Some Aspects of Implementing Always-On IT-Solutions and Standards in Banking Sector

The growing competition in the banking sector, resulting in growing demands of the customers, requires from the banks a 24 hour availability of services. The technological development is accompanied by the increase in technologically sophisticated forms of fraud. The answer to these challenges is a more efficient use of information technology. The use of new technologies, besides the defense from unauthorized access into the bank’s information system, abuse of information technology, and damage that can be caused, represents the basis for the new service offer which has an important role in market positioning of the banks. An empirical research was conducted in order to determine the level of influence of the information technology to the payment transactions. The results suggest that the level of influence is important due to the enlargement of product range and communication channels with clients, expense reduction for the costumers and the bank, as well as the increase of the business security.

Collaborative Systems for Decision Making for Disaster Preparedness and Response, Department of Information Systems

Real time collaboration solutions are critical during a large scale emergency situation and necessitate the coordination of multiple disparate groups. Collaborative technologies may be valuable in the planning and execution of disaster preparedness and response. Yet, research suggests that specific collaborative technologies, such as group decision support systems, are not often leveraged for decision-making during real time emergency situations in the United States. In this chapter, we propose a theoretical model of the impact of disaster immediacy and collaboration systems on group processes and outcomes. Using a 3D model of the dimensions of space, time, and situation, we explore media richness and group polarization within the context of collaboration technologies and disaster situations. We also present the next generation of collaboration technology extensions in order to address the need for more contemporary decisional settings. This set of principles and theories suggest how collaborative technologies may be positioned to better manage future disasters.

Risks Evaluation and IT Audit Aspects of Business Intelligence Solutions

Many organizations are struggling with a vast amount of data in order to gain valuable insights and get support in their decision-making process. Decision-making quality depends increasingly on information and the systems that deliver this information. These services are vulnerable and risky from security aspects, and they have to satisfy several requirements, like transparency, availability, accessibility, convenience, and compliance. IT environments are more and more complex and fragmented, which means additional security risks. Business intelligence solutions provide assistance in these complex business situations. Their main goal is to assist organizations to make better decisions. Better decisions means that these solutions support the management of risks, and they have a key role in raising revenue and in reducing cost. The objectives of this chapter are to give an overview of the business intelligence field and its future trends, to demonstrate the most important business intelligence solutions, meanwhile highlighting their risks, business continuity challenges, and IT audit issues. In spite of the fact that this chapter focuses on the business intelligence solutions and their specialities, risk management and the related IT audit approach can be applied for other categories of information systems. IT audit guidelines, best practices, and standards are presented as well, because they give effective tools in controlling process of business intelligence systems.

An Adaptive E-Commerce Architecture for Enterprise Information Exchange

This article contributes to the design of a generic framework for providing a new way to exchange information between enterprises. This concept is a well addressed in the context of B2B standards. Many organizations are increasingly searching for adopting these standards to automate data exchange. But the limit of such models resides in the fact that the content of exchange is defined in several formats which make their use difficult. To overcome this difficulty, we have explored the possibility to integrate new models for describing content involved in B2B transaction which represent a key issue. Our finding establishes the feasibility of integrating product models described by ontology with e-commerce standards especially at the business process level. This article presents a descriptive model allowing partners to exchange information with other organisations without modifying their Information System. The case study also indicates that our system is developed as a Service Oriented Architecture.

Information Supply Chains

Information supply chains (ISCs) take an information-centric view of supply chains, where information is not only used to support supply chain operations, but also to create value for customers and enable business partners to collectively sense and respond to opportunities in a networked ecosystem. Creating value in the ISC involves gathering, organizing, selecting, synthesizing, and distributing information. In so doing, ISCs should provide secure, confidential, reliable, and real time access to heterogeneous information, while ensuring that the right information is delivered to the intended recipients at the right time. In other words, security, information quality, and information lead-time delays are critical performance determinants in ISCs. Recent disaster events such as Hurricane Katrina have highlighted the need for and value of ISCs by exposing the vulnerability of supply chains to demand surges and supply disruptions. Mitigating supply chain vulnerabilities requires a mechanism that allows for continuously sensing the environment, detecting existing or anticipated vulnerabilities, and responding to these vulnerabilities in real time through information sharing and collaboration. This chapter describes how the autonomic computing paradigm can be used to build resilient information supply chains by restructuring the associated relationships, chains, and networks.

