Enterprise Software Research Articles

MyPMP: A plug-in for implementing the metamodeling approach for project management in small-sized software enterprises

Nowadays, with the recurrent demands of high quality, delivery on time and no extra costs, the task of managing a software project could be extremely complex for any software enterprise. Furthermore, small-sized software enterprises face several problems (e.g., lack of knowledge, human and financial resources, time, and size of staff) that, undoubtedly, make this task more difficult. In this context, obtaining a simplified version of the management activities can be a helpful alternative for these enterprises. In this way, that an inexperienced project manager can define the management process that best fits with a particular project is not an easy task. Thus, this paper introduces the metamodeling approach in order to help project managers to define a process for managing a software project. Therefore, with the aim to validate its feasibility an add-in program was developed as a part of a case study. The achieved results show an important reduction in project?s effort and time needed to develop a new software product.

Harnessing Web 2.0 for ERP Implementations

The paper discusses the enterprise resource planning (ERP).ERP implementation solves business problems by customizing and integrating off-the-shelf enterprise software packages. A successful ERP implementation involves extensive collaboration and communication among the customer, implementation consultancy, and software vendor. Collaboration allows implementation personnel from different organizations to utilize each other's experiences. An example of this is the Web 2.0. A Web 2.0 knowledge repository system can reduce costs, improve quality, and lower the risks of ERP implementations.Through the case study, the key desired features for Web 2.0 knowledge repository system to support ERP implementations were defined. Epics was designed to fulfill these requirements and developed a prototype. Epics can be used by software vendors, ERP consulting firms, and ERP users. Human aspects play a critical role in ERP implementation. ERP implementation quality depends largely on how the implementation personnel's knowledge and past experiences are reused and communicated. Although knowledge reuse, collaboration, and communication are important for all software projects, they're particularly critical in ERP implementation owing to its unique challenges.

Sourcing Requirements and Designs for Software as a Service

Software as a Service (SaaS) has become an important pragmatic in the world of enterprise software and business services markets. SaaS supports the concept of outsourcing where business processes are offered under a service level agreement for a given price. However, sourcing SaaS may not always involve outsourcing with respect to the transfer of internal activities and resources to external service providers. Users of SaaS need to know what strategies to use when determining sourcing requirements. In this paper, the authors develop a classification for sourcing SaaS based on Kraljic's matrix and a mapping of SaaS services to the sourcing structures. Further, they evaluate the proposed sourcing models against two real world case studies.

Human resource aspects in global indirect virtual supply chain syndrome

The research attempts to establish the global indirect virtual supply chain (IVSC) teams and identify human resource (HR) bundles and attributes playing a role in its success and failure. Prominent teams identified in IVSC are: 1) information technology and consulting services; 2) enterprise software development; 3) business operations representative and literature review. Three strategic HR bundles and 18 HR attributes together are identified that have influence and impact on IVSC. Questionnaire is designed to study these attributes across the geography and their specific role through an exploratory survey. The survey responses are analysed using preferential rank translation technique to identify top factors of success/failure in IVSC. The results indicate that the 'thought process' for supply chain goals though appears to be similar across job-role and geography but there exist some traditional dissimilarity. This research outlet reveals one unique finding to specifically identify patterns of human thinking in IVSC. The geo-clusters of US-Europe, China-Asia Pacific and India bring about a new perspective and dimension to the HR aspects and can help identify focus areas for company as per job-role/geography. The research also attempt to reveal key HR attributes influencing an IT enabled IVSC.

Success factors for active internationalisation of small and medium-sized software enterprises: case analyses from France and Brazil

Success factors for active internationalisation of small and medium-sized software enterprises: case analyses from France and Brazil

Critical parameters for the adoption of software capability maturity model by small and medium enterprises

The study involved a survey of Ugandan small and medium enterprises that develop software on critical factors influencing the adoption of software capability maturity model. The research examined the software development environment in these small and medium enterprises and the operational tenets of the software capability maturity modelling in order to establish the critical parameters that should be considered for successful adoption of the software capability maturity model by small and medium software enterprises. Quantitative data was analysed using factor analysis to deduce the critical factors on the variables based on the data collected from the field. Linear regression analysis was also done to determine whether there was a significant relationship between adoption of software capability maturity model and adoption parameters. The key parameters for adoption of the software capability maturity model were identified as management's ability to choose appropriate improvement strategy, organisational culture, managements' commitment, developers' involvement, effective communication, rewards, training and project championship.

