Structure Of Information System Research Articles

Enhancing Fault Injection Testing of Service Systems via Fault-Tolerance Bottleneck

Modern large-scale service systems are usually deployed with redundant components to ensure high dependability in distributed and volatile environments. Fault Injection Testing (FIT) is a popular technique for testing such systems, while the application of FIT to validating the correctness of redundant components remains a challenging task, especially when the system's structural information is unavailable when testing starts. In this study, we refer to a minimum set of faults that, when injected, will cut off all execution paths in a service system as a <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">fault-tolerance bottleneck</i> , and we propose a novel Fault-tolerance Bottleneck driven Fault Injection (FBFI) approach to the exploration and validation of redundant components without prior knowledge of the system's business structure. The core idea of FBFI is to iteratively infer and inject bottlenecks of the business structure constructed so far. In this way, FBFI is able to discover and test redundant components by repeatedly triggering new system behaviors. The effectiveness and efficiency of FBFI is evaluated using two microservice benchmark systems with different deployment scales. The results reveal that FBFI is more practical and cost-effective than random and lineage-driven FIT approaches in testing service systems of high redundancy levels.

Organization Cybernetics for Railway Supplier Selection

The comprehensive stimulation for this research arises from the necessity to continually understand and investigate the Information System (IS) discipline body of knowledge from organizational practice. Specifically, in this study, we focus on comparing a few available excellence frameworks, data analytics, and cybernetics approaches. Such knowledge and skill practice in the IS field is predominant for both IS research and teaching. On the other hand, to propose a relevant performance reporting model using data analytics and cybernetics that entail a body of knowledge and skill is crucial for the development and transformation of organizational excellence. Yet, it helps to design an online real-time organizational dashboard that produces knowledge for its application and decision-making within an organizational practice. IS discipline in an organization is comparatively young and its specification in academia as well as in practice is rapidly changing, we focus on the practical design, and IS structure for organizational excellence through employing information technologies.

Does blame shifting work?

Contract systems, especially of the higher-order flavor, go hand in hand with blame. The pragmatic purpose of blame is to narrow down the code that a programmer needs to examine to locate the bug when the contract system discovers a contract violation. Or so the literature on higher-order contracts claims. In reality, however, there is neither empirical nor theoretical evidence that connects blame with the location of bugs. The reputation of blame as a tool for weeding out bugs rests on anecdotes about how programmers use contracts to shift blame and their attention from one part of a program to another until they discover the source of the problem. This paper aims to fill the apparent gap and shed light to the relation between blame and bugs. To that end, we introduce an empirical methodology for investigating whether, for a given contract system, it is possible to translate blame information to the location of bugs in a systematic manner. Our methodology is inspired by how programmers attempt to increase the precision of the contracts of a blamed component in order to shift blame to another component, which becomes the next candidate for containing the bug. In particular, we construct a framework that enables us to ask for a contract system whether (i) the process of blame shifting causes blame to eventually settle to the component that contains the bug; and (ii) every shift moves blame ``closer'' to the faulty component. Our methodology offers a rigorous means for evaluating the pragmatics of contract systems, and we employ it to analyze Racket's contract system. Along the way, we uncover subtle points about the pragmatic meaning of contracts and blame in Racket: (i) the expressiveness of Racket's off-the-shelf contract language is not sufficient to narrow down the blamed portion of the code to the faulty component in all cases; and (ii) contracts that trigger state changes (even unexpectedly, perhaps in the runtime system's data structures or caches) interfere with program evaluation in subtle ways and thus blame shifting can lead programmers on a detour when searching for a bug. These points highlight how evaluations such as ours suggest fixes to language design.

Making a Formal Case for the Development of Components of Modern Enterprise Information Systems

Background: The article covers the specifics of streamlining the design of software components for modern information systems, proposes a multiple-path integration approach intended for obtaining optimal and suboptimal solutions in multidimensional problems. Methods: The article proposes an approach to establishing a smooth pipeline for the development of software components within enterprise Information Systems (IS) based on the principles of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) that intend to reduce the complexity of the IS components themselves and the way they communicate with each other. To come up with the most practical solutions, the authors have used multiple-path integration methods that can help provide solutions to multidimensional problems within a reasonable time. Findings: The proposed formalization of the task to design an IS component serves as a base for studying the characteristics of the life cycles of different IS components, strategies and approaches to their design and development, as well as the general IS structure by means of various strategies of interaction between the existing software components and the ones being designed. Improvements/Application: The proposed approach can be used as a tool for building large-scale information systems in order to reduce the time and resources spent on the project. The article suggests a use case for this approach involving the building of IS components for telecommunication companies.

