Advanced Information Systems Engineering Research Articles

The Effect of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) on Improving Tax Compliance Rates

Kosovo's tax administration plays a fundamental role in the state's functioning, carrying out many duties and obligations. In addition to these duties, TAK also acts as a stabilizing element for the macro-fiscal economy. In addition to the importance of human resources, the function of information technology is unquestionably crucial in achieving TAK's objectives. The implementation of information technology has resulted in the mechanization of several processes, simplifying the gathering of data and the distribution of tax responsibilities. Advanced information technology systems have improved communication channels with taxpayers and other individuals or groups involved, promoting increased transparency in tax information management. The adoption of the Electronic Data Exchange (EDI) application has resulted in advantages not just for TAK but also for taxpayers and the general public. There are several benefits to using TAK, such as increased efficiency in processing tax return data, less dependence on people specifically assigned to tax return processing, and a lower likelihood of errors in tax returns. The benefits for taxpayers and citizens include the convenience of filing and paying taxes, the option to do so online at any time, and the ability to access online services without the need for in-person engagement with tax authorities. Another vital part of TAK's employment of information technology is the facilitation of online declarations and payments, as well as digital connections with taxpayers. This progress has led to higher adherence to tax obligations and a decreased incidence of tax evasion.

Selected Topics on Information Systems Engineering: Editorial Introduction to Issue 9 of CSIMQ

This issue of the journal of Complex Systems Informatics and Modeling (CSIMQ) presents papers that discuss selected topics on information systems engineering. The papers are extended versions of selected papers from the CAiSE Forum 2016 held in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The CAiSE Forum is a place within the International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering for disseminating and debating new ideas and tools related to this area.

Selected Topics on Advanced Information Systems Engineering: Editorial Introduction to the Issue 5 of CSIMQ

The 5th issue of the journal on Complex Systems Informatics and Modeling (CSIMQ) presents extended versions of five papers selected from the CAiSE Forum 2015. The forum was part of the 27th edition of international Conference on Advanced Information Systems engineering (CAiSE 2015), which took place in June 2015 in Stockholm, Sweden. Information systems engineering draws its foundation from various interrelated disciplines including, e.g., conceptual modeling, database systems, business process management, requirements engineering, human computer interaction, and enterprise computing to address various practical challenges in development and application of information systems. The guiding subjects of CAiSE 2015 were Creativity, Ability, and Integrity. The CAiSE Forum aimed at presenting and discussing new ideas and tools related to information systems Engineering.

Report on the First International i* Teaching Workshop (iStarT)

The i* Framework, facilitating goal-oriented information systems modeling, has received much attention in research since its introduction. As the i* and related frameworks (e.g., GRL and Tropos) have been in existence for more than 20 years, researchers around the world have accumulated experience in teaching such languages, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, to students with a wide variety of backgrounds. It is our aim to begin to collect and share these experiences. As such, we organized the first International iStar Teaching Workshop (iStarT'15), a focused workshop covering topics related to i* and goal-oriented pedagogy held at the Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE'15). In this report we summarize the presentations, discussion and future plans made as part of iStarT'15.

National Weather Service Forecasters Use GPS Precipitable Water Vapor for Enhanced Situational Awareness during the Southern California Summer Monsoon