Success factors for active internationalisation of small and medium-sized software enterprises: case analyses from France and Brazil

In many countries, there is a small but growing tendency towards the internationalisation of small and medium-sized software enterprises. This paper searches for insights about the internationalisation process of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with highly innovative products. It compares the internationalisation process in France, as a mainstream country in terms of technology, and Brazil, as a non-mainstream one. This paper attempts to answer the following questions: what are the factors that enable SMEs to offer high value-added products to the foreign market, and what are the differences and similarities between internationalisation processes from both countries. Based on a multiple case study, this research shows that although innovation, entrepreneurship, and foreign market knowledge are important dimensions for the active internationalisation, networking is not as relevant as it was believed to be. Moreover, the study shows that internationalisation consists of two different processes.

Identification of plasma microRNA expression profile in radiographic axial spondyloarthritis-a pilot study.

At present, there are no studies that have established a microRNA (miRNA)-based signature profile in patients with radiographic axial spondyloarthritis (rad-axial SpA), and we hypothesized that these patients may have aberrantly expressed circulating miRNAs reflective of underlying disease and inflammation. This study aims to determine the expression profile of miRNAs in plasma of patients with rad-axial SpA and compare it with healthy, age, and sex-matched controls. Fifteen subjects with rad-axial SpA based on ASAS classification criteria and 5 controls were recruited from our local SpA registry. Demographic data were collected and disease activity was measured using Bath Ankylosing Spondylitis Disease Activity Index (BASDI). Peripheral blood samples (5ml) were obtained from eligible consenting patients and controls. RNA from the plasma was prepared using miRNeasy kit (Qiagen) by a modified protocol. Expression of 175 miRNAs was screened in the plasma of all 15 patients and 5 controls using serum/plasma miRNA PCR arrays (Exiqon Inc. Woburn, MA) essentially following the manufacturer's instructions. Real-time PCR was carried out on StepOne Plus (Applied Biosystems) and the data was extracted and analyzed using ExiGen Enterprise software (MultiD, Göteborg, Sweden). Potential miRNA targets were identified using bioinformatics. ESR and CRP levels were measured by standard laboratory methods. We identified 7 differentially expressed miRNAs (2 upregulated and 5 downregulated). miR-34a, which was overexpressed in patients with rad-axial SpA, was predicted to target BMP-3 mRNA by TargetscanS and PicTar miRNA target algorithms. miR-150 was downregulated in all of the samples analyzed by us using the TaqMan Gene Expression assay. The most repressed miRNA was miR-16 and is predicted to regulate the expression of activin A receptor (ACVR2B), a receptor for growth, and differentiation factor-5 (GDF-5). Our data indicates that (1) patients with axial SpA, as compared to controls, have dysregulated expression of selected miRNAs in the plasma; and (2) the differentially expressed miRNAs are predicted to target genes that play a role in bone morphogenesis, growth, and immune response.

Active Internationalization of Small and Medium - Sized Software Enterprises - Cases of French Software Companies

Implementations of software production processes usually ignore organizational, market, and economical attributes of products that are to be inserted in international markets. Software engineering has begun to deal with the business aspects of software products only recently. The Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge v3.0 presents two concepts of life cycle: the software development life cycle and the software product life cycle. The second is more concerned with business issues related to software products, but research on those issues is still due. In this sense, this paper aims to answer the following question: what factors allow small and medium software enterprises to offer high value added products in order to enter and remain in the international market? This work selects four research dimensions from literature and explores a number of variables inside those dimensions, which are considered as candidates to help explaining a successful process of active internationalization. The paper presents a multiple case study that shows that although innovation, entrepreneurship, and foreign market knowledge are important dimensions for the active internationalization, networking is not as relevant as it could be thought.

Implementation of a Novel System for Cross Platform Communication of Diversified Applications over Network

Enterprises of all ends are trying to integrate and manage the data within a single sign on system. With the drastic increase in the usage of internet in the last decade, it has been observed that more and more use of web services throughout the industry. Data today is stored in various forms and structure in different OS, mainframes etc, the optimum way of managing this data and the most efficient way to access and retrieve this data is the need of the hour. This is where the versatility of web services comes into picture which enables enterprises and consumers to integrate numerous diversified platforms together to satisfy the essential requirements. This explores a dire need of a cost effective and efficient system that can integrate various cross platform applications to work together in a systematic environment. The aim of this research paper is to design and implement an organized system to demonstrate the data flow, architecture and the techniques used to integrate an ERP system with web applications. This is done by using a SOAP web service which integrates ASP.NET, Java and Database applications. Microsoft .NET as a platform for developing enterprise software is emerging for integration with SAP Enterprise. Interest in Web services is rapidly increased from their inception. To exchange information among various applications in a standard way is the main goal of web services. This communication between the applications is based on SOAP and REST principle. Web service is a software system designed to support interoperable machineto-machine interaction over a network. Currently, it has been emphasized quality and security of web services. Therefore, in this paper, the authors highlighted some standard trends such as SOAP, WSDL, UDDI for web services and the security policies to protect user information. This system is in Visual Studio 2010 development environment, using c# programming language, ASP.NET, ADO.NET and SQL Server database to jointly develop a B/S structure of ERP system.

