Does Quality Influence the Required Capacity of Business Information Management? The Case of Agriculture

In order to be able to optimise the usage of IS/IT services within an organization, the Business Information Management (BIM) role is pivotal. Many organizations struggle to determine what the required number of staff for the BIM department should be. In earlier research a preliminary model to determine the required capacity of BIM was designed. In this paper the model is validated within a specific industry: the agricultural sector. From a sense that quality of IS/IT services might influence the relationship between the determining factors in the model and the required capacity for BIM, also research is conducted to analyse if quality of IS/IT service interferes with determining the required BIM capacity. As part of a literature study seven aspects of quality were found which provide a good overview of the quality of the IS/IT service within an organization. These seven aspects were included in a survey which had 37 respondents from organizations within the agricultural sector. Data was collected about a set of eight determining factors that were taken from prior research and about quality of IS/IT. Based upon these data correlations were tested. The first connections were tested by using Pearson’s product-moment correlation coefficient which showed a significant correlation between several factors and the number of FTEs. After which a multiple regression-analysis was done to check if the number of FTEs for the executive processes would increase or decrease when the number of business processes increases or decreases. The quality of the IS/IT service doesn’t seem to influence the relationship between the several factors and the number of FTEs investigated in this research. This research shows that the quality of IS/IT service has no influence on determining the required capacity of a BIM department

Determining the Required Capacity of Business Information Management: Towards a Concise Instrument

Many organizations are striving for a structural and professional approach toward business information management (BIM). With help of BiSL they can shape the BIM responsibilities and processes, but they struggle with the required capacity for the BIM activities necessary for their particular situation. Therefore, research was started to develop an instrument to determine the required capacity of the BIM activities in an organization. In this paper the construction of the instrument will be described. A limited set of factors may be of importance to identify the required capacity of BIM activities that is needed: complexity of business processes, complexity of IS/IT, dynamics of the organization and its environment and the size of the organization are examples of relevant factors. However, factors that appear relevant may prove useless in practice due to the fact that organizations have no data on these indicators available. Furthermore, the relationships between the present and desired quality of information and information services are part of the instrument. The instrument was tested in practice to determine the usefulness. The results show that the instrument has the potential to determine the required capacity of BIM

What are the factors that influence the success of the BiSL framework for business information management?

Business Information Services Library (BiSL) is a framework from Dutch origin that helps organizations shape Business Information Management. BiSL is not used by every organization in the Netherlands. The question is what moves organizations to start using BiSL or what motives do they have to reject the use of BiSL. The research question in this study is: What motivates the adoption (or non-adoption) of the BiSL Framework? To answer this question 18 interviews were conducted. The interviews have been held with organizations that do use BiSL and with organizations that do not use BiSL. Among the interviews were three interviews with experts in the field of BiSL. The conclusion of our research is that organizational readiness is the deciding factor to Van Outvorst et al.use BiSL. To apply BiSL successfully there is a need of support, knowledge and a certain level of organizational maturity in business information management

Dynamics-based impact identification method for composite structures

Modern aircraft design acknowledges integrity, superior strength-to-weight ratio, and safety as critical priorities, which has led to the development of monitoring and maintenance techniques for composite structures. However, composite materials pose the risk of introducing damage that cannot be identified visually, namely barely visible impact damage (BVID). If not detected and repaired in time, damage to the structure can compromise its performance and integrity. Therefore, structural health monitoring (SHM) is an emerging technology that can enhance BVID detection in composite structures. Using ultrasonic waves to locate and characterize an impacted region in composite materials is one of the most promising SHM techniques for quantitative impact identification. Although previous studies use guided waves to assess impact in composite materials, few have addressed inservice inspection, and still, few have attempted to quantify impact severity information from the measured signals to full-scale engineering structures. The present investigation addresses these challenges by developing measures of impact identification based on features extracted from ultrasonic waves. Hence, the research aims to develop a monitoring method using combined sensing technologies to gather data from the system and then translate it into predictions about its health. It requires research across multiple disciplines, such as signal processing, data analysis, damage modeling, dynamics, and sensing technologies. This work proposes to combine the building block (B.B.) approach and the design of experiments (DOE) for guided wave-based structural health monitoring (GWSHM). This practical and systematic approach minimizes the number of tests needed for realistic and large structures by building data from lower-level to higher-level systems. Researchers have conducted lowenergy impact tests on a square (1x1m) aluminum and composite plates in the current research phase. Several sensor signal features and the effect of signal response for various energy levels have been examined using the impact response data generated from three different sensor types: Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG), Piezoelectric Patch Transducer (PZT), and Optical Acoustic Emission (OptimAE). Therefore, the present work compares the performance and reliability of FBGs and OptimAE sensors using PZT-based sensors as a reference. In addition, this study describes a systematic experimental approach and analyzes preliminary results over a range of energy levels below the damage onset. The results showed that the distance from sensors and the directivity effect (for FBG) affect the sensitivity and signal strength. Furthermore, considering the requirements of SHM sensors, the performance also varies with different sensing technologies. In the next stage, SHM analysis will address the effect of structural elements with added complexity (i.e., stiffeners and variable thickness)