A Two-Tier Approach to Elicit Enterprise Portal User Requirements

Author(s):  
Eric Tsui

Organizations are increasingly turning to enterprise portals to support knowledge work. Portal deployment can be intradepartmental across several business units in one organization or even inter-organizational. Currently in the industry, most of these portals are purchased solutions (e.g., collaboration and smart enterprise suites) and many of these purchasing and selection decisions are primarily driven by the interest of a small group of stakeholders with strong influence from IT vendors. The true requirements for the portal as well as the strategy for its medium- to long-term phased deployment are, in general, poorly addressed. This, together with other reasons, has lead to many failures or to a low adoption rate of the enterprise portal by staff at various levels of an organization. Common problems that hinder portal adoption include lack of an overall governance model, mis-alignment with business processes, poor or non-existent content management (process, tools, and governance), and technical problems associated with the development and configuration of portlets. This article focuses on one critical issue that directly influences the success of an enterprise portal deployment, namely the correct elicitation of user requirements (which in turn lead to the chosen portal’s features and to the style of the portal interface). Taking into consideration the advancement and landscape of commercial portal vendors in the market, this article discusses a bottom-up approach to the identification of high-level drivers for portal usages for its users.

2008 ◽  
pp. 1812-1821
Author(s):  
Eric Tsui

Organizations are increasingly turning to enterprise portals to support knowledge work. Portal deployment can be intradepartmental across several business units in one organization or even inter-organizational. Currently in the industry, most of these portals are purchased solutions (e.g., collaboration and smart enterprise suites) and many of these purchasing and selection decisions are primarily driven by the interest of a small group of stakeholders with strong influence from IT vendors. The true requirements for the portal as well as the strategy for its medium- to long-term phased deployment are, in general, poorly addressed. This, together with other reasons, has lead to many failures or to a low adoption rate of the enterprise portal by staff at various levels of an organization. Common problems that hinder portal adoption include lack of an overall governance model, mis-alignment with business processes, poor or non-existent content management (process, tools, and governance), and technical problems associated with the development and configuration of portlets. This article focuses on one critical issue that directly influences the success of an enterprise portal deployment, namely the correct elicitation of user requirements (which in turn lead to the chosen portal’s features and to the style of the portal interface). Taking into consideration the advancement and landscape of commercial portal vendors in the market, this article discusses a bottom-up approach to the identification of high-level drivers for portal usages for its users.


Author(s):  
Thomas Hädrich ◽  
Torsten Priebe

Knowledge work can be characterized by a high degree of variety and exceptions, strong communication needs, weakly structured processes, networks and communities, and as requiring a high level of skill and expertise as well as a number of specific practices. Process-oriented knowledge management suggests to focus on enhancing efficiency of knowledge work in the context of business processes. Portals are an enabling technology for knowledge management by providing users with a consolidated, personalized interface that allows accessing various types of structured and unstructured information. However, the design of portals still needs concepts and frameworks to guide their alignment with the context of persons consigned with knowledge-intensive tasks. In this context the concept of knowledge stance is a promising starting point. This paper discusses how knowledge stances can be applied and detailed to model knowledge work and support to support it with semantic context-based portals. We present the results from implementing a portal prototype that deploys Semantic Web technologies to integrate various information sources and applications on a semantic level and discuss extensions to this portal for the support of knowledge stances.


2011 ◽  
Vol 204-210 ◽  
pp. 1051-1056
Author(s):  
Lang Cai Cao ◽  
Jian Luo

With ever-changing and fast-changing in current business environment, traditional business process is more and more incapable to meet the demand to share information, visualize both high-level and detailed process data, track status and expedite business processes. To address these challenges, the visual workflow platform is introduced. As proven by an industrial case, the workflow platform can greatly help business units to improve work efficiency.


Author(s):  
A. Ferrerón Labari ◽  
D. Suárez Gracia ◽  
V. Viñals Yúfera

In the last years, embedded systems have evolved so that they offer capabilities we could only find before in high performance systems. Portable devices already have multiprocessors on-chip (such as PowerPC 476FP or ARM Cortex A9 MP), usually multi-threaded, and a powerful multi-level cache memory hierarchy on-chip. As most of these systems are battery-powered, the power consumption becomes a critical issue. Achieving high performance and low power consumption is a high complexity challenge where some proposals have been already made. Suarez et al. proposed a new cache hierarchy on-chip, the LP-NUCA (Low Power NUCA), which is able to reduce the access latency taking advantage of NUCA (Non-Uniform Cache Architectures) properties. The key points are decoupling the functionality, and utilizing three specialized networks on-chip. This structure has been proved to be efficient for data hierarchies, achieving a good performance and reducing the energy consumption. On the other hand, instruction caches have different requirements and characteristics than data caches, contradicting the low-power embedded systems requirements, especially in SMT (simultaneous multi-threading) environments. We want to study the benefits of utilizing small tiled caches for the instruction hierarchy, so we propose a new design, ID-LP-NUCAs. Thus, we need to re-evaluate completely our previous design in terms of structure design, interconnection networks (including topologies, flow control and routing), content management (with special interest in hardware/software content allocation policies), and structure sharing. In CMP environments (chip multiprocessors) with parallel workloads, coherence plays an important role, and must be taken into consideration.