Abstract During the North American Monsoon, low-to-midlevel moisture is transported in surges from the Gulf of California and Eastern Pacific Ocean into Mexico and the American Southwest. As rising levels of precipitable water interact with the mountainous terrain, severe thunderstorms can develop, resulting in flash floods that threaten life and property. The rapid evolution of these storms, coupled with the relative lack of upper-air and surface weather observations in the region, make them difficult to predict and monitor, and guidance from numerical weather prediction models can vary greatly under these conditions. Precipitable water vapor (PW) estimates derived from continuously operating ground-based GPS receivers have been available for some time from NOAA’s GPS-Met program, but these observations have been of limited utility to operational forecasters in part due to poor spatial resolution. Under a NASA Advanced Information Systems Technology project, 37 real-time stations were added to NOAA’s GPS-Met analysis providing 30-min PW estimates, reducing station spacing from approximately 150 km to 30 km in Southern California. An 18–22 July 2013 North American Monsoon event provided an opportunity to evaluate the utility of the additional upper-air moisture observations to enhance National Weather Service (NWS) forecaster situational awareness during the rapidly developing event. NWS forecasters used these additional data to detect rapid moisture increases at intervals between the available 1–6-h model updates and approximately twice-daily radiosonde observations, and these contributed tangibly to the issuance of timely flood watches and warnings in advance of flash floods, debris flows, and related road closures.

Revolutionising the Civil Courts in South Africa Through Information Technology

A consultative approach was undertaken by a handful of academics in assessing the information technology of court systems from a global perspective inter alia southern hemisphere countries to European trends, which resulted in academics writing critically about this process in revolutionising the case management process and technology. Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng of the Constitutional Court in South Africa remarked that the e-filing system was required to address some of the problems that judicial officers face in hearing appeals when dockets are lost in their entirety. In this specific context there is needed reform for the case management structure of matters that appear on the court roll. The time delay in transcribing records for Judges/Magistrates to access the evidence for writing their judgments inevitably creates backlogs of judgments only being delivered eight months after the trial. This is unfavourable for the litigants that have their matter unduly delayed and causes an incremental rise in litigation fees. A possible solution is for the technology that enables and allows for ‘real-time transcript,’ which ensures that when evidence is given in court it is automatically transcribed. This means that the Judge/Magistrate has immediate visual access to it on the computer. This particular technology could save costs and allow for accurate information to be given to the Judge/Magistrate for faster digestion of the matter before them. The paper-based system perpetuates that copious amounts of pages are filed at court. An environmental lawyer’s worst nightmare of seeing so many pages that have to be printed instead of referring to a ‘soft’ copy. To a litigants aghast, after the very tedious process of paginating the court files and their own files and on the day of the trial/application the court file goes walkabout. The result is that it is impossible for the matter to proceed on the same day, accordingly the trial is postponed to locate the file and the originals alternatively for the respective litigants to file the necessary copies to ensure that the matter can proceed with a copied file for a civil dispute. However from a criminal perspective when the docket is lost, then the case is postponed for the location of the docket and if it cannot be found then the matter is removed from the roll, until it can be found and then the matter will then be re-enrolled on the court roll, sometimes matters take years to re-appear if at all. The result sadly is that when documents go missing that criminals are released into society once again. European countries have adopted e-Courts that function on an online basis where witnesses can attest to evidence through online mediums akin to skype. In the Southern Hemisphere countries such as Singapore and Australia have some of the most advanced Information Technology systems such as e-filing systems and video conferencing are some of the developments that contribute to the ‘dawn of a new era of cybercourts.’ Australia had initially developed the online court system for matters that were ‘complex’ but then a particular necessity for it evolved and as a result at least one permanent cyber court sits in each court. Another reason for using information technology in Australia was to ease the backlog of a paper-based system. The trends in technology is not only to revolutionise business and marketing but also has its place in court. Advanced technology usually sums up convenience and especially in the struggle for access to justice ‘convenience’ is a fad that can address access to justice. A major drawback of information technology is that it is an expensive system, but surely government may address the cost concern if it weighs the successes of the system to paper-based outdated systems. In Singapore the courts have converted to an electronic litigation system, meaning every iota of the litigation is computerised. This paper shall only deal with an analysis of the court online system to revolutionise the civil system within a South African context.

Special section of BPMDS’2013: coping with complexity in business processes

The BPMDS series has produced 11 workshops from 1998 to 2010. Nine of these workshops were held in conjunction with CAiSE conferences. From 2011, BPMDS has become a 2-day working conference attached to Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE). The topics addressed by the BPMDS series are focused on IT support for business processes. This is one of the keystones of information systems theory. The goals, format, and history of BPMDS can be found on the Web site http://www.bpmds. org/.

