Complex Systems Informatics and Modeling Quarterly
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Developing ICT Services in a Low-Resource Development Context
Get PDFDespite an urgent need for social and technological innovation to improve wellbeing of people and communities in poor regions of the world, information and communications technology (ICT) service delivery has not yet been very successful in regions with low levels of literacy, poor infrastructures, and limited purchasing power. High rates of failure, reported in various studies, point at a frequent mismatch between deployed technologies and local needs and contexts. Still, no practical field-validated methodologies for ICT service innovation in low-resource development contexts have been proposed that offer adequate ways to meet local needs and contexts and assess sustainability before deployment. This article outlines a framework for development of ICT services in low-resource development contexts, covering the full lifecycle of ICT service innovation. This framework is based on extensive field research, and shows how a collaborative, adaptive, and iterative methodology can address a set of key sociotechnical concerns and issues widely encountered in developing and emerging countries
Automating the Provisioning and Configuration of Devices in the Internet of Things
Get PDFThe Internet of Things benefits from an increasing number of interconnected technical devices. This has led to the existence of so-called smart environments, which encompass one or more devices sensing, acting, and automatically performing different tasks to enable their self-organization. Smart environments are divided into two parts: the physical environment and its digital representation, oftentimes referred to as digital twin. However, the automated binding and monitoring of devices of smart environments are still major issues. In this article we present a method and system architecture to cope with these challenges by enabling (i) easy modeling of sensors, actuators, devices, and their attributes, (ii) dynamic device binding based on their type, (iii) the access to devices using different paradigms, and (iv) the monitoring of smart environments in regard to failures or changes. We furthermore provide a prototypical implementation of the introduced approach
Selected Topics on Business Informatics Research: Editorial Introduction to Issue 6 of CSIMQ
Get PDFBusiness informatics research bridges management and engineering domains and facilitates communication between scientific and practical applications. The sixth issue of the journal of Complex Systems Informatics and Modeling Quarterly contains four publications that present the extended papers from the workshops of the 14th International Conference on Perspectives in Business Informatics Research (BIR 2015) that was organized in Tartu, Estonia, 26-28 August, 2015. The BIR 2015 workshops captured important and novel topics on information logistics and knowledge supply, security and compliance in business processes, and use of ontologies in information systems. Within this context the fifth publication included in this issue complements the topic of the business informatics research with the investigation of a model-driven approach on the gesture-based interaction in information systems
Measuring Complexity of SAP Systems
Get PDFThe paper discusses the reasons of complexity rise in ERP system SAP R/3. It proposes a method for measuring complexity of SAP. Based on this method, the computer program in ABAP for measuring complexity of particular SAP implementation is proposed as a tool for keeping ERP complexity under control. The main principle of the measurement method is counting the number of items or relations in the system. The proposed computer program is based on counting of records in organization tables in SAP
The Formalization of the Business Process Modeling Goals
Get PDFIn business process modeling the de facto standard BPMN has emerged. However, the applications of this notation have many subsets of elements and various extensions. Also, BPMN still coincides with many other modeling languages, forming a large set of available options for business process modeling languages and dialects. While, in general, the goal of modelers is a central notion in the choice of modeling languages and notations, in most researches that propose guidelines, techniques, and methods for business process modeling language evaluation and/or selection, the business process modeling goal is not formalized and not transparently taken into account. To overcome this gap, and to explicate and help to handle business process modeling complexity, the approach to formalize the business process modeling goal, and the supporting three dimensional business process modeling framework, are proposed
Exploring the Potential of Dynamic Perspective Taking on Business Processes
Get PDFAlthough many organizations have started to work with business process models in their operational practice, they have not explored the entire potential of intertwining business process modeling with organizational development. Process specifications contain workflows that require execution, in order to achieve business objectives and support business operation effectively. With the advent of Subject-oriented and Social Business Process Management, communication and stakeholder interaction have become novel perspectives on how to design and implement processes. They go beyond formal responsibilities encoded in functional roles, and are not very common across organizational hierarchies. However, stakeholders, including organizational developers and IT specialists, can be supported looking at processes and their execution from either perspective, namely, from a traditional one, focusing on functions and task accomplishment, and from an interactional perspective, focusing on communication among stakeholders and system interactions. The introduced dual-mode workflow execution engine UeberFlow allows considering both perspectives during process runtime, thus, checking operational completeness from either perspective. Stakeholders can start modeling with a perspective they are familiar with and subsequently proceed with the another one by switching dynamically to an alternate mode of execution. The presented meta-model and architecture of such a dual mode support tool enables coupling business process management directly with organizational development
