Information System Development

This chapter discusses the idea that even though information systems development (ISD) approaches have long advocated the use of integrated organisational views, the modelling techniques used have not been adapted accordingly and remain focused on the automated information system (IS) solution. Existing research provides evidence that business process simulation (BPS) can be used at different points in the ISD process to provide better-integrated organisational views that aid the design of appropriate IS solutions. Despite this fact, research in this area is not extensive; suggesting that the potential of using BPS for the ISD process is not yet well understood. The paper uses the findings from three different case studies to illustrate the ways BPS has been used at different points in the ISD process, especially in the area of requirements engineering. It compares the results against IS modelling techniques, highlighting the advantages and disadvantages that BPS has over the latter. The research necessary to develop appropriate BPS tools and give guidance on their use in the ISD process is discussed.

Motivational Aspects of Legitimate Internet File Sharing and Piracy

This chapter examines potential and active customers’ intrinsic and extrinsic values associated with selected legal, ethical, and economic impacts of file sharing, especially in relationship to potential impacts on customer relationship management (CRM). The pros and cons of file sharing are highlighted in a conceptual model and empirically tested through graphical and statistical analysis through hypothesis testing, via factor analysis and principal component analysis (PCA) techniques. Recommendations on the potential growth of file-sharing industry, through the lens of price, competition, increased selection, and regulation, are included. These file sharing topics, issues, and concerns will have a variety of impact on potential and active customers, businesses, and strategic leveraging of CRM. The success of the P2P industry will depend on several important issues: copyright protection, communications infrastructure, and innovative pricing and payments strategies.

Behavioral Aspects in Strategic Transformation of Organizations

Since behavioral and cultural factors play a major role in organizational transformation, IT managers must understand both the business requirements and human behavioral aspects in implementing large scale IT systems. This chapter stresses on behavioral issues, particularly how human behavior impacts on transforming organizations through implementing large IT systems such as ERP systems. The current business environment is forcing IT managers to use more and more “collective thinking power,” generated by team activities, to make strategic decisions, or even to run day-to-day operations. Here we focus on broader issues managed through people’s cooperation and efforts.

Measuring of Web Performance as Perceived by End-Users

Users perceive good Internet performance as characterized by low latency, high throughput, and high availability. When browsing the Web, users are concerned with the performance of entire pages. Understanding and identifying the sources of the performance problems is a very important issue, especially for e-business. Therefore, there is the need to have a service for testing and measuring e-business Web site performance from the perspective of the end-users. We present our contribution in this area, that is, the Wing free service that has been developed for the purpose of Web transaction visualization. Our Web client that probes a target Web site is a real Web browser (MS IE), so the user can observe how a particular browser uses the network. Such known tools use their own Web browsing methods. Therefore, the solutions can be different from that used by real browsers and the results can be inadequate. Wing helps identify inefficient network usage by the browser and helps to tune Web pages to use the network efficiently. Therefore, Wing can be a good analysis tool for Web page and network application developers. Wing was used in an extensive study of WUTs Web access characteristics using statistical and data mining analysis methods. We also introduce the MWING system, which is based on our experiences from Wing project. MWING is a generic automated distributed multiagent-based measurement framework for running different measurement, testing and diagnosing tasks related to Internet; for example, in Internet topology discovering, Web benchmarking, or Grid services performance studies. One of possible agents can be Winglike agents downloading different Web pages in periodic experiments from many agent locations.

Development of Intelligent Equipment Diagnosis and Maintenance System using JESS

In modern manufacturing organizations, tasks of equipment and facility maintenance are complex and often geographically dispersed due to enterprise globalization. Diagnosing modern equipment breakdown requires considerable expertise and collaboration among equipment users and technical experts. Therefore, an intelligent diagnosis and maintenance system is necessary to support agile production and collaborative equipment maintenance in real time. This chapter focuses on describing the development of a rule-based intelligent equipment trouble-shooting and maintenance platform using JAVA Expert System Shell (JESS) technology. A prototype system is designed and developed combining rule-based knowledge system and inference engine to support real time collaborative equipment maintenance across geographical boundary. The main modules of the system include diagnosis knowledge management, project or case management and system administration. The knowledge management module consists of key functions such as knowledge type definition, knowledge component definition, document definition, mathematical model definition, rule and rule-set management. The project management module has key functions such as project definition, project’s role management, project’s function management and project’s rule-set execution. Further, a thin-film transistor liquid-crystal display (TFT-LCD) production equipment diagnosis and maintenance system is designed and implemented to demonstrate the intelligent maintenance capability. The prototype system enhances agility of TFT-LCD collaborative manufacturing processes with real time equipment diagnosis and maintenance.

