Educating the Next Generation of Global Information Managers

In this paper we examine the only T-Shaped,Atlantis-supported global dual degree program inInformation Management, the International Bachelor’sin Information Management. Atlantis promotes astudent-centered, transatlantic dimension to a highereducation and training in a wide range of academic andprofessional disciplines and funds collaborative efforts todevelop programs of study leading to joint or dualundergraduate or graduate degrees. The Atlantisprogram, jointly administered and funded by the U.S.Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement ofPostsecondary Education and the European Union’sEducation, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency,supports the level of international educational immersionrecommended here

Transformation of the Software Components and Web Services Market

The Service Oriented Computing paradigm, with as its main manifestation web-service technology, holds high promises, but exploits its full potential only when third-party web-services are traded in a service market to enable effective development of net-enhanced organizations and business networks. After the introduction of software source code libraries and the rise of Software Component Markets (SCMs) since 1999, Web Service Markets (WSM) represent the third wave in the trade of reusable software components. However, very little is known about the current status, structure and trends within the WSM. We present a longitudinal study of the structure of the SCM in 1999, 2000, and 2006 and a study of the WSM in 2006. The SCM has grown into a large, polluted, and un-transparent market of around 30,000 software components, offered by 28 producers, 28 catalogues, and 8 intermediaries. Our study shows that the WSM is emerging and in the early stage of development in 2006. SCM and WSM still have a long way to become transparent and effective mechanisms for organizations to obtain powerful, re-usable, and interoperable components for business networking

Splicing Community and Software Architecture Smells in Agile Teams: An industrial Study

Software engineering nowadays largely relies on agile methods to carry out software development. In often highly distributed organizations, agile teams can develop organisational and socio-technical issues loosely defined as community smells, which reflect sub-optimal organisational configurations that bear additional project cost, a phenomenon called social debt. In this paper we look into the co-occurrence of such nasty organisational phenomena—community smells—with software architecture smells—indicators that software architectures may exhibit sub-optimal modularization structures, with consequent additional cost. We conclude that community smells can serve as a guide to steer the qualities of software architectures within agile teams

REDESIGN AND PERFORMANCE OF SERVICE NETWORKS: A SYSTEMS DYNAMICS APPROACH

Continuous innovation of service networks is important for the success of modern service based economies. Over the last years, several analysis and design methods have emerged for engineering SOA applications. However, none of these methods can effectively cope with the increased level of complexity and dynamics that come with service network innovation. In addition, and even more problematic, existing methods fall largely short in assisting application designers and business managers in evaluating and predicting the impact of design decisions on the performance of the service-enabled applications and the end to end business processes at the network level. In this paper we use system dynamics simulation to predict the impact of design decisions for software services and human-operated services on service network performance in the automobile industry. We show that a single design decision at the software level influences 10 out of 12 performance indicators at the firm and the inter-organizational business network level

Blockchain-Oriented Services Computing in Action: Insights from a User Study

Blockchain architectures promise disruptive innovation but factually they pose many architectural restrictions to classical service-based applications and show considerable design, implementation, and operations overhead. Furthermore, the relation between such overheads and user benefits is not clear yet. To shed light on the aforementioned relations, a service-based blockchain architecture was designed and deployed as part of a field study in real-life experimentation. An observational approach was then performed to elaborate on the technology-acceptance of the service-based blockchain architecture in question. Evidence shows that the resulting architecture is, in principle, not different than other less complex equivalents; furthermore, the architectural limitations posed by the blockchain-oriented design demand a significant additional effort to be put onto even the simplest of functionalities. We conclude that further research shall be invested in clarifying further the design principles we learned as part of this study as well as any trade-offs posed by blockchain-oriented service design and operation

DataOps for Societal Intelligence: a Data Pipeline for Labor Market Skills Extraction and Matching

Big Data analytics supported by AI algorithms can support skills localization and retrieval in the context of a labor market intelligence problem. We formulate and solve this problem through specific DataOps models, blending data sources from administrative and technical partners in several countries into cooperation, creating shared knowledge to support policy and decision-making. We then focus on the critical task of skills extraction from resumes and vacancies featuring state-of-the-art machine learning models. We showcase preliminary results with applied machine learning on real data from the employment agencies of the Netherlands and the Flemish region in Belgium. The final goal is to match these skills to standard ontologies of skills, jobs and occupations