Enterprise Mashups Research Articles

Using ERP Mashups to Improve Business Processes

Customizing an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system to fit organizational needs is a complex task. Cost, difficulties with maintenance and upgrade, and loss of vendor support are just some of the factors that cause customizations to fail. Enterprise mashups represent a new way of tailoring an ERP environment in close collaboration with users. We have developed two enterprise mashups for a multinational company in the fish feed industry. The paper describes and discusses how organizations may use mashup technology to improve their processes by customizing their ERP systems. Our study suggests that the case organization indeed has a potential for such improvement.

Ensuring business and service requirements in enterprise mashups

During the past few years, mashups have gained wide attention as they utilize Web 2.0 technologies in order to combine data, as well as the functionalities of numerous services, in a simple web application. While developing mashups for simple user-specific needs is not a demanding procedure, this is not the case for value-added services that need to satisfy specific properties and business needs, known as enterprise mashups. As a number of business requirements have to be satisfied, and execution faults are less tolerated compared to user-centric scenarios, a rigorous approach for their development is required. In this work we present such an approach utilizing model checking techniques, provided by the behavior, interaction, priorities (BIP) component framework. In addition, a methodology for the transformation of business process model and notation models, describing the business logic of a requested mashup, into the corresponding BIP models is proposed. The generated models enable the verification of requested properties.

Development and Implementation of the AVAILS+ Collaborative Forecasting Tool for Production Assurance in the Kuwait Oil Company, North Kuwait (KOC NK)

Summary AVAILS+ is a short-term forecasting tool designed to lead the production-assurance efforts of the North Kuwait Asset [Sabriyah, Raudhatain, Ratqa, Abdali, and Bahrah fields of the Kuwait Oil Company (KOC)]. The term "AVAILS" is a shorthand term for "Available Production," whereas the "+" connotes the extended capabilities of both the technology (suite of dashboard metrics) and the methodology (team building and collaboration). The tool has been developed jointly between KOC North Kuwait (KOC NK) and Quantum Reservoir Impact (QRI). AVAILS+ design principles are firmly rooted within Reservoir Competency Asymmetric Assessment (RCAA) (Saleri and Toronyi 2011), QRI's empirically driven investigative process for qualifying and quantifying reservoir fundamentals. As a technology, the tool can best be described as an "enterprise mashup," a collection of exploration-and-production data stores integrated into a reservoir-analytics engine with dashboards for tracking primary drivers of the production forecast. This high degree of data integration, coupled with its visual nature (dashboards), enables better cross-organization transparency and collaboration with respect to execution of the recovery plan for production assurance. There is nothing novel about short-term forecasts, metrics, dashboards, or fit-for-purpose databases—all which are components of this enterprise mashup. What is unique is the way in which AVAILS + elegantly unifies these components into a strategic decision-making engine for KOC NK. There have been genuine new insights within this business-intelligence approach to managing the reservoirs of KOC NK, all leading the workforce to an improved understanding of reservoir fundamentals and, consequently, better, more-informed, and more-timely decisions.

Enacted Software Development Process based on Cross Platform Unified Framework in the Context of Investment Banking

The demand for the rich web based solution changed the way the application were developed in the investment banking industry specifically for sales and trading (front office activities). Traditionally, simple web application were considered to be enough powerful to provide the user with all the capabilities. Later on developer started implementing mashup technology in order to cater to IBs ever increasing demands, which actually is a technique for building applications that combine data from multiple sources to create an integrated experience. This paper extends the concept of enterprise mashups to provide a new framework called cross platform unified framework (CPUF ) which is a cross-technology and delivery platform framework, services, patterns and practices aimed at changing the way IB industry projects are design and delivered to business users. This paper not only explains the various core components of the framework it also highlights the important benefits of the CPUF. It aimed at understanding the user needs from their technical interface(s), identify the systems that can provide these features, provide a technology agnostic framework that can stitch this information together without moving data or processes out of the existing system.

