Business Processes In Terms Research Articles

Exploring the relationships between information technology adoption and business process reengineering

AbstractThis study investigates the impacts of information technology on business process reengineering from intra- and extra-organizational perspectives. This research proposes a framework for facilitating business process reengineering efforts towards competitive organizations. The framework was tested using data from a sample of 382 chief information officers or senior information systems managers, each of whom completed a survey. The survey results indicate that organizational innovation, market pressure and competitive intensity positively affect information technology adoption, which in turn trigger changes or business process in terms of workplace, workforce and business structure.

WS-CONTRACT ESTABLISHMENT WITH QOS: AN APPROACH BASED ON FEATURE MODELING

Electronic contracts describe inter-organizational business processes in terms of supply and consumption of electronic services (commonly Web services). The establishment of e-contracts in a particular business domain usually involves a set of well-defined common and variable properties. These properties are not fully exploited by the existing e-contract establishment approaches. Feature modeling is a software engineering technique that has been widely used for capturing and managing commonalities and variabilities of product families in the context of software product line. This paper presents a feature-based approach to support Web services e-contract (WS-contract) establishment. The approach aims at improving the information structure and reuse of WS-contracts, including the QoS attributes. Features are used to represent possible WS-contract elements in order to drive WS-contract template instantiation, thus acting as a configuration space manager. A toolkit named FeatureContract was developed to automatically support the proposed approach. A case study was carried out within the telecom context to show the approach feasibility.

On heuristics, narrative and knowledge management

This article is based on comments delivered by Laurence Pruzak at a meeting of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development at the University of Ottawa in November, 2007. We discuss heuristics of knowledge management and how they close the gap between the theories that drive the academic activity of knowledge management—Prof. de la Mothe's discipline—and the work of practitioners in the field. We do this by providing narrative examples of these basic practices in order to demonstrate the value of narrative itself to the practice of knowledge management. We find that there is trans-disciplinary pedagogic value in narrative form, which enhances our understanding of knowledge management and shapes our approaches to future research in the discipline. On a practical level, these comments rehearse how a historical approach to rhetoric informs contemporary group dynamics and organizational hierarchy; how rhetoric and narrative become factors in the management of information flow and systems, organizational strategy, and leadership; and how they affect our understanding of space, time and emotional investment in work. As knowledge management increases in importance in terms of business processes and advantage, we are increasingly reliant on proxies for measurement and non-empirical skills and behaviors such as judgment, creativity and imagination.

Self-adaptive middleware: Supporting business process priorities and service level agreements

This paper deals with quality of service, defined at the application level, with respect to business constraints expressed in terms of business processes. We present a set of adaptive methods and rules for routing messages in an integration infrastructure which yields a form of autonomic behavior, namely the ability to dynamically optimize the flow of messages in order to comply with SLAs according to business priorities. EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) infrastructures may be seen as component systems that exchange asynchronous messages over an application bus, under the supervision of a processflow engine that orchestrates the messages. The QoS (Quality of Service) of the global IT system is defined and monitored with SLAs (Service Level Agreements) that apply to each business process. The goal of this paper is to propose routing strategies for message handling that maximize the ability of the EAI system to meet these requirements in a self-adaptive and self-healing manner, i.e., its ability to cope with sudden variations of the event flow or temporary failures of a component system. These results are a first contribution towards deployment of autonomic computing concepts into BPM (Business Process Management) architectures. This approach marks a departure from previous approaches in which QoS constraints are pushed to the lower level (e.g., the network). Although the techniques, such as adaptive queuing, are similar, managing QoS at the business process level yields more flexibility and robustness.

Taking it to the next level: Corporate real estate becomes a business process

The corporate real estate provider community is freely using the term business process outsourcing, or ‘BPO’ to differentiate its value propositions. Yet most buyers and sellers have yet to articulate clearly the concept as it pertains to corporate real estate ‐ the value proposition, economic structure, focus and impediments to adoption. This paper defines BPO as it relates to corporate real estate and suggests conditions that must be in place for its adoption.

Application service providers (ASPs): new impetus for transformational change

AbstractApplication service providers (ASPs) are a business phenomenon of the Internet age. The ASP concept offers companies the rewards of best‐in‐class application functionality for a fixed monthly cost and easy usage scalability, thus liberating organizations from technological complexities. In exploring the effectiveness of the ASP model, this paper examines the development of ASPs and also reports the results of a UK study, 178 ASP service purchasers and providers, highlighting the nature and offerings of service providers and the levels of satisfaction with ASP services. It is argued that the ASPs' potential to induce transformational change in terms of business processes and thus on the total enterprise is extensive. Also, by highlighting concerns with current ASP services, the paper concludes on an optimistic note emphasizing a favourable outlook for ASPs in the future. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Architectural design support for business process and business network engineering

Concurrent enterprises and networks of business processes cannot function without each other. Cooperation in networks allows for faster reaction to business opportunities. Cooperation requires that the business processes and information technology (IT) systems within and between companies are well aligned with the demands their environment puts upon them. This requires a careful and effective analysis and design of business processes from a customer-to-customer perspective. Moreover, the introduction of IT for effective business network operations and coordination will only function in a predictable way when one has an accurate (design) model of the interaction and cooperation in the network. Therefore, a good model is essential. In this paper, we show how the modelling and analysis principles we developed for business process engineering can be used in business network engineering. We also introduce a visual design studio developed for this purpose. This visual design studio enables business process engineers to capture and analyse both structural and behavioural aspects of (networks of) business processes in terms of models without having actually to build these processes first. Models created with this visual design studio can be analysed and reconfigured on the basis of various business scenarios and perspectives and/or new technological possibilities. In the same way, the strategic benefit of IT for business processes and networks can be analysed and demonstrated. We furthermore discuss the additional endeavours confronted within business network engineering projects in contrast to business process engineering.

Measuring the Economic Value of Information Systems

The determination of value of information or information systems is a basic issue for information management. In order to solve it several questions must be answered like: what is the object of valuation; how is value defined and measured; and what constitutes a coherent and usable method for valuation. In this paper an approach is outlined that combines the information commodity approach, activity-based costing, and graph modelling. The first is used to define the object of analysis (an information commodity) and the nature of value (the demand value at the marketplace). The third allows the modelling of business processes in terms of activities and cost relations between activities. The second enables the assignment of costs to activities modelled in the graph. Together they constitute a coherent and usable method for determining the value of IS. This is illustrated by means of a case study.

Measuring the economic value of information systems

The determination of value of information or information systems is a basic issue for information management. In order to solve it several questions must be answered like: what is the object of valuation; how is value defined and measured; and what constitutes a coherent and usable method for valuation. In this paper an approach is outlined that combines the information commodity approach, activity-based costing, and graph modelling. The first is used to define the object of analysis (an information commodity) and the nature of value (the demand value at the marketplace). The third allows the modelling of business processes in terms of activities and cost relations between activities. The second enables the assignment of costs to activities modelled in the graph. Together they constitute a coherent and usable method for determining the value of IS. This is illustrated by means of a case study.