The Next Generation of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Metrics

Adopting a focus on CRM has been an industry standard for nearly two decades. While evidence exists that a majority of the attempts to implement CRM systems fail, there is a surprising lack of understanding as to why. The authors contend that the limitations of mostly internally-focused, marketingbased, efficiency-oriented CRM metrics has hindered both the understanding of why CRM systems often fail as well as led to the perception of failed CRM implementations. Only through the development, application and use of CRM metrics can organizations hope to better understand CRM implementations or achieve their CRM goals. To make matters more difficult, the growing capabilities of CRM applications over the past few years has been raising the expectations and sophistication of customers. A new generation of CRM metrics is needed—a generation of relevant, enterprise-wide, and customer-centric metrics. This next generation of CRM metrics is discussed in detail.

Organizational Readiness to Adopt ERP

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are now being implemented in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This chapter presents the results of a study that proposes and validates a framework for evaluating the level of readiness for ERP adoption in manufacturing SMEs. The framework conceptualizes readiness to adopt an ERP as including four dimensions: the organizational context, external forces, perception of ERP, and business processes. A field study of eleven manufacturing SMEs was conducted. The framework led to the classification of these firms in three clusters: “committed adopters” (4 firms), “uncommitted adopters” (5 firms), and “late adopters” (2 firms).

A Component-Based Tool Architecture for Performance Modeling and Optimization

Most of the available modeling and simulation tools for performance analysis do not support model optimization sufficiently. One reason for this unsatisfactory situation is the lack of universally applicable and adaptive optimization strategies. Another reason is that modeling and simulation tools usually have a monolithic software design, which is difficult to extend with experimentation functionality. Such functionality has gained in importance in recent years due to the capability of an automatic extraction of valuable information and knowledge out of complex models. One of the most important experimentation goals is to find model parameter settings, which produce optimal model behaviour. In this chapter we elaborate on the design of a powerful optimization component and its integration into existing modeling and simulation tools. For that purpose we propose a hybrid integration approach being a combination of loose document- based and tight invocation- based integration concepts. Beside the integration concept for the optimization component we also give a detailed insight into the applied optimization strategies.

Design and Development of ISO 9001

Among all quality strategies, quality information system (QIS) is the one that finds comparatively little recognition among the quality engineering professionals. The situation is different in the general management arena, where management professionals are striving to attain core competence of organizations through the implementation of management information systems (MIS). On realizing this trend and anticipating tremendous benefits, a research project has been started with the objective of developing a QIS compatible to ISO 9001:2000. In this chapter, the quality management information system (QMIS) that has been designed by referring to clause 4 of ISO 9001:2000 has been reported. After designing this QMIS, its development in a real time environment was examined by conducting a study at an ISO 9001:2000 certified high technology oriented company. Also, a validation study was conducted by gathering the opinions and assessment of the managing partner of the company on QMIS. These studies revealed the feasibility and possibility of implementing QMIS in ISO 9001:2000 certified companies. The details of this work are presented in this paper.

The Critical Success Factors Across ERP Implementation Processes

It is very important to identify what are the key factors across different steps within enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation models. This study consists of two phases. The first phase involves a questionnaire survey among experienced ERP consultants in order to identify the key successful factors of each step within ERP implementation models. In the second phase, experienced ERP consultants are interviewed to examine why these factors are important at each of the implementation steps and what are the difficulties of using Western ERP implementation models in China. The results suggest that ERP implementation is likely to be more successful if ERP implementation models address implementation challenges and leverages. This study provides guidance to ERP consultants on how to utilize their limited resources by considering these factors at each step within the ERP implementation models.