A framework to explore innovation at SAP through bibliometric analysis of patent applications

Easily accessible patent databases and advances in technology have enabled the exploration of organizational innovation through the analysis of patent records. However, the textual content of patents presents obstacles to gleaning useful information. In this study, we develop an expert system framework that utilizes text and data mining procedures for analyzing innovation through textual patent data. Specifically, we use patent titles representing the innovation activity at one company (SAP) and perform a bibliometric analysis using our proposed framework. Enterprise software, of which SAP is a pioneering developer, must serve a wide assortment of functions for companies in many different industries. In addition, SAP's sole focus is on enterprise software and it is a market leader in the category with substantial patent activity over the last decade. Using our framework to analyze SAP's patent activity provides a demonstration of how our bibliometric analysis can summarize and identify trends in innovation in a large software company. Our results illustrate that SAP has a breadth of innovative activity spread over the three-tier software engineering architecture and a lack of topical repetition indicative of limited depth. SAP's innovation is also seen to emphasize data management and quickly integrate emerging technologies. Results of an analysis on any company following our framework could be used for a variety of purposes, including: to examine the scope and scale of innovation of an organization, to examine the influence of technological trends on businesses, or to gain insight into corporate strategy that could be used to aid planning, investment, and purchasing decisions.

Are 'Better' Ideas More Likely to Succeed? An Empirical Analysis of Startup Evaluation

Entrepreneurs face high uncertainty, and often make costly investments in new business ideas without knowing the expected payoff. This paper empirically examines whether ex-ante assessment of early-stage startup ideas can predict their subsequent commercialization. We leverage an entrepreneurship program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in which early-stage venture ideas, presented in the form of succinct standardized summaries, elicit subjective evaluations from a large set of experienced entrepreneurs and executives. Using data on 652 ventures in multiple industry sectors, evaluated over an 8-year period, we find that ideas that elicit more positive evaluations are significantly more likely to ultimately reach commercialization. We further show that these results are driven by venture ideas with documented intellectual capital in research-and-development-intensive sectors, such as life sciences and medical devices. We find no evidence, by contrast, that experts can effectively assess the commercial potential of venture ideas in non-R&D-intensive sectors such as consumer web and enterprise software. Finally, we find that industry-specific and scientific expertise is not critical to experts’ collective ability to predict ventures’ commercial viability.

Real options, learning cost and timing software upgrades: Towards an integrative model for enterprise software upgrade decision analysis

A key challenge facing information technology (IT) managers is how to carefully analyze the decision options available to them when considering enterprise software infrastructure upgrades. We present an illustrative case that not only captures the trade-offs involved in retaining an existing software infrastructure as opposed to adopting a new one at an appropriate time, but also demonstrates how the combined application of various analytical tools including real options analysis may provide richer information than a single approach. Our model offers IT managers the potential to arrive at a deeper understanding of software upgrade timing decisions while generating important information relevant to practical decision situations.

ITIL in small to medium‐sized enterprises software companies: towards an implementation sequence

AbstractInformation technology infrastructure library (ITIL) framework is a set of comprehensive publications providing descriptive guidance on the management of IT processes, functions, roles, and responsibilities related to IT service management. However, and in spite of its repercussion and popularity, the ITIL framework does not suggest an implementation order for their processes. This decision constitutes the first challenge that an organization must overcome when starting an ITIL implementation, the enterprise size being one of the leading factors to be considered in the decision‐making process. In the scenario of small and medium enterprises dedicated to producing software, this paper is devoted to investigating which processes are the most selected to start the implementation of ITIL in these organizations. This is performed by means of two different instruments, first, a systematic literature review on the topic and second, a survey conducted among experts and practitioners. Results show in both cases that incident management process should be the first process when implementing ITIL framework. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A systematic composite service design modeling method using graph-based theory.

The composite service design modeling is an essential process of the service-oriented software development life cycle, where the candidate services, composite services, operations and their dependencies are required to be identified and specified before their design. However, a systematic service-oriented design modeling method for composite services is still in its infancy as most of the existing approaches provide the modeling of atomic services only. For these reasons, a new method (ComSDM) is proposed in this work for modeling the concept of service-oriented design to increase the reusability and decrease the complexity of system while keeping the service composition considerations in mind. Furthermore, the ComSDM method provides the mathematical representation of the components of service-oriented design using the graph-based theoryto facilitate the design quality measurement. To demonstrate that the ComSDM method is also suitable for composite service design modeling of distributed embedded real-time systems along with enterprise software development, it is implemented in the case study of a smart home. The results of the case study not only check the applicability of ComSDM, but can also be used to validate the complexity and reusability of ComSDM. This also guides the future research towards the design quality measurement such as using the ComSDM method to measure the quality of composite service design in service-oriented software system.

