Legacy Information Systems, Can They be Agile? A Framework for Assessing Agility

Information systems should contribute to enterprise effectiveness, and usually do so during the operational phase of their lifecycle. From the experience of practitioners, the duration of this lifecycle is often not predetermined, therefore resulting in information systems with a relatively long lifespan and information systems with a relatively short lifespan. An important aspect of application management, is managing the application lifecycle. In the experience of practitioners, deciding the moment to end the lifecycle, refactor it, or leave it be are often not thoroughly researched. The decision to move on to a newer information system is therefore not always sufficiently justified and relies more on a gut feeling. What if the older information system is still able to perform and comply with the changes the enterprise desires? Prolonging the length of an application lifecycle could result in cost reduction in an application portfolio. In this paper, we aim to create a method of assessment of the ability to change of a legacy information system and identifying potential areas in which a legacy information system would need improvement in order to increase this ability to change

The Impact of IT Management Processes on Enterprise Agility

In dynamic business environments, the ability to adapt is highly important for organizations in order to best their competition. This is necessary because throughout the years of doing business, organizations have experienced but one constant factor: change. The concept of enterprise agility is designed to counter this phenomenon. In this regard, IT is perceived to play a vital role in enterprise agility, most often viewed as an enabler. However, IT can be an inhibitor of enterprise agility as well because of its potentially restricting nature, structural thinking, bureaucracy, rigor, etc. This especially becomes apparent in information systems (IS) that have been operational in organizations for several years. This research aims at discovering processes of IT management that empower or obstruct enterprise agility. We identify processes on the one hand and aspects of enterprise agility on the other and relate them to each other using propositions. We conclude with the identified contribution of IT management to enterprise agility, propose directions for optimization as well as offer suggestions for additional research

Legal Assistance and Police Interrogation: (Problematic Aspects of) Dutch Criminal Procedure in Relation to European Union and the Council of Europe

__Abstract__ This paper discusses the rise of a fundamental issue in Dutch criminal proceedings. The presence of a lawyer prior to and during police interrogations has for a long time been a matter open for debate in the Netherlands. Allowing legal assistance during and prior to police interrogations has been researched on several occasions in the previous century and the beginning of this century. In the Netherlands, one of the most important reasons for not admitting legal assistance was and is founded in the confident reliance on the professionalism and integrity of police officers and justice officials in dealing with the interests of suspects. However, after the Salduz case (ECHR 27 November 2008, Appl. No. 36391/02, Salduz v. Turkey), the Dutch government was compelled to draft legal provisions in order to facilitate legal assistance during and prior to police interrogations. The initial drafts still contained a hesitant approach on admitting the lawyer to the actual interrogation. The EU-Directive of November 2013 (Pb EU 2013, L249) set out further reaching standards compelling the Dutch government to create new drafts. In a ruling of April 2014, the Dutch Supreme Court (ECLI:NL:2014:770) argued that the judgements of the ECtHR were too casuistic to derive an absolute right to have a lawyer present during police interrogation. However, they urged the legislator to draft legislation on this matter and warned that its judgement in this could be altered in future caused by legal developments. The Dutch legislator already proposed new draft legislation in February. In this paper it is examined whether the provisions of the new drafts meet the standards as set out in the EU-Directive as well as by the ECtHR

Technology: A Key to Solve VAT Fraud?

This article is a follow up on a previous article from the same authors. In that article the authors concluded that keeping the current system for intra EU trade between businesses and addressing VAT fraud by using technological solutions may be the best way forward. In this article the authors address potential technological solutions that can help to solve the issue of VAT fraud. The technical solutions that are addressed are: split payment, blockchain technology, real time reporting and SAF-T. All these solutions have or are being considered by some EU Member States or even the European Commissio

The Computational Complexity of Evolving Systems

Evolving systems are systems that change over time. Examples of evolving systems are computers with soft-and hardware upgrades and dynamic networks of computers that communicate with each other, but also colonies of cooperating organisms or cells within a single organism. In this research, several models are designed that represent evolving systems in a suitable fashion. The causes of the changes are not taken into account for these models. One of these models uses a sequence of objects to model an evolving system. The objects in a sequence represent snapshots of an evolving system, taken one after the other. The relationship between the amount of available time and memory and the efficiency with which computer systems perform their tasks has been well studied. The influence of changes in a system on their efficiency is unknown. In this research, the relationship between changes of an evolving computer system and the efficiency of the system is studied. A whole new theory is developed to formulate and better understand this relationship and related problems. The amount of change in a system is measured by determining the complexity of the individual components in a sequence that represents the evolving system. In theory, evolving systems possess "super-Turing" computational power, i.e., they are powerful enough to solve any problem. By imposing restrictions on the size of the changes, the theoretical power is reduced to a more realistic scale. The results proved in the thesis illustrate that many methods and techniques that are used to prove results in the classical complexity theory can be used, with the necessary modifications, to prove similar results in the complexity theory of evolving systems