2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Waqas Ahmed ◽  
Esteban Zimányi ◽  
Alejandro A. Vaisman ◽  
Robert Wrembel

Data warehouses (DWs) evolve in both their content and schema due to changes of user requirements, business processes, or external sources to name a few. Although multiple approaches using temporal and/or multiversion DWs have been proposed to handle these changes, an efficient solution for this problem is still lacking. The authors' approach is to separate concerns and use temporal DWs to deal with content changes, and multiversion DWs to deal with schema changes. To address the former, previously, they have proposed a temporal multidimensional (MD) model. In this paper, they propose a multiversion MD model for schema evolution to tackle the latter problem. The two models complement each other and allow managing both content and schema evolution. In this paper, the semantics of schema modification operators (SMOs) to derive various schema versions are given. It is also shown how online analytical processing (OLAP) operations like roll-up work on the model. Finally, the mapping from the multiversion MD model to a relational schema is given along with OLAP operations in standard SQL.


Author(s):  
Noreen I. Arshad ◽  
Rachelle Bosua ◽  
Simon Milton ◽  
A. Kamil Mahmood ◽  
A. Izuddin Zainal-Abidin ◽  
...  

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-105
Author(s):  
Marco Aurélio de Souza MENDES ◽  
Marcello Peixoto BAX

Abstract Enterprise information architectures still do not deliver all the value that comes from integrating structured and unstructured information. Enterprise Content Management and Business Process Management were developed as autonomous disciplines. Thus, Enterprise Content Management still occurs without formally considering the business processes that generate and manipulate content, while Business Process Management initiatives arise without a documented treatment of materials produced by the processes. The non-integrated approach to these disciplines collaborates to reduce the potential benefits expected in Organizational Change Management programs. In such context, the article discusses the interrelation between Business Process Management and Enterprise Content Management, approaching from a historical view of these disciplines, their conceptual limits, technological support, and dialogues that would benefit both initiatives. The paper contributes to clarify a question still vague in the field of Information Management, which is how to integrate Business Process Management and Enterprise Content Management treating structured and unstructured information in a unified manner. It discusses how to approach this issue in a broad scope of IM by combining the concepts of Enterprise Content Management and Business Process Management. Based on a literature review, the paper analyzes and synthesizes experiences in Enterprise Content Management and Business Process Management acquired in the context of a project carried out in a Power Sector Company. The article reveals problems in separating approaches to Enterprise Content Management and Business Process Management. It shows the importance of an effort for integration and presents three instruments that promote the linkage of the two initiatives, approximating process offices and analysts’ information.


2013 ◽  
Vol 44 (2s) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucia Recchia ◽  
Paolo Boncinelli ◽  
Enrico Cini

In the developing countries populations, which are already vulnerable and food insecure, are likely to be the most seriously affected by the effects of climate change, e.g. yield decreases and price increases for the most important agricultural crops. The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report for Africa describes a trend of warming at a rate faster than the global average and increasing aridity: in many parts of Africa, it seems that warmer climates and changes in precipitation will destabilise agricultural production and aggravates food security. The present work concerns the vegetables cultivation in the Parakou region in Benin, where agriculture employs approximately 70% of the active population and contributes to 36% of the Gross Domestic Product and 88% of export earnings. However, the agricultural sector has been regarded as unproductive with low adaptation capacities because of structural factors (e.g. high level of poverty among rural populations, weak mechanization and intensification of production modes), but also because of natural constraints (e.g. poor management of water and soils, leading to soil degradation). Considering the aridity, the low carbon content and the reduced level of nutrients available in the soil, the use of an hydroponic module has been hypothesised. In this way sufficient yields of the crops may be assured and no agricultural machines will be needed for the tillage operations. In addition, the nutrients can be added to the growing solution using residual materials as poultry manure, ashes and green wastes. In order to verify if some construction or maintenance problems can occur and if a growing solution can be easily obtained using agricultural wastes, some tests have been carried out. Moreover laboratory analyses have been done for different solutions that may be adopted with different shares of water, poultry manure, ashes and green wastes. The tests have indicated that the hydroponic module could be used in Benin without incurring in technical problems and that a growing solution containing poultry manure, ashes and green wastes can supply to the crops a significant amount of nutrients.


2017 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-119
Author(s):  
VICTOR EDWIN COLLAZOS ◽  
HELGA DUARTE AMAYA

Enterprise Architecture (EA) has gained importance in recent years, mainly for its concept of “alignment” between the strategic and operational levels of organizations. Such alignment occurs when Information Technology (IT) is applied correctly and timely, working in synergy and harmony with strategy and the operation to achieve mutually their own goals and satisfy the organizational needs.Both the strategic and operational levels have standards that help model elements necessary to obtain desired results. In this sense, BMM and BPMN were selected because both have the support of OMG and they are fairly well known for modelling the strategic level and operational level, respectively. In addition, i* modeling goal can be used for reducing the gap between these two standards. This proposal may help both the high-level design of the information system and to the appropriate identification of the business processes that will support it.This paper presents a methodology for aligning strategy and the operation based on standards and heuristics. We have made a classification for elements of the models and, for some specific cases, an extension of the heuristics associated between them. This allows us to propose methodology, which uses above-mentioned standards and combines mappings, transformations and actions to be considered in the alignment process.


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