Common Business Objects Research Articles

AN ANALYSIS OF DEVOPS’ IMPACT ON INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ORGANISATIONS: A CASE STUDY

DevOps is a software development philosophy that involves the working together of development, operations, and other software development departments in order to accomplish common business objectives. However, very little has been done to establish the organisational impact of DevOps on information technology organisations; so an understanding of this phenomenon remains incomplete among practitioners and academic researchers. In this paper a framework for an appropriate DevOps restructuring approach is presented, based on the literature and on a single case study of a large multinational company with its headquarters in South Africa. The paper contributes to a better understanding of the organisational implications of the implementation of DevOps.

Towards the Meta-Modeling of Complex Inter-Organisationnel Collaborative Processes

Enterprises are progressively embedded in business to business atmospheres, in order to achieve their common business objectives. Such collaborations lead to Inter-Organizational Business Processes. Therefore, IOBP modeling involves new challenges, mainly the ability to deal with autonomy, privacy, heterogeneity. As a contribution in this area, a IOBP meta-model was designed. This model takes into account the maximum concepts related to the collaboration. Where, the process is complex, and its model in a global way affects its vision and complicates its implementation and hence the idea of its analysis into sub-IOBP to reduce the complexity of the global collaborative process, to streamline information exchange and to facilitate the understanding of the process by partners. A set of Atlas Transformation Language (ATL) transformation rules has been defined to convert Unified Modeling Language (UML) models to Business Process Model and Notation. Finally, the application of our approach has been demonstrated through a framework which can solve the problem of generic IOBP.

Knowledge Representation of Cyber-physical Systems for Monitoring Purpose

Automated warehouses, as a form of cyber-physical systems (CPSs), require several components to work collaboratively to address the common business objectives of complex logistics systems. During the collaborative operations, a number of key performance indicators (KPI) can be monitored to understand the proficiency of the warehouse and control the operations and decisions. It is possible to drive and monitor these KPIs by looking at both the state of the warehouse components and the operations carried out by them. Therefore, it is necessary to represent this knowledge in an explicit and formally-specified data model and provide automated methods to derive the KPIs from the representation. In this paper, we implement a minimalistic data model for a subset of warehouse resources using linked data in order to monitor a few KPIs, namely sustainability, safety and performance. The applicability of the approach and the data model is illustrated through a use case. We demonstrate that it is possible to develop minimalistic data models through Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) resource shapes which enables compatibility with the declarative and procedural knowledge of automated warehouse agents specified in Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL).

Design and Implementation of Business Objects for Automated Business Negotiations

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in the specification, generation and exchange of business objects in the context of electronic commerce. Common business objects have been defined for product catalogs, purchase orders and other business entities. However, no business objects have been defined and implemented for supporting automated business negotiations even though business negotiation is very much an integral part of business activities. In this work, we have designed and implemented a set of business negotiation objects for supporting the bargaining type of business negotiations. These objects define the operations and information contents needed for negotiation parties to express their requirements and constraints during a bargaining process. They correspond to a set of negotiation primitives, which is a superset of the negotiation-related primitives defined in two popular languages: ACL and COOL. The implementation of these objects is patterned after the business object documents in the XML format proposed by the Open Applications Group, thus conforming to the established standard. The incorporation of several types of constraint specifications in these business negotiation objects provides the negotiation parties and the negotiation servers that represent them much expressive power in specifying call‐for‐proposals and proposals. Two synchronization problems and their solutions associated with the withdrawal and modification of negotiation proposals are addressed and presented in this paper. The use of these business negotiation objects in a bi‐lateral bargaining protocol is also presented. We have validated the utility of these objects in an integrated network environment, which consists of two replicated negotiation servers, two commercial products, and some other university research systems that form a supply chain.

Virtual enterprise networks: the fifth element of corporate governance

Although still flying low under the popular business media's collective radar, virtual enterprise networks (or nets) do receive increased attention in the strategic management literature. A virtual enterprise network (VEN) is a system of autonomous firms that collaborate to achieve common business objectives. VENs give participants a competitive edge in markets demanding agility and rapid response. Seen as an emerging transactional exchange governance (TEG) form within transaction cost economics (TCE), VENs and the relations among firms that form them posit challenges for researchers and managers. VENs differ substantially from markets and hierarchies, and from recurrent and relational contracts, utterly changing what it means to be a firm in today's business. This essay explores alternative TEG forms, their characteristics and the criteria that bear on the choice of corporate governance: flexible specialization, market uncertainty, product (good or service) complexity, reliance on trust, risk, self-organization, shared knowledge, and socio-territorial cohesiveness. The essay offers propositions on the relations among economic criteria and the choice of transactional exchange governance forms by exploring the dynamics of a generic TEG structure. This is a system dynamics simulation model that partially offsets the shortcomings of transaction cost economics (TCE) and points to the potentially rich contribution of system dynamics to exploring VENs beyond the ideal-type TEG forms of markets and hierarchies that dominate the TCE literature.

Java and the IBM San Francisco project

The San FranciscoTM project establishes a new paradigm for building business applications. The product, targeted for independent software vendors (ISVs), provides a distributed object infrastructure (foundation), common business objects (CBOs), and business process components (BPCs). Together, they provide a platform-independent business application foundation, ready for extension by ISVs to produce end-customer, business-critical applications. The San Francisco project is written almost entirely in JavaTM and to our knowledge is currently the largest Java development effort in the world. This paper provides an overview of the San Francisco project, with emphasis on the Java considerations of the product's development, the lessons learned, and our recommendations for future Java language maturity.

Common Business Objects: Demonstrating Interoperability in the Oil and Gas Industry

Summary The PetroTechnical Open Software Corp. (POSC) was organized in 1990 to define technical methods to make it easier to design interoperable data solutions for oil and gas companies.1–7 When POSC rolls out seed implementations, oilfield service members must validate them, correct any errors or ambiguities, and champion these corrections into the original specifications before full integration into POSC-compliant, commercial products.8–10 Organizations like POSC are assuming a new role of "promoting formation of projects where E&P companies and vendors jointly test their pieces of the migration puzzle on small subsets of the whole problem."11,R12 We describe three such joint projects. While confirming the value of such open cross-company cooperation, these cases also help to redefine interoperability in terms of business objects that will be common across oilfield companies, their applications, access software, data, or data stores.13,R14