Towards an Increased Degree of Usability Work in Organizations

It is widely recognized that there is a substantial gap between usability research and practice where UCD approaches are rarely applied in practice due to arguments regarding the intricate nature of its methods and techniques. This paper presents an action research study designed to investigate and analyze the potentials for an increased degree of UCD activities in the early development phases of advanced information systems technology. The results demonstrate that there is a large interest in usability but that organizational priority and competence is often lacking. Instead one relies heavily on questionable concepts such as ‘trained professionals’ to excuse the low effort towards usability. Based on the results, six recommendations for improved usability work in R&D organizations are presented, focusing on the importance of prioritization of, and education in usability work.

Special section of BPMDS’2012: artefacts and processes for business process modeling and management

The BPMDS series has produced 11 workshops from 1998 to 2010. Nine of these workshops were held in conjunction with CAiSE conferences. From 2011, BPMDS has become a two-day working conference attached to CAiSE (Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering). The topics addressed by the BPMDS series are focused on IT support for business processes. This is one of the keystones of Information Systems theory. The goals, format and history of BPMDS can be found on the web site http://www.bpmds. org/. According to Seligman et al. [1], an information systems engineeringmethod has four pillars: a way of thinking, a way of modeling, a way of working and a way of supporting. The framework presented in [2] was inspired from this work and aims to evaluate the capacity of business process engineering methods to design flexible business process models. According to this framework

Measure of Clinical Information Technology Adoption

ObjectivesThe objective of this study was to create a new measure for clinical information technology (IT) adoption as a proxy variable of clinical IT use.MethodsHealthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) data for 2004 were used. The 18 clinical IT applications were analyzed across 3,637 acute care hospitals in the United States. After factor analysis was conducted, the clinical IT adoption score was created and evaluated.ResultsBasic clinical IT systems, such as laboratory, order communication/results, pharmacy, radiology, and surgery information systems had different adoption patterns from advanced IT systems, such as cardiology, radio picture archiving, and communication, as well as computerized practitioner order-entry. This clinical IT score varied across hospital characteristics.ConclusionsDifferent IT applications have different adoption patterns. In creating a measure of IT use among various IT components in hospitals, the characteristics of each type of system should be reflected. Aggregated IT adoption should be used to explain technology acquisition and utilization in hospitals.

情報家電産業の高度化を担う機能性色素

多くの機能性色素が，液晶ディスプレイ（LCD），プラズマディスプレイパネル，有機EL（OLED）などのディスプレイ，光ディスク分野，デジタル印刷分野や色素増感太陽電池で広く使用されるようになった。本総説では，ディスプレイ分野とデジタル印刷分野で使用されている機能性色素についておもに解説する。たとえば，液晶ディスプレイのカラーフィルタに，耐久性の高いジアリライド系，キナクリドン系，フタロシアニン系顔料を微粒子で用いることで優れた透明性とコントラスト比を示す。また，偏光フィルムの耐久性を高めるために，ジスアゾ系またはトリスアゾ系二色性色素が用いられている。OLED用の三色の発光材料として，いくつかの蛍光色素やシクロメタル化イリジウム錯体が紹介されている。広範囲で利用されているインクジェット技術分野において，いくつかのナノ顔料が，染料インクと同様な鮮明さを得るために高分子バインダーやUV硬化型のバインダーとともに使用されている。フルオラン系ロイコ色素と長鎖アルキル基を有する固体酸を含む感熱記録紙では，発色反応と消色反応が可逆的に生じる機構が紹介されている。

Enhancing the Supply Chain Management performance using Information Technology: some evidence from UAE companies

The objective of this paper is to investigate Supply Chain Management (SCM) performance of selected companies in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) countries upon successful implementation of Information Technology (IT) applications. By carrying out an in-depth qualitative analysis, the paper seeks to evaluate how IT can enhance the SCM performance from a practitioner perspective. The survey results have indicated that respondents are aware that adopting IT does not necessarily translate to immediate benefits. Companies in UAE will, therefore, need to ‘educate’ their senior managers on using IT systems to streamline their supply chain operations, reduce cycle time and improve supply chain visibility. While most respondents have implemented IT systems for transactional processing, more can be done to implement more advanced IT systems for better planning and decision-making.