Opinion Mining in Latvian Text Using Semantic Polarity Analysis and Machine Learning Approach
Get PDFIn this paper we demonstrate approaches for opinion mining in Latvian text. Authors have applied, combined and extended results of several previous studies and public resources to perform opinion mining in Latvian text using two approaches, namely, semantic polarity analysis and machine learning. One of the most significant constraints that make application of opinion mining for written content classification in Latvian text challenging is the limited publicly available text corpora for classifier training. We have joined several sources and created a publically available extended lexicon. Our results are comparable to or outperform current achievements in opinion mining in Latvian. Experiments show that lexicon-based methods provide more accurate opinion mining than the application of Naive Bayes machine learning classifier on Latvian tweets. Methods used during this study could be further extended using human annotators, unsupervised machine learning and bootstrapping to create larger corpora of classified text
Metadata Extraction and Management in Data Lakes With GEMMS
Get PDFIn addition to volume and velocity, Big data is also characterized by its variety. Variety in structure and semantics requires new integration approaches which can resolve the integration challenges also for large volumes of data. Data lakes should reduce the upfront integration costs and provide a more flexible way for data integration and analysis, as source data is loaded in its original structure to the data lake repository. Some syntactic transformation might be applied to enable access to the data in one common repository; however, a deep semantic integration is done only after the initial loading of the data into the data lake. Thereby, data is easily made available and can be restructured, aggregated, and transformed as required by later applications. Metadata management is a crucial component in a data lake, as the source data needs to be described by metadata to capture its semantics. We developed a Generic and Extensible Metadata Management System for data lakes (called GEMMS) that aims at the automatic extraction of metadata from a wide variety of data sources. Furthermore, the metadata is managed in an extensible metamodel that distinguishes structural and semantical metadata. The use case applied for evaluation is from the life science domain where the data is often stored only in files which hinders data access and efficient querying. The GEMMS framework has been proven to be useful in this domain. Especially, the extensibility and flexibility of the framework are important, as data and metadata structures in scientific experiments cannot be defined a priori
Influence of Shadow IT on Innovation in Organizations
Get PDFShadow IT is relatively new and emerging phenomenon which is bringing number of concerns and risks to the organizational security. Past literature has mostly explored the “negative” effects of the Shadow IT phenomenon, including, for example, the security aspect where Shadow systems are said to undermine the official systems and endanger organizational data flows. However, the question of how Shadow IT can contribute to leverage user’s innovation has not been adequately addressed. We used three methods to understand if Shadow IT can be an important source of innovation for firms: 1) Single case study with international firm that adopted Shadow IT; 2) Interviews with 15 IT executives and 3) Focus group using twitter as enabling tool to interact with 65 IT professionals. We offer a new perspective on how Shadow IT practices can leverage user’s innovation. The study offers novel insights on the role of Shadow users in the organizational innovation process and how they contribute to new innovations by using Shadow IT. Not only this user led innovation through Shadow IT brings positive outcomes for the employee, but it also reveals the path to follow for organizations to increase their innovation capabilities
An Approach for Multi-Artifact Testing Through an Ontological Perspective for Behavior-Driven Development
Get PDFIn a user-centered development process, artifacts evolve in iterative cycles until they meet users’ requirements and then become the final product. Every cycle gives the opportunity to revise the design and to introduce new requirements which might affect the specification of artifacts that have been set in former development phases. Testing the consistency of multiple artifacts used to develop interactive systems every time that new requirements are introduced is a cumbersome activity, especially if it is done manually. This paper proposes an approach based on Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) to support the automated assessment of artifacts along the development process of interactive systems. The paper uses an ontology for specifying tests that can run over multiple artifacts sharing similar concepts. A case study testing Task Models, Prototypes, and Final User Interfaces is presented to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach from the early phases of the design process, providing a continuous quality assurance of requirements, and helping clients and development teams to identify potential problems and inconsistencies before commitments with software implementation are made