중소규모 SW개발 프로젝트를 위한 시각화 기반의 Tool-Chain 품질관리 방법 제안

Since the concept of software engineering was first used in 1968 by NATO Science Committee, a lot of research work and improvements have been made on software development methodology and software quality control, but they still fall short of ensuring successful development of small and medium scale software systems. Under these circumstances, Center for Software Engineering (CSE) at National IT Industry Promotion Agency(NIPA) has been conducting studies on quality control methodologies of software visualization well-suited for small and medium scale software systems, and also working on the systemization and quantification of software quality control. In this paper, we attempt to scope on the software development management of domestic and foreign small and medium-sized enterprises that are lying in the blind spot, compared to large enterprises with well-organized software development systems. In particular, based on software visualization that CSE is pursuing for small and medium-sized developers, we propose a practical quality control methodology well-suited for small and medium scale projects, and a low-cost quality control management tool by combining open-source quality control tools. Our proposal is expected to induce developers` mind change in SI-specialized small and medium-sized software enterprises, increase their profits and improve customer satisfaction through project quality control.

A Suggested Model to Evaluate Accounting Software for Small Businesses : A Field Study on the Canadian Business Environment

There are an increasing number of small businesses that are transferring their accounting systems into computerized systems. There are several Accounting Software systems available on the market addressing a broad range of needs, company size, and industries. Small businesses could not simply select the appropriate software that fits their needs due to the lack of experienced calibers. Previous research dealt with the process of selecting a software or providing a model for selecting software for large enterprises. In this study, we develop a model that can help small businesses select a new accounting software that is most suitable to fulfill their needs. The model proposes that the selection of accounting software is affected by the needs and constraints of a small business and the essential and esoteric features of the software in the market. The importance and contribution of the esoteric features have been weighed in the model by the expert opinions of Canadian professional accountants.

SAP-Created Niche in Enterprise System Application

SAP SE is a German multinational software corporation that makes enterprise software to manage business operations and customer relations. Headquartered in Walldorf, Germany, with locations in more than 130 countries, SAP SE is the world leader in enterprise software and software-related services. Founded in April 1, 1972, Weinheim, Germany with a group of Founders: Hasso Plattner, Klaus Tschira,Claus Wellenreuther, Dietmar Hopp, Hans-Werner Hector.

The critical success factors (CSFs) for Enterprise Software contract negotiations

Purpose – As the wrong Enterprise Software (ES) acquisition can lead an organization with chronically exceeded budgets and settling for minimum returns, so can an unfavorable contractual agreement. Often the acquiring organizations become vulnerable to risks and mistakes as the software contracts are habitually written using legal terminologies and mainly to the advantage of the vendor. To avoid costly ES contracting mistakes, the purpose of this paper is to empirically identify the critical success factors (CSFs) of contracting in the context of ES acquisition. Design/methodology/approach – A questionnaire survey was conducted to gather the data for this study. Statistical analysis conducted for this study include descriptive statistics, factor analysis with reliability and validity tests and nonparametric test. Findings – The five key factors are: contractual assurance, forward compatibility and licensing; right to use, own and use of own, confidentiality and payment; software acceptance; license assignment; and vendor obligation for intellectual property. The research and managerial implications of these factors are given in discussion. Research limitations/implications – As with most empirical studies, the subjectivity of the opinion of respondents from only two industries presents some limitations to generalization. Another limitation is the respondent has been asked for the degree of criticality for each of the contracting issue given in the questionnaire. There could be critical issues other than the listed ones which are more specific to the organization. Practical implications – The results can be used by managers to improve their understanding on the critical contractual issues in ES acquisition negotiations. Originality/value – The significant value of this study identifies the CSFs for ES contract negotiations while acquiring the software.

Interaction Traces Mining for Efficient System Responses Generation

Software service emulation is an emerging technique for creating realistic executable models of server-side behaviour. It is particularly useful in quality assurance and DevOps, replicating production-like conditions for large-scale enterprise software systems. Existing approaches can automatically build client-server and server-server interaction models of complex software systems directly from analysis of service interaction trace data. However, when these interaction traces become large, searching an entire trace library to generate a run-time responses can become very slow. In this paper we describe a new technique that utilises data mining, specifically clustering algorithms, to pre-process large amounts of recorded interaction trace data. With the obtained clusters we facilitate efficient yet well-formed runtime response generation in our Enterprise System emulation environment. We evaluate our approach using two common application-layer protocols: LDAP and SOAP. Our experimental results show that by utilising clustering techniques in the pre-processing step, the response generation time can be reduced by 99% on average compared with existing approaches.