Special issue on business process lifecycle: design, deployment, operation and evaluation

Keywords: Business Process ; Lifecycle ; Deployment Reference EPFL-ARTICLE-176301doi:10.1002/smr.559View record in Web of Science Record created on 2012-04-19, modified on 2017-05-12

Governance, risk and compliance: Applications in information systems

This special issue is a collection of selected best papers from the 1st International Workshop on Governance, Risk and Compliance - Applications in Information Systems (GRCIS), which was held in conjunction with the 20th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE 2008), and additional contributions that were submitted via an open call for papers.

Driving on Main Street: The Road to Widespread Physician EHR Use

TO THOSE OF US physicians who have long worked to encourage the use of electronic health record systems and other health information technology to improve care, what once felt like the frontier is feeling more and more these days like Main Street-during rush hour no less. The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009, with its time-limited funding to help offset the cost of implementing such systems, largely contributed to the recent surge in interest and activity in electronic health record (EHR) adoption and meaningful use. HITECH has also increased physicians' sense of urgency by drawing attention to looming healthcare payment reform, giving notice that organizations that lack qualified EHR systems containing data that prove and improve healthcare quality and value likely will suffer financially. Physicians newly interested in achieving EHR meaningful use may be reacting to different and transient forces than those of us who were out on the health information technology (IT) frontier. It is important to ensure that these physicians can align with the success principles that motivated leaders of successful EHR implementations in the days before HITECH, including those visionary CEOs who described their experiences in the feature articles. These correct principles are independent of any time-limited stimulus incentives and persist long after the EHR meaningful use incentive dollars are gone. MOTIVATING HOSPITAL AND HEALTH SYSTEM LEADERS The feature articles are replete with important rationales, insights, and advice from CEOs nationally recognized for their successful EHR system implementations. The authors' comments can serve as a useful reference for fellow CEOs leading their own boards, leadership teams, physicians, nurses, and other health professionals to work to achieve the health IT-enabled care transformation they see as essential to patient care quality and organizational excellence. M. Michelle Hood points out the critical importance of realizable, real-time, consequential exchange of information enabled by health IT, as well as the need to properly frame EHR implementations as transformative clinical care redesign initiatives rather than as IT projects. She also underscores the importance of responsiveness to business climate issues while promoting participative decisionmaking structures, communication, collaboration, process redesign, standardization, and frequent reporting on important processes and outcomes. Meanwhile, CEOs David Bernd and Peter Fine, who lead organizations nationally recognized for their successful implementation and productive use of advanced health IT systems, provide cautions regarding the unsustainable nature of the current healthcare delivery system, the precarious prospects for those who change too little or too slowly in the face of needed reform, and the capacity EHR systems possess to empower improved patient outcomes and costs when integrated into clinical practice. While their organizations are shining examples of the profoundly positive impact that successful EHR implementations can bring, Bernd and Fine are realistic in describing important barriers encountered on their EHR journeys and suggestions for reaching the next horizon. PHYSICIAN ENGAGEMENT: ONE KEY TO EHR SUCCESS Ultimately, no effort to achieve health ITenabled care transformation will succeed unless physicians - whose orders trigger most determinants of healthcare quality and costs - are meaningful users of robust EHR systems that support desired improvements in quality and value. While physicians on the whole have been slow to implement EHRs, we are not necessarily resistant to information technology in general or even to certain aspects of health IT use. Like other consumers, most of us increasingly use some combination of electronic technologies, such as digital cameras, ATMs, smart phones, digital media, GPS devices, social media, online reservation sites, airport check-in kiosks, and barcode scanners or credit card readers at grocery checkouts. …

