Focus Issue on Legacy Information Systems and Business Process Change:Modelling of Organisational Change Using the EKD Framework

Little attention has been given in the development of a systematic approach for elaborating and using enterprise knowledge to manage organisational change. In this paper we present a framework based on the confluence of two technologies: enterprise knowledge modelling and process guidance. The framework comprises of a set of modelling components for describing intentional enterprise knowledge, and a number of strategies for reasoning with enterprise knowledge during organisational change projects. Dynamic selection of appropriate strategies is guided by the use of a methodology roadmap. The approach is demonstrated using examples from an industrial application of change resulting from de-regulation in the electricity supply sector

Facilitating Requirements Negotiating: Modeling Alternatives and Arguments

Co-development aims to ensure the alignment of business processes and support technical systems. During co-development stakeholders need an early understanding of the potential impact of different requirement choices on the enterprise. An early impact analysis understanding is more likely to actively engage stakeholders, highlight strategic options and deliver useful and sustainable systems. However, when multiple stakeholders are involved with differing backgrounds, experiences and frequently competing goals it is inevitable that conflicts occur during the early phases when requirements tend to be opaque. This paper puts forward a conceptual framework for co-development to support collaborative reasoning and decision-making through the modelling of requirements alternatives and arguments, promoting critical reflection, negotiation and discussion

Facilitating Requirements Negotiation: Modelling Alternatives and Arguments

Co-development aims to ensure the alignment of business processes and support technical systems. During co-development stakeholders need an early understanding of the potential impact of different requirement choices on the enterprise. An early impact analysis understanding is more likely to actively engage stakeholders, highlight strategic options and deliver useful and sustainable systems. However, when multiple stakeholders are involved with differing backgrounds, experiences and frequently competing goals it is inevitable that conflicts occur during the early phases when requirements tend to be opaque. This paper puts forward a conceptual framework for co-development to support collaborative reasoning and decision-making through the modelling of requirements alternatives and arguments, promoting critical reflection, negotiation and discussion

Selected Topics on Advances in Capability-Oriented Information Systems Development: Editorial Introduction to Issue 10 of CSIMQ

Modern organizations need to be sustainable in the presence of dynamically changing business conditions, which require from Information Systems (IS) to address complex challenges for being able to support organizations acting in varying business conditions – changing customer demands, new legislations, new customers, and emerging alliances. From a technical perspective, the gap between business requirements and supporting IS is still present, mostly due to the fact that current IS development approaches operate with artifacts defined on a relatively low abstraction level. To go beyond the state of the art, IS development frameworks used by enterprises need to be structured for solving emerging problems, and enterprises need to have efficient methods for the use of these frameworks to deliver the right IS solutions just-in-time and just-enough. The notion of capability emerged in the beginning of the nineties in the context of competence-based management, military frameworks, and developing organization’s competitive advantage – linguistically, it means the ability or qualities necessary to do something.

Selected Topics on Business Informatics: Editorial Introduction to Issue 13 of CSIMQ

[EN] The objective of this thematic issue is to bring attention to actual research on Business Informatics, as being publicized on the 19th IEEE Conference on Business Informatics (CBI 2017), July 24-27, 2017, in Thessaloniki, Greece. The conference created a productive forum for researchers and practitioners from the fields that contribute to the construction, use and maintenance of information systems and the organisational context in which they are embedded. 10 papers were selected by the Program Chairs Prof. Peri Loucopoulos, Prof. Oscar Pastor and Prof. Jelena Zdravkovic to submit extended versions for a possible publication in Issue 13 of CSIMQ, as well as few external candidate submissions were considered.Zdravkovic, J.; Pastor López, O.; Loucopoulos, P. (2017). Selected Topics on Business Informatics: Editorial Introduction to Issue 13 of CSIMQ. Complex Systems Informatics and Modeling Quarterly. 13:I-II. doi:10.7250/csimq.2017-13.00SIII1

A Systematic Classification and Analysis of NFRs

The main agenda of Requirements Engineering (RE) is the development of tools, techniques and languages for the elicitation, specification, negotiation, and validation of software requirements. However, this development has traditionally been focused on functional requirements (FRs), rather than non-functional requirements (NFRs). Consequently, NFR approaches developed over the years have been fragmental and there is a lack of clear understanding of the positions of these approaches in the RE process. This paper provides a systematic classification and analysis of 89 NFR approaches

Visualisation for validation

Animation is a multiple graphical view of a process in action. Animation has been successfully employed in programming for designing, developing and debugging programs or monitoring their performance. This paper advocates that many benefits can be accrued from the use of visualisation techniques for the purpose of validating conceptual specifications during Requirements Engineering. To this end, the paper describes a visualisation system which makes use of three interrelated conceptual models and their metamodel represented uniformly in a repository and an animation algorithm which generates graphical views corresponding to the behaviour of an application domain as specified by the conceptual models