Interoperative end-user process modelling for process collaborative manufacturing

As business environments change rapidly, the ability to quickly set up a collaborative automated business processes is desirable. Collaborative business processes are increasingly driven by business agility, adaptability and flexibility, particularly in a modern manufacturing enterprise environment. Traditionally, collaborative business processes are used among big organisations. Many of collaborative business process systems are designed for a long-term use with central control. It is a great challenge for enterprises to adapt processes to the today's business pace. Today's enterprise users demand many situational collaborative business process applications which handle business needs within a short period and which normally do not need to support too many users. The traditional centrally controlled systems are not designed for such situational applications. In this paper, we explore how business process mashups can be used for manufacturing enterprise collaboration. We highlight the modelling of end-users process collaboration from both a control flow and a data flow perspective. Based on our analyses, an end-user process modelling approach is proposed for process enterprise mashup applications. Our approach, illustrated by reference to an example pharmaceutical collaborative manufacturing case, will support collaboration among users with different levels of modelling skills and expertise in a pharmaceutical manufacturing enterprise environment.

Accountability in Enterprise Mashup Services

As a result of the proliferation of Web 2.0 style web sites, the practice of mashup services has become increasingly popular in the web development community. While mashup services bring flexibility and speed in delivering new valuable services to consumers, the issue of accountability associated with the mashup practice remains largely ignored by the industry. Furthermore, realizing the great benefits of mashup services, industry leaders are eagerly pushing these solutions into the enterprise arena. Although enterprise mashup services hold great promise in delivering a flexible SOA solution in a business context, the lack of accountability in current mashup solutions may render this ineffective in the enterprise environment. This paper defines accountability for mashup services, analyses the underlying issues in practice, and finally proposes a framework and ontology to model accountability. This model may then be used to develop effective accountability solutions for mashup environments. Compared to the traditional method of using QoS or SLA monitoring to address accountability requirements, our approach addresses more fundamental aspects of accountability specification to facilitate machine interpretability and therefore enabling automation in monitoring.

Proposing a context-aware enterprise mashup readiness assessment framework

Web mashups have received a lot of attention recently as more enterprises are engaged in enterprise 2.0 initiatives. So far, there is insufficient research on the adoption and diffusion of Web mashups in an enterprise context. In this paper, we discussed the benefits and issues associated with enterprise mashups. We proposed a context-aware enterprise mashup readiness assessment framework to help enterprise managers and decision makers determine their needs and readiness for enterprise mashups. A case study was conducted to verify the usefulness of the proposed framework. The results show that our work can be used to guide enterprises with their decision making for the adoption of enterprise mashups and thus contribute to the development of a rigorous strategy for enterprise mashup adoption, development and diffusion.

Enterprise Mashups: A New Approach for Business Solutions

A mashup is a Web application that integrates content from different providers in order to create a new service which is not offered by the content provider. The development of this kind of applications involves activities such as accessing heterogeneous sources, combining data from different data sources and building graphical interfaces. This factor limits non-experienced computer users to develop these applications. However, nowadays there are enterpriseoriented tools that allow non-experienced user for building mashups in order to respond business needs in an easy and rapid way. Due to this, the enterprise mashup approach has been widely adopted by a large number of enterprises. This paper presents an overview of the enterprise mashup approach, as well as a review of four enterprise-oriented tools which provide a set of features that allows non-expertise users developing mashups into an enterprise. Finally, we present the challenges to be addressed by enterprise-oriented mashup tools in order to provide an easier and faster way of developing mashups.

Composing enterprise mashup components and services using architecture integration patterns

Enterprise mashups leverage various source of information to compose new situational applications. The architecture of such applications must address integration issues: it needs to deal with heterogeneous local and/or public data sources, and build value-added applications on existing corporate IT systems. In this paper, we leverage enterprise architecture integration patterns to compose reusable mashup components. We present a service oriented architecture that addresses reusability and integration needs for building enterprise mashup applications. Key techniques to customize this architecture are developed for mashups with themed data on location maps. The usage of this architecture is illustrated by a property valuation application derived from a real-world scenario. We demonstrate and discuss how this state-of-the-art architecture design method can be applied to enhance the design and development of emerging enterprise mashups.