Continuous Database Availability

In today’s business environment, it is usual that data relevant to business is stored on different hardware, inside different databases, different data warehouses, inside as well as outside of the organization. Accuracy, quality, timeliness, and especially availability of such distributed data make crucial role in the process of business managing. Now, one of the biggest challenges is to ensure continuous availability of that data, even in critical and disaster situations. This chapter gives a short overview of the most used solutions for database availability that have become industry standards and gives examples of implementation of these standards by, in this moment, three main database vendors: Oracle (Oracle 11g), IBM (DB2 Version 9.5) and Microsoft (SQL Server 2008).

Principles and Experiences

The data requirements of e-business applications have been increased over the years. These applications present an environment for acquiring, processing, and sharing data among interested parties. To manage information in such data-intensive application domain, independent enterprise e-business applications have developed their own solutions to information services. However, these solutions are not interoperable with each other, target vastly different systems, and address diverse sets of requirements. They require greater interoperability to enable communication between different systems, so that they can share and utilize each other’s resources. To address these challenges, we discuss principles and experiences for designing and building of a novel enterprise information system. We introduce a novel architecture for a hybrid information service, which provides unification, federation, and interoperability of major Web-based information services. The hybrid information service is designed as an add-on information system, which interacts with the local information services and assembles their metadata instances under one hybrid architecture. It integrates different information services using unification and federation concepts. In this chapter, we summarize the principles and experiences gained in designing and building the semantics, architecture, and implementation for the hybrid information service.

IT Governance and IT Risk Management Principles and Methods for Supporting 'Always-On' Enterprise Information Systems

Most organizations in all sectors of industry, commerce, and government are fundamentally dependent on their information systems (IS) and would quickly cease to function should the technology (preferably information technology–IT) that underpins their activities ever come to halt. The development and governance of proper IT infrastructure may have enormous implications for the operation, structure, and strategy of organizations. IT and IS may contribute towards efficiency, productivity, and competitiveness improvements of both interorganizational and intraorganizational systems. On the other hand, successful organizations manage IT function in much the same way that they manage their other strategic functions and processes. This, in particular, means that they understand and manage risks associated with growing IT opportunities, as well as critical dependence of many business processes on IT and vice-versa. IT risk management issues are not only marginal or ‘technical’ problems but become more and more a ‘business problem.’ Therefore, in this chapter, a corporate IT risk management model is proposed and contemporary frameworks of IT governance and IT audit explained. Also, it is depicted how to model information systems and supporting IT procedures to meet ‘always-on’ requirements that comes from the business. In fact, a number of IT metrics proposed in the chapter support the alignment of IT Governance activities with business requirements towards IT.

Leagility in Manufacturing and Procurement

A combination of lean and agile concepts, leagility has gained ground in recent years. While it has found widespread applications in the domain of manufacturing, other domains such as procurement can also benefit from the principles of leagility. We study the application of concepts of leagility in PC manufacturing through the case of Dell and based on our experience with a worldwide retailer, we develop a conceptual framework in this paper which can be used as the basis for applying the principles of leagility in the domain of procurement. The framework would be of particular significance to academics as it extends the field of leagility to procurement. At the same time, manufacturing and retail firms can derive benefits by downsizing their inventory using the principles and conceptual framework discussed in this chapter.

Optimization of Enterprise Information Systems through a 'User Involvement Framework in Learning Organizations'

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) today is being adopted by business organizations worldwide with a view to maximize their capabilities. But more often than not the expected outcomes are not delivered due to inaccurate calculations with respect to the organization’s ability to adapt to the change. Although the benefits of enterprise information systems in streamlining the functions of the organization cannot be questioned, preparing the organization to adopt the new system needs more focused efforts. In order to ensure that the existing capabilities of the organizations are an enabler and not an inhibitor in the adoption process, they need to be learning organizations. A study was conducted in Bhilai Steel Plant (BSP), one of the leading steel manufacturing public companies in India, where ERP is to be adopted. In spite of the fact that it has a strong backbone of resources in terms of information technology (IT) infrastructure, the implementation process is virtually on a standstill. In this chapter, an evaluation of the psychological capabilities of the organization is done. This can be evaluated through the mindset of the workforce and the willingness with which they are ready to adopt change.