MIS in the Service Factory of the Future

This chapter deals with Management Information Systems situated in a futuristic context, namely that of a “service factory” of the future. The vision of such a service factory is to become a major driver for the large-scale exploitation of multi-agent information processing technologies, e.g. the manufacturing sector in a service-oriented view, and explore the potential of the “production as a service” approach as both an enabler and a catalyst towards the realisation of intelligent and environmentally conscious factories. In the chapter, the author presents the service factory concept and analyses its potential business impact. The chapter includes two appendices related to the real world validation of the concept with members of the industrial community.

MIS Applications in Emerging Areas and Novel Business Domains

This chapter is dedicated to the examination of a case study related to the efficient management of waste. It is commonplace that industrial activities have created serious ecological problems, and even though there are different philosophies and approaches to resolving these problems, it is necessary to organize business activities along ecologically sound principles. Waste management in this chapter refers to the widest concept of organizing, handling, transporting, recycling, and disposing responsibly of all types of waste generated by companies. Building of W-MIS, i.e. Waste-Management Information System, is a key issue, because every business activity produces some waste, either hazardous or polluting to the environment.

Open Source Supply Chains

This chapter deals with an ambitious Management Information System goal: the creation of open source supply chains. It starts with some basics and background for the open (source) supply chains, discusses relevant architectures and modelling work, proceeds to an analysis of real-world business cases and the related application scenarios, and presents an open source reference model. In current e-commerce frameworks, the issue of dynamic supply chain establishment and supply chain life cycle management is still misrepresented and not addressed adequately. Registration, advertisement, and change management for complex products and services heavily relies on proprietary application programming interfaces and protocols as well as emerging and partially competing (pseudo)standards.

Essentials of Management Information Systems

This first chapter deals with some essentials of Management Information Systems. The main concern here is, from the corporate perspective, on a broader interpretation over time, and it may be necessary to know before proceeding to the purchase of a new MIS how the actual implementation and uptake of the new system will look like. The chapter also elaborates on a non-exhaustive list of key issues that are relevant and connected with the notion of a Management Information System. The author also makes a quite interesting examination of a business case dealing with the introduction of an MIS to support independent film makers.

Grounding Theories for Building Robust Corporate Management Information Systems

What kind of software tool would people ideally like to use in order to facilitate a collaborative decision-making process in order to arrive at the best decision, in the shortest possible amount of time, with the strongest support by as many members of the group as possible, while also enabling new members of the group to easily understand why a certain decision was made one way and not another, even after several months or even years later? This chapter presents some grounding theories for building robust corporate management Information Systems. The chapter presents a theoretical analysis of what can be encountered nowadays within modern organisations, which relates with multiple reality decision-making. The author also discusses theoretical and practical aspects related with the Management Information System contexts and the Management Information System interactions of corporate decision-making.

MIS Infrastructure to Support Business Process and Operations Outsourcing

This chapter deals with Management Information System infrastructures and how they can be organised to better support business process and operations outsourcing. The author examines the outsourcing potential for development in the area of Management Information Systems, and continues presenting a truly innovative platform that has been developed, the PANDA platform, which makes use of a sophisticated mechanism to deal with reputation matters within multi-vendor establishments. More specifically, the PANDA system is a B2B Web platform targeting to serve e-collaborations among IT service providers in a cost-efficient way (i.e. of component-based enterprise software solutions). It aims at (intelligently) automating collaborations among an international open community of IT companies and IT service providers that support various vendors’ solutions of enterprise software.

Doing Business on the Globalised Networked Economy

This chapter deals with the realisation of business transactions on the globalised networked economy; technology and business challenges for accounting Information Systems are discussed, and the chapter presents an environmental accounting infrastructure. Accounting services will definitely constitute the future of our global economies – as they always have in all levels, but now, the difference is that this dominance of accounting services shall be evident and apparent in all levels of the society and the economy. This means that the emergence of the accounting service science as an independent branch of the accounting discipline that will be taught, studied, researched, and examined, shall take place. For sure, this is not a novelty; management (and traditional) accounting experienced, at some point of their lifetime, their transformation from a profession into a science.

MIS Case for Use in Archaeology

This chapter presents a business case for use of a Management Information System in the domain of archaeology, aiming to specifically unify existing practices and models to assist archaeological excavations from all practical perspectives: reduce time, minimise costs, improve personnel recruiting and assignments, et cetera. The work goes through experiences gained from the planning and implementation of an ambitious research venture aimed at developing a visually enhanced, unified access to data, information, processes, and the related content of archaeological excavations in situ. Such content is distributed among various excavations all over the world, thematically related, providing access to archaeology visitors, students, and archaeologists (practitioners, professionals, academicians, and researchers).

Scenes from the Future

This final chapter presents some scenes from the future in terms of elaborating on the reflections from the service factory workshops presented in the previous chapter. Here, the author focuses on five application scenarios and tries to shed light on a variety of methodological, organisational, human-related factors, and business aspects. The selected areas include: (1) problem solving in complex product development projects, (2) collaborative authoring, publishing and delivery of multimedia content, (3) individual learning and corporate content management in industry, (4) knowledge sharing and management in professional virtual communities, and lastly, (5) augmented reality and experiential systems for use in remote and rural areas.

Using Mission-Specific MIS Infrastructures

This chapter focuses on something that has unfortunately drawn little attention in the past, but is expected to garner more and more interest in the years to follow, namely mission-specific Management Information Systems and the underlying Management Information System infrastructures. Managerial/organizational information needs and the role of Management Information Systems in business organizations have been studied from one side only: formalizing the functions and defining typologies of operations. This (wrong) approach still dominates the field despite the fact that such type of MIS covers only less than 5 or 10 per cent of the interactions and communications amongst the employees and the management of a commercial business or an organization. This chapter examines two example cases related with the building of a conceptual framework for the study of research ecosystems and the measuring of government innovation within the countries of the European Union.