Building enterprise mashups

Mashups combine web 2.0 and web services technology to provide end-user programming on the web. We explore how the existing data-oriented functionality can be extended for enterprise use. In particular to support business processes. Completing this, a design of a process-oriented enterprise mashup system is presented.

Enterprise Mashup Systems as Platform for Situational Applications

Currently, several Enterprise 2.0 platforms are beginning to emerge. This paper introduces Enterprise Mashup technology as a means to improve IT alignment of individual work processes and changing business needs. Enterprise Mashups enable users to create customized applications to easily find and transform business information and functionalities, as well as collaboratively share pre-built Mashup applications. Therefore, the concept of Enterprise Mashups integrates Web 2.0 technologies and principles with well-established paradigms such as Enterprise Information Integration, Business Intelligence, and Business Process Management. Involved organizational key drivers, technical challenges and inhibitors are discussed to assess the potential business value and explain the emerging expansion of Mashup platforms in companies.

Study on Widgets for Mashup

Study on Widgets for Mashup Liu Fang Li Chunwang Wang Fang 1(National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing 100190, China) 2(Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China) [Abstract] After introducing the definition, type and feature of widgets, this paper emphatically analyzes object structures and API standards of UWA and W3C widgets, and discusses the architecture of enterprise mashup and implementations of the mashup application based on widgets. Finally, related work and trends are given. [Keywords] Mashup Widget Architecture Presentation application

Identifying Middlewares for Mashup Personal Learning Environments

The common understanding of e-learning has shifted over the last decade from the traditional learning objects portals to learning paradigms that enforces constructivism, discovery learning and social collaboration. Such type of learning takes place outside the formal academic settings (e.g., seminars or lectures) where a learning environment is created by using some kind of web application mashup tools. The use of these mashup tools moves the learning environment further away from being a monolithic platform towards providing an open set of learning tools, an unrestricted number of actors, and an open corpus of artifacts, either pre-existing or created by the learning process – freely combinable and utilizable by learners within their learning activities. However, collaboration, mashup and contextualization can only be supported through services, which can be created and modified dynamically based on middlewares to suit the current needs and situations of learners. This article identifies middlewares suitable for creating effective personal learning environment based on Web 2.0 mashup tools. This article also proposed a general framework for constructing such personal learning environments based on Ambient Learning realized by learning agents and the use of Enterprise Mashup servers.

Mix, Match, Rediscovery

Knowledge is the fact or knowing something from experience or via association. Knowledge organization is the systematic management and organization of knowledge (Hodge, 2000). With the advent of Web 2.0, Mashups have become a hot new thing on the Web. A mashup is a Web site or a Web application that combines content from more than one source and delivers it in an integrated way (Fichter, 2006). In this article, we will first explore the concept of mashups and look at the components of a mashup. We will provide an overview of various mashups on the Internet. We will look at literature about knowledge and the knowledge organization. Then, we will elaborate on our experiment of a mashup in an enterprise environment. We will describe how we mixed the content from two sets of sources and created a new source: a novel way of organizing and displaying HP Labs Technical Reports. The findings from our project will be included and some best practices for creating enterprise mashups will be given. The future of enterprise mashups will be discussed as well.

Mix, Match, Rediscover

Knowledge is the fact or knowing something from experience or via association. Knowledge organization is the systematic management and organization of knowledge (Hodge, 2000). With the advent of Web 2.0, Mashups have become a hot new thing on the Web. A mashup is a Web site or a Web application that combines content from more than one source and delivers it in an integrated way (Fichter, 2006). In this article, we will first explore the concept of mashups and look at the components of a mashup. We will provide an overview of various mashups on the Internet. We will look at literature about knowledge and the knowledge organization. Then, we will elaborate on our experiment of a mashup in an enterprise environment. We will describe how we mixed the content from two sets of sources and created a new source: a novel way of organizing and displaying HP Labs Technical Reports. The findings from our project will be included and some best practices for creating enterprise mashups will be given. The future of enterprise mashups will be discussed as well.