A Wireless Soil Moisture Smart Sensor Web Using Physics-Based Optimal Control: Concept and Initial Demonstrations

This paper introduces a new concept for a smart wireless sensor web technology for optimal measurements of surface-to-depth profiles of soil moisture using in-situ sensors. The objective of the technology, supported by the NASA Earth Science Technology Office Advanced Information Systems Technology program, is to enable a guided and adaptive sampling strategy for the in-situ sensor network to meet the measurement validation objectives of spaceborne soil moisture sensors. A potential application for this technology is the validation of products from the Soil Moisture Active/Passive (SMAP) mission. Spatially, the total variability in soil-moisture fields comes from variability in processes on various scales. Temporally, variability is caused by external forcings, landscape heterogeneity, and antecedent conditions. Installing a dense in-situ network to sample the field continuously in time for all ranges of variability is impractical. However, a sparser but smarter network with an optimized measurement schedule can provide the validation estimates by operating in a guided fashion with guidance from its own sparse measurements. The feedback and control take place in the context of a dynamic physics-based hydrologic and sensor modeling system. The overall design of the smart sensor web-including the control architecture, physics-based hydrologic and sensor models, and actuation and communication hardware-is presented in this paper. We also present results illustrating sensor scheduling and estimation strategies as well as initial numerical and field demonstrations of the sensor web concept. It is shown that the coordinated operation of sensors through the control policy results in substantial savings in resource usage.

Adaptive Sky: From Instrument Pixels to a Sensor Web Gestalt

A variety of sensors have been developed and deployed to monitor the Earth, ranging from in situ seismographic networks to hyperspectral imaging instruments carried onboard NASA satellites. Despite an impressive collection of sensing assets, there is still much untapped potential, as evidenced by the limited number of studies that successfully employ high-resolution data from multiple instruments. Sensor webs offer the potential to go beyond simple data fusion by dynamically combining sensing assets into coordinated, multi-instrument observers of specific geophysical objects, phenomena, and processes. In this paper, we describe Adaptive Sky, an algorithm package for sensor webs developed through funding from the NASA Earth Science Technology Office under the Advanced Information Systems Technology program. Fundamentally, Adaptive Sky aims to relate the observations from one sensor at time t to the observations from another sensor at time t', providing a “gestalt,” or unified, perspective that is more than the sum of its parts. A scenario involving the eruption of Bezymianny Volcano on the remote Kamchatka Peninsula on 14 October 2007 demonstrates conceptually how Adaptive Sky can be leveraged to create unprecedented spatio-temporal and phenomenological coverage of a complex geophysical event of interest, despite limitations inherent in the individual sensors.

Is Desperation the Mother of Innovation? Why Technology Flourishes Best in Bad Times

