A Method for Information Systems Development According to SOA

While service-oriented architecture (SOA) is gaining momentum in research and industry, we believe the field of methods for designing information systems according to SOA still leaves room for improvement. Nevertheless, the implementation of SOA design principles demands a methodical approach. All existing methods have shortcomings of some kind, but also propose some useful concepts. In this paper, the SOA method (SOAM) is presented. It is based on an understanding of the useful concepts from existing methods and puts them together with new ideas that address the key shortcomings. It has been tested in practice at Vattenfall Europe, one of the largest European energy and heat providers and three other companies. The evaluation has shown that SOAM is well-defined, supports the design of information systems according to the SOA design principles and can be applied in practice

Proposal for Components of Method Design Theories - Increasing the Utility of Method Design Artefacts

Gregor and Jones have proposed components for design theories, building on theory concepts from behavioural sciences and prior publications. Their design theory structure addresses IT artefacts in general, not specific to any type, such as constructs, models, methods or instantiations. Their work is an important contribution to the academic discussion of design theories. The authors are building on this and believe that specialised design theory structures for different types of artefacts further increases utility, usability and acceptance of the components for both academia and practise. They have analysed each of the components published by Gregor and Jones and proposed refinements specific to method design artefacts wherever applicable. For each component, they derive evaluation criteria and present examples of method publications fulfilling the criteria. They argue that by presenting method design theories according to this structure the contribution of method design artefacts to the body of knowledge will increase

Improving Software Flexibility for Business Process Changes

In times of continuous change, companies need to adjust their business processes to gain sustainable competitive advantage. Resulting changes in the company’s IT currently require the involvement of developers from departments that are mostly not aligned with the business. These changes often result in high transaction and labor costs. The article presents a platform-based method to adjust business processes with the aim of increasing both efficiency and flexibility compared to current approaches. The core of our work is an evaluation against traditional component-based software development using a sound simulation model. Three real-world scenarios of business process change show that – despite a slight increase in transaction costs – our suggested method decreases labor costs while increasing operational flexibility

Call for Papers Issue 5/2011: The Future of Telecommunications

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Comparison of Four Approaches to Age and Gender Recognition for Telephone Applications

This paper presents a comparative study of four different ap-proaches to automatic age and gender classification using seven classes on a telephony speech task and also compares the results with Human performance on the same data. The automatic approaches compared are based on (1) a parallel phone recognizer, derived from an automatic language identification system; (2) a system using dy-namic Bayesian networks to combine several prosodic features; (3) a system based solely on linear prediction analysis; and (4) Gaus-sian mixture models based on MFCCs for separate recognition of age and gender. On average, the parallel phone recognizer performs as well as Human listeners do, while loosing performance on short utterances. The system based on prosodic features however shows very little dependence on the length of the utterance. Index Terms — speech processing, acoustic signal analysis, speaker classification, age, gender 1

Tool Support for Design Science Research—Towards a Software Ecosystem: A Report from a DESRIST 2017 Workshop

The information systems (IS) field contains a rich body of knowledge on approaches, methods, and frameworks that supports researchers in conducting design science research (DSR). It also contains some consensus about the key elements of DSR projects—such as problem identification, design, implementation, evaluation, and abstraction of design knowledge. Still, we lack any commonly accepted tools that address the needs of DSR scholars who seek to structure, manage, and present their projects. Indeed, DSR endeavors, which are often complex and multi-faceted in nature and involve various stakeholders (e.g., researchers, developers, practitioners, and others), require the support that such tools provide. Thus, to investigate the tools that DSR scholars actually need to effectively and efficiently perform their work, we conducted an open workshop with DSR scholars at the 2017 DESRIST conference in Karlsruhe, Germany, to debate 1) the general requirement categories of DSR tool support and 2) the more specific requirements. This paper reports on the results from this workshop. Specifically, we identify nine categories of requirements that fall into the three broad phases (pre-design, design, and post design) and that contribute to a software ecosystem for supporting DSR endeavors

New School of IT: Der aktuelle Spielstand

Das Aufkommen von netzzentrischen Lösungen, verbunden mit Mobilität, mehr Rechenleistung und zunehmender Datenmenge, hat eine Reihe von Entwicklungen zur Folge, die die Rolle von IT-Organisationen dauerhaft verändern. In [1] haben wir eine New School of IT beschrieben, die erste Antworten auf die Herausforderungen an IT-Organisationen bietet. Zehn Jahre nach der ersten Formulierung des Begriffes sind durch Cloud Native Computing oder künstliche Intelligenz bereits konkrete Meilensteine in der New School of IT erreicht, es bleiben aber auch eine Reihe von offenen Herausforderungen an Methodenkompetenz und Ausbildung. Wir fassen im Folgenden den Stand der Dinge zusammen

Strategies for Creating, Generalising and Transferring Design Science Knowledge – A Methodological Discussion and Case Analysis

Design Science Research has been well accepted as part ofInformation Systems Research. The discussion about the researchprocess and the structure of design theories has been going on forsome time. While research has been done on the relation betweendesign theories and other types of theories, not much has beensaid about how design knowledge can be re-used. Otherdisciplines refer to such re-use as “generalisation” and “transfer”.We define a three-level separation of design abstraction (short-,mid-, and long-range) and show how knowledge re-use strategiesoperate between and within them, as well as how they relate togeneralisation and transfer. Each strategy is supported by a casefrom an existing publication, showing that the types of designtheories and the research strategies can be found in practice. Weargue that these research strategies can provide guidelines toresearchers and reviewers for planning, performing and evaluationDesign Science Research