Combining lexical and structural information to reconstruct software layers

ContextThe architectures of existing software systems generally lack documentation or have often drifted from their initial design due to repetitive maintenance operations. To evolve such systems, it is mandatory to reconstruct and document their architectures. Many approaches were proposed to support the architecture recovery process but few of these consider the architectural style of the system under analysis. Moreover, most of existing approaches rely on structural dependencies between entities of the system and do not exploit the semantic information hidden in the source code of these entities. ObjectiveWe propose an approach that exploits both linguistic and structural information to recover the software architecture of Object Oriented (OO) systems. The focus of this paper is the recovery of architectures that comply with the layered style, which is widely used in software systems. MethodIn this work, we (i) recover the responsibilities of the system under study and (ii) assign these responsibilities to different abstraction layers. To do so, we use the linguistic information extracted from the source code to recover clusters corresponding to the responsibilities of the system. Then we assign these clusters to layers using the system's structural information and the layered style constraints. We formulate the recovery of the responsibilities and their assignment to layers as optimization problems that we solve using search-based algorithms. ResultsTo assess the effectiveness of our approach we conducted experiments on four open source systems. The so-obtained layering results yielded higher precision and recall than those generated using a structural-based layering approach. ConclusionOur hybrid lexical–structural approach is effective and shows potential for significant improvement over techniques based only on structural information.

The Impact of Mergers and Acquisitions on Information Systems: A Case of A Software Industry Acquisition

A company named Syscom' was recently acquired by another company, Matcom'. Both companies were focused on software development in similar markets, however, the Management Information Systems (MIS) decisions made by each company have resulted in significant differences as to how employees go about the business of developing, selling and supporting software. This paper highlights how Information Systems (IS) decisions made at these two companies enabled different ways for people to work together along with affecting various aspects of business operations and team communications. In addition, this paper presents issues with the integration of Syscom with the Matcom IS structure as a result of the acquisition of Syscom. Managerial implications are drawn from the discussion. l[l>Jote]: The names of the companies have been disguised for confidentiality.

Conceptual and formal description of structure-functional synthesis and development control problems of space and ground based date monitoring information systems

A multiple-model approach to description of space and ground based date monitoring information systems (IS) functioning processes is presented. Moreover these systems investigate in conditions when their parameters and structures changeability by objective (subjective) external (internal) reasons. The processes considered in this paper were qualified as control processes of IS structure dynamics. Previously developed concept of active moving object (AMO) was used to form an informal and set-theory-based statement of control problems.

THE RAILWAY INFORMATION SYSTEM AS A QUEUEING SYSTEM

The present article dwells upon the Information System (IS) of Latvian railways providing the analysis of the queuing system (QS) used to removing defects occurring in the infinite linear queuing system. The author of the article analyzes research data about the failures of system functioning in order to establish the parameters of the before mentioned system and other information systems used by Latvian railways. The structure of accidents happening in the informative systems and the removal of possible defects are researched. The present investigation provides evidence that substantiates a Markov hypothesis about the peculiarities of IS service. The author also examines the organizational structure of IS taking into consideration the level of the danger of possible accidents. The statistics of the failures of IS relates to the statistics of accidents that might happen to rolling stock.

Role of Value Compatibility in it Adoption

Compatibility has been recognised as an important element in the adoption of IT innovations in organisations but as a concept it has been generally limited to technical or functional factors. Compatibility is also significant, however, with regard to value compatibility between the organisation, and the adopted IT innovation. We propose a framework to determine value compatibility analysing the organisation's and information system's structure, practices and culture, and explore the value compatibility of an organisation with its adopted self-service computer-based information system. A case study was conducted to determine the congruence of an organisation's value and IT value compatibility. This study found that there was a high correspondence in the organisational structure and practice dimensions; however, there were organisational culture disparities. The cultural disparities reflected the self-service acceptance and training issues experienced by the case organisation. These findings add insight into the problems experienced with value compatibility and the adoption of the information systems, and show the potential use of the proposed framework in the detection of such problems.

The importance of library science in implementing DAM systems

Many organizations are finding that hiring staff trained in library science is instrumental in creating and managing their digital asset management system's data structure, rules, and values. This paper briefly outlines the benefits of hiring library science professionals, and the kind of education and training they commonly experience.

