of the imperial family, which reflects the special sanctity ascribed to these images. The aim of this dissertation is to arrive at a more inclusive understanding of danzo as religious icons with distinctive material, formal and functional characteristics that define them as a unique group of religious icons within Japanese Buddhist sculpture