Situational Enterprise Services

The ability to rapidly find potential business partners as well as rapidly set up a collaborative business process is desirable in the face of market turbulence. Collaborative business processes are increasingly dependent on the integration of business information systems. Traditional linking of business processes has a large ad hoc character. Implementing situational enterprise services in an appropriate way will deliver the business more flexibility, adaptability and agility. Service-oriented architectures (SOA) are rapidly becoming the dominant computing paradigm. It is now being embraced by organizations everywhere as the key to business agility. Web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX on the other hand provide good user interactions for successful service discovery, selection, adaptation, invocation and service construction. They also balance automatic integration of services and human interactions, disconnecting content from presentation in the delivery of the service. Another Web technology, such as semantic Web, makes automatic service discovery, mediation and composition possible. Integrating SOA, Web 2.0 Technologies and Semantic Web into a service-oriented virtual enterprise connects business processes in a much more horizontal fashion. To be able run these services consistently across the enterprise, an enterprise infrastructure that provides enterprise architecture and security foundation is necessary. The world is constantly changing. So does the business environment. An agile enterprise needs to be able to quickly and cost-effectively change how it does business and who it does business with. Knowing, adapting to diffident situations is an important aspect of today’s business environment. The changes in an operating environment can happen implicitly and explicitly. The changes can be caused by different factors in the application domain. Changes can also happen for the purpose of organizing information in a better way. Changes can be further made according to the users' needs such as incorporating additional functionalities. Handling and managing diffident situations of service-oriented enterprises are important aspects of business environment. In the chapter, we will investigate how to apply new Web technologies to develop, deploy and executing enterprise services

A UK Perspective at the Future of Manufacturing

For the UK manufacturing industry, the internet economy and Industry 4.0 is seen more a chance than a threat. Facing a couple of challenges in the old industrial world, Industry 4.0 gives the UK in the new “game” the opportunity to establish an innovative manufacturing sector made up of smaller and new players. Whereas new digital services and new digital competition for the established industries come up, British industries could be among the new players: The changes in the existing business models and their extension towards “servitization”, where production and services will come together, is the chance for British manufacturing, which Government and industry is keen to take it

Supporting Collaborative Business Processes: a BPaaS Approach.

Collaborative business processes are increasingly driven by business flexibility and agility. Cloud-based business process management services have provided small medium enterprises (SMEs) with a pay-per-use manner for their daily business needs, i.e. some simple business process applications, e.g. salesforce provides cloud-based CRM to boost SMEs' sales. This raises the question how cloud-based business process management solutions can support the fast pace of change of business collaborations among business partners? For example, collaborative processes for managing industrial incidents are short term, low frequency processes. This paper proposes an architecture meta-model, which is used to design the concrete architecture and to further analyse the performance of the proposed solution. A real world case of collaborative processes for incident and maintenance notifi cations is used to explain the design and implementation of the cloud-based solution for supporting collaborative business processes. Service improvement of the new solution and computing power costs are analysed accordingly

A requirements framework for novice web developers

This paper introduces a requirements framework intended to guide novice web developers. The work is based on two earlier studies which found that the requirements phase is not well served in web development methods and that there is no agreed set of requirements from practitioners as to what they would like to see in a web development method. The requirements framework outlined here is developed by novice practitioners and later evaluated by them as flexible, simple and easy to use

A Generic Adaptive Model in Adaptive Hypermedia

For adaptive hypermedia there is a strong model in form of the AHAM model and the AHA! system. This model, based on the Dexter Model, however is limited to application in hypermedia systems. In this paper we propose a new Generic Adaptivity Model. This statemachine based model can be used as the basis for adaptation in all kinds of applications

Needs of Service Identification for Service-Oriented Business Process Management

Since the trend of adopting SOA into enterprise applications, the needs for definition and identification of services have been recognized. There is a growing body of research carried out on the identification of different types of services. Identifying right granularity services is important: if the service is of large size, it goes against the reusability principle of SOA, whereas if the service is of small size, then it causes unnecessary computing power for implementing any business functions. Without a formal (semi)- automatic approach to identify services, it is difficult in migrating existing systems into service-oriented systems. This paper explores the need for service identification for service-oriented business process management systems. The current approaches, techniques and methods of service identification are reviewed, and limitations of the each approach is analysed. New requirements and techniques are demonstrated in creating improved dynamic services with consideration for interoperability, modularity, reusability within information environment

Simplifying Big Data Analytics System with A Reference Architecture

The internet and pervasive technology like the Internet of Things (i.e. sensors and smart devices) have exponentially increased the scale of data collection and availability. This big data not only challenges the structure of existing enterprise analytics systems but also offer new opportunities to create new knowledge and competitive advantage. Businesses have been exploiting these opportunities by implementing and operating big data analytics capabilities. Social network companies such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Video streaming company like Netflix have implemented big data analytics and subsequently published related literatures. However, these use cases did not provide a simplified and coherent big data analytics reference architecture as well as currently, there still remains limited reference architecture of big data analytics. This paper aims to simplify big data analytics by providing a reference architecture based on existing four use cases and subsequently verified the reference architecture with Amazon and Google analytics services

A reference architecture for big data systems

Over dozens of years, applying new IT technologies into organizations has always been a big concern for business. Big data certainly is a new concept exciting business. To be able to access more data and empower to analysis big data requires new big data platforms. However, there still remains limited reference architecture for big data systems. In this paper, based on existing reference architecture of big data systems, we propose new high level abstract reference architecture and related reference architecture notations, that better express the overall architecture. The new reference architecture is verified using one existing case and an additional new use case

Service identification requirements for enterprise information systems

Identifying services is one of the most important step in developing service-oriented business systems. Existing service identification methods still have some shortcomings, e.g. unrepeatable approach, inapplicable to all enterprise information systems and unadaptable to business factor change. Some approaches focus on fixed cases or certain types of organizations neglecting the change of involvement and operation of the enterprise systems, which have limited value to apply to a broad range of real-life business cases In this paper, we investigate requirements of service identification from different types of information systems, from single systems to collaborative systems, from closed systems to open systems. The research is important for providing a solid foundation for further identifying services for developing different service-oriented system

Implementing a Business Intelligence System for small and medium-sized enterprises

Over the years, Business Intelligence (BI) systems have become critically important to organizations due to the increasing fast-paced competition, the vast amount of daily generated data and the complexity of how to manage collected data. Business intelligence systems empower organizations to gain insights and to understand a clearer view of their vast data, business and customers, which help to make better decisions and hence produce better results and increase profit. BI refers to a collection of an organization’s resources such as tools, technologies, applications, systems and databases which enable organizations to manage insights of their business data, activities and performance in order to make better decision. However the majority of existing BI systems, target and support large organizations, and the small and medium-sized organizations (SMEs) are mostly overlooked due to lack of substantial finance. The paper elaborates the considerations for implementing BI systems for SMEs. Some new trends such as cloud BI solutions, open BI sources solutions are reviewed. The paper finally provides for the implementation of Business Intelligence system for a SME, the purpose and constraints of the system are detailed