Performance measure of information systems (IS) in evolving computing environments: an empirical investigation

This paper argues that the contingent evaluation approach can help an organization to evaluate the impact of information systems (IS) on business performance. The structure of IS is one of the most important factors in applying the contingent approach, because it reflects the evolution of the computing environment and is also aligned with business objectives and strategies. We empirically derived four taxonomies of IS structure and tested the relationships between the derived typologies and the prioritized or adopted measures of their performance. Firms with different IS structure were found to consider some measures to be more appropriate than others. The empirical results support the idea that the contingent measurement approach has the potential to be an even more useful framework if it incorporates more contingency factors, such as environmental, organizational contexts, and other characteristics.

The Dynamics of Alignment: Insights from a Punctuated Equilibrium Model

Several prior articles have emphasized the importance of alignment between business and information system (IS) strategies, and between business and IS structures. Seeking to advance our understanding of alignment, we examine the dynamics of changes in alignment through strategy/structure interactions in the business and IS domains. More specifically, we address the following question: In what ways does alignment evolve over time? Changes in the strategic IS management profile (which includes business strategy, IS strategy, business structure, and IS structure) over time are examined using a punctuated equilibrium model, involving long periods of relative stability, or evolutionary change, interrupted by short periods of quick and extensive, or revolutionary, change. Case studies of changes in business and IS strategies and structure over long time periods in three organizations suggest that the punctuated equilibrium model provides a valuable perspective for viewing these dynamics. The cases suggest that a pattern of alignment may continue over a long period, because either the level of alignment is high or the managers do not recognize the low alignment as a problem. Revolutions, involving changes in most or all dimensions of the strategic IS management profile, interrupt the evolutionary changes. However, organizations hesitate to make such revolutionary changes in strategic IS management profiles. Complete revolutions apparently require a combination of strong triggers. Finally, post-revolution adjustments to one dimension of the strategic IS management profile seem to follow revolutionary changes.

Multiple material objects: from CAD representation to data format for rapid prototyping

The representations of contemporary CAD systems do not provide or contain any information with regard to the materials of the objects that the CAD system is used for the design work. The information is usually supplied at the computer-aided manufacturing stage by the production engineers. With the advent of rapid prototyping (RP) techniques, which allow multiple material objects to be produced, this arrangement is inadequate. This paper proposes a scheme for representing multiple material objects in a CAD system. A material tree of the object is built in the CAD system's data structure. By extracting information from this material tree, and outputting a modified version of a STL file format to the RP machines, multiple material objects could be fabricated in a RP machine.

The impact of transborder data flow restrictions on international information systems management

This research investigates the effects of transborder data flow (TDF) restrictions on the information systems (IS) management strategies and costs of multinational corporations. An empirical study was designed to investigate several research hypotheses dealing with the impact of TDF restrictions on IS structure and strategies across different industries. Statistical results indicate that TDF restrictions will significantly increase IS costs and influence MIS decisions overseas. To alleviate the problem, MNCs are adopting distributed approaches to manage their international IS. These findings allow some important implications to be drawn for both practitioners and researchers dealing with this pressing issue.

A knowledge-based control architecture with interactive reasoning functions

A knowledge-based system architecture called IPEX is presented that uses a time-distributed, interactive reasoning paradigm for process control applications. Structural features of the system are presented, and it is shown that temporal considerations are included in each of the system's data structures either explicitly or implicitly. Diagnostic planning is discussed, and explanations of the algorithms that formulate and maintain diagnostic/control plans are given. In particular, it is shown that the IPEX system can manage concurrently executing interactive diagnostic plans for multiple problem hypotheses.

Task-Structure Relationship of Information Systems Development Subunit: A Congruence Perspective

Several studies have examined the influence of organizational context (e.g., organization size, environment, strategy) on information systems (IS) performance/success. But very few studies have examined IS structure, and those studies have focused on a particular element of IS structure (e.g., decentralization). Thus, the multidimensional structural configuration of IS as an organizational subunit has escaped research attention. Further, the nature of the task to be performed by the IS subunit as a contextual factor has been virtually ignored in the IS research literature. In this paper, we first develop a congruence model for the task-structure relationship in an information systems development (ISD) subunit setting. Then we test this model as a multivariate relationship followed by subordinate bivariate analyses. Analysis of data from 41 hospitals’ ISD subunits reveals that a congruence relationship between task context and the structure of an ISD subunit is present. Our findings also show that an exclusive association exists between uncertainty in the task environment and the decision-making structure. Likewise, the association between equivocality of task content and the control structure of the ISD subunit is also exclusive. Implications of these findings for decision makers and researchers are discussed.