Guest editorial It might seem that technology advances the fastest during boom times, especially in capital-intensive industries such as upstream oil and gas, but actually, just the opposite is the case. Historically, widespread economic and social dislocations and uncertainty for the future drive collective determination to overcome adversity and bring about lasting change. Even in prehistoric times, the Egyptians, Chinese, Aztecs, and other early cultures created technological wonders many millennia before the word "technology" was invented. What we call "technology" today has always been about humankind's need for greater good in overall living conditions. It is also usually desperate times that trigger the most major technological strides. A prime example of this occurred with horizontal drilling technology. Although the first horizontal wells were drilled in the US in the 1920s, it was not until the 1970s—amid the energy supply and intermittent prices shocks of that era—did serious technology development progress. Yet it was not even during this relatively high-priced market that horizontal drilling technology moved to the point of mainstream adoption. Rather, it was after oil prices collapsed in 1986 to as low as USD 6/bbl, then stayed weak and wavering in the USD 20/bbl range for years, that the E&P sector became desperate to drive down finding and lifting costs. A pioneering collaborative industry effort rallied companies to participate in a nonprofit consortium that took directional drilling technology from early development to mainstream adoption by the early 1990s. During these same years, a number of other advanced technologies progressed in record time, including underbalanced drilling, diamond drill bits, "designer" drilling muds, automated oilfield equipment, and, by the 1990s, specialized engineering and geoscience technical software. The full-scale commercial adoption of these technologies positioned the upstream sector to handle sharp swings in oil prices and economic trends, as has happened again just within the past year. Today's "Desperation-Driven" Innovation Trends Never before has the world seen oil market instability as profound as during the past year. In sustained high-price/high-demand periods, such as were experienced between 2003 and mid-2008, producers have no choice but to focus on maximizing output and meeting consumer, commercial, and industrial demand. With strong capital spending budgets, the E&P sector was better able to afford applying the most advanced technologies already available, such as drilling deeper offshore wells in high-potential frontier areas, developing more challenging onshore wells in remote locations, drilling longer horizontal and multilateral wells, and expanding the use of advanced information technology systems, services, and software. However, as has happened in other high-price/tight-supply periods in the past, development of newer technologies still in their infancy, while hardly ignored, was not the overriding emphasis; keeping reliable supplies flowing was.

Hierarchies in a multidimensional model: From conceptual modeling to logical representation

Hierarchies are used in data warehouses (DWs) and on-line analytical processing (OLAP) systems to see data at different levels of detail. However, many kinds of hierarchies arising in real-world situations are not addressed by current OLAP systems. Further, there is still no agreement on a conceptual model for DW and OLAP design that offers both a graphical representation and a formal definition. In this paper, we formally define the MultiDimER model, a conceptual multidimensional model that allows to represent facts with measures as well as the different kinds of hierarchies already classified in our previous work [E. Malinowski, E. Zimányi, OLAP hierarchies: a conceptual perspective, in: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, 2004, pp. 477–491]. We also present the mapping of such hierarchies to the relational model, as well as their implementation in commercial DW products.

Emergency physicians’ behaviors and workload in the presence of an electronic whiteboard

As the demands on the emergency medicine (EM) system continue to increase, improvements in the organization of work and the access to timely clinical and system information will be required for providers to manage their workload in a safe and efficient manner. Information technology (IT) solutions are beginning to find their place in the emergency department (ED) and it is time to begin understanding how these systems are effecting physician behavior, communication and workload. The study used a time-in-motion, primary task analyses to study faculty and resident physician behavior in the presence of an electronic whiteboard. The NASA-Task Load Index (TLX) was used to measure subjective workload and the underlying dimensions of workload at the end of each physician observation. Work, communication and workload were characterized using descriptive statistics and compared using Mann-Whitney U-tests. Physicians in our study performed more tasks and were interrupted less than physicians studied previously in conventional EDs. Interruptions interrupted direct patient care tasks less than other clinical activities. Temporary interruptions appear to be a major source of inefficiency in the ED, and likely a major threat to patient safety. Face-to-face interruptions persist even in the presence of advanced IT systems, such as the electronic whiteboard. Faculty physicians exhibited lower workload scores than resident physicians. Frustration was a significant contributing factor to workload in resident physicians. All physicians ranked temporal demands and mental demands as major contributing factors to workload. The results indicate that the electronic whiteboard improves the efficiency of work and communication in the ED. IT solutions may have great utility in improving provider situational awareness and distributing workload among ED providers. The results also demonstrate that IT solutions alone will not solve all problems in the ED. IT solutions will probably be most effective in improving efficiency and safety outcomes when paired with human-based interventions, such as crew resource management. Future studies must investigate team interaction, workload and situational awareness, and the association of these factors to patient and provider outcomes.