Visualizing large data sets in the earth sciences

The authors describe the capabilities of McIDAS , an interactive visualization system that is vastly increasing the ability of earth scientists to manage and analyze data from remote sensing instruments and numerical simulation models. McIDAS provides animated three-dimensional images and highly interactive displays. The software can manage, analyze, and visualize large data sets that span many physical variables (such as temperature, pressure, humidity, and wind speed), as well as time and three spatial dimensions. The McIDAS system manages data from at least 100 different sources. The data management tools consist of data structures for storing different data types in files, libraries of routines for accessing these data structures, system commands for performing housekeeping functions on the data files, and reformatting programs for converting external data to the system's data structures. The McIDAS tools for three-dimensional visualization of meteorological data run on an IBM mainframe and can load up to 128-frame animation sequences into the workstations. A highly interactive version of the system can provide an interactive window into data sets containing tens of millions of points produced by numerical models and remote sensing instruments. The visualizations are being used for teaching as well as by scientists.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Information requirements and alternatives in Information System design

The front end of all modern business Information Systems (IS) development methodologies includes an information requirement analysis step. It is shown that this step should be expanded to explicitly consider organizational components external to the computer as subject to change and hence design. This design problem is related to the alternative ways in which users' tasks may be performed and hence to the alternative coordination schemes and organizational structures a business may have. Furthermore, it is shown that the study of these alternatives and the specification of information requirements for each of them should be jointly made if a cost-effective system is to be assured. The explicit consideration of alternative organizational structures in IS opens the way to the use of organization theories to provide a sound basis for design. In particular, theory-derived criteria for joint organization-information structure generation are presented. Other consequences derived from this approach to IS design are that the focus on evaluation changes from efficiency to effectiveness improvement and that political problems are more likely to be foreseen and action taken to facilitate implementation. A case is used to illustrate the practical use of results presented.

Information-system structure by communication-technology concepts: A cybernetic model approach

Information-systems are classified into two types, termed “Evidence-of Existence” and “Presentation” of information. The objective of the evidence-type system lies in the domain of documentation and retrieval of information. The structure of this system-type is developed, with application of cybernetic concepts, as an isomorphic model in analogy to the system-structure of communication technology. The latter postulates three criteria of structuring: (1) Source-Channel-Sink, with input-output characteristics, (2) Filter-type communication-channel, (3) Reversable code. These criteria are applied to the structuring of information-systems of the evidence-of-existence type. For the purpose of two-way communication the information-systems have to be represented by closed-loop models. The selective-retrieval requirements necessitate the system-channel to be a filter of information. These information-filters are implemented by keyword-phrases, being identical with the codewords. They yield a uniquely decodable code which is totally reversible to adequately serve both the documentation and the retrieval of documents. It is proven that hierarchic information-systems, applying categorization or subject-heading objects of information, do not meet the mandatory code-requirements. The inherent coding-deficiencies of hierarchic systems generate intolerable retrieval ambiguities. The same critique applies to the thesaurus concept. The development of a novel species of thesaurus is suggested, realizing a kind of Linnéan encyclopedia of general human knowledge, presenting all relevant interrelations of objects of knowledge. Such thesaurus would provide the much needed support for formulating efficient search queries. Other relevant features of communication technology, like the information-potential, should be isomorphically transformed into information-system models.

A deductive question-answerer for natural language inference

The question-answering aspects of the Protosynthex III prototype language processing system are described and exemplified in detail. The system is written in LISP 1.5 and operates on the Q-32 time-sharing system. The system's data structures and their semantic organization, the deductive question-answering formalism of relational properties and complex-relation-forming operators, and the question-answering procedures which employ these features in their operation are all described and illustrated. Examples of the system's performance and of the limitations of its question-answering capability are presented and discussed. It is shown that the use of semantic information in deductive question answering greatly facilitates the process, and that a top-down procedure which works from question to answer enables effective use to be made of this information. It is concluded that the development of Protosynthex III into a practically useful system to work with large data bases is possible but will require changes in both the data structures and the algorithms used for question answering.