Data Warehouse Support for Policy Enforcement Rule Formulation

It is believed that a data warehouse is for operational decision making. Recently, a proposal was made to support decision making for formulating policy enforcement rules that enforce policies. These rules are expressed in the WHEN-IF-THEN form. Guidelines are proposed to elicit two types of actions, triggering actions that cause the policy violation and the corresponding correcting actions. The decision-making problem is that of selecting the most appropriate correcting action in the event of a policy violation. This selection requires information. The elicited information is unstructured and is “early.” This work is extended by proposing a method to directly convert early information into its multi-dimensional form. For this, an early information mode is proposed. The proposed conversion process is a fully automated one. Further, the tool support is extended to accommodate the conversion process. The authors also apply the method to a health domain.

Improving Application Integration by Combining Services and Resources

The main application integration approaches, the service-oriented architecture (SOA) and representational state transfer (REST) architectural styles, are rather different in their modeling paradigm, forcing application developers to choose between one and the other. In addition, both introduce more application coupling than required, since data schemas need to be common, even if not all instantiations of those schemas are used. This chapter contends that it is possible to improve this scenario by conceiving a new architectural style, structural services, which combines services and resources to reduce the semantic gap with the applications, allowing to tune the application integration between pure service-based and pure resource-based, or an intermediate mix. Unlike REST, resources are not constrained to offer a fixed set of operations, and unlike SOA, services are allowed to have structure. In addition, compliance is used to reduce coupling to the bare minimum required by the actually used application features.

Exploring Business Process Agility From the Designer's Perspective

Business process agility remains an intriguing issue for business process management (BPM) when it comes to modeling human-centric processes. Several attempts were made from academia to find alternative approaches, with the reputable adaptive case management to be introduced recently as an alternative to BPM methodology and case management modeling and notation (CMMN) standard, as an alternative language of business process management notation (BPMN), targeting the modeling of human-centric processes characterized by agility. This chapter identifies the nature of human-centric processes, as its main objective is to examine whether using CMMN for the design and modeling of such processes could cover their agility requirements.

Enterprise 4.0

Enterprise 4.0 is already referred to as the next stage of the evolution of global business and the global economy. This wave is achieved by technology enablers often referred as digital transformation (DT). Social media represent a subset of these technologies which contribute to organizational transformation. However, the adoption of social media does not imply such a transformation; changes in the organization's culture and behavior are also needed. While the technology enablers allow the production, sharing, and management of information and knowledge within the organization they also require the updating of the supporting information systems (IS). Thus, using technologies in organizations requires an exercise in understanding how to demonstrate their usefulness in relation to the creation, access, and sharing of contents and IS improvements in a safe way. To this end, this chapter envisages a new context of labor faced within DT of organizations, largely boosted by the organizational adoption of social media, and which the authors propose to be implemented through the m_CSDIT framework.

On the Rim Between Business Processes and Software Systems

The constant change and rising complexity of organizations, mainly due to the transforming nature of their business processes, has driven the increase of interest in business process management by organizations. It is recognized that knowing business processes can help to ensure that the software under development will meet the business needs. Some of software development processes (like unified process) already refer to business process modeling as a first effort in the software development process. A business process model usually is created under the supervision, clarification, approval, and validation of the business stakeholders. Thus, a business process model is a proper representation of the reality (as is or to be), having lots of useful information that can be used in the development of the software system that will support the business. The chapter uses the information existing in business process models to derive software models specially focused in generating a data model.

Context-Based Handling of Mobile Process Activities

Process technology constitutes a crucial component of information systems. In this context, high flexibility is required as business functions must be quickly adaptable to cope with dynamic business changes. As recent developments allow for the use of mobile devices in knowledge-intensive areas, it is often demanded to enhance process-aware information systems with mobile activity support. In general, the technical integration of this activity type with existing process management technology is challenging. For example, protocols governing the communication between mobile devices and process management systems must be adapted. If a mobile context shall be additionally considered, the integration gets even more complex. However, the use of a mobile context offers advantages. For example, the mobile activity execution time may be decreased if mobile activities are only assigned to those users whose location is beneficial. This chapter proposes an approach to enable the robust handling of single process activities on mobile devices based on a mobile process model.

Supporting Participation in Online Social Networks

Social networking systems can be considered one of the most important social phenomena because they succeeded in involving billions of people all around the world and in attracting users from several social groups, regardless of age, gender, education, or nationality. Social networking systems blur the distinction between the private and working spheres, and users are known to use such systems both at home and at the work place both professionally and with recreational goals. Social networking systems can be equally used to organize a work meeting, a dinner with the colleagues, or a birthday party with friends. In the vast majority of cases, social networking platforms are still used without corporate blessing. However, several traditional information systems, such as CRMs and ERPs, have also been modified in order to include social aspects. This chapter discusses the participation in online social networking activities and, in particular, the technologies that support and promote the participation in online social network.

Practical Guidance in Achieving Successful Change Management in Information System Environments

Situations such as improvements in business transaction processing and various security issues keep today's information systems in a constant state of change. Serious disruption of company operations can occur when changes are improperly planned and/or carried out. In addition to technological issues, an equally important consideration is in regard to how information system changes will affect organizational personnel. The Institute of Internal Auditors has identified seven steps that can be used to effectively implement change in an information system environment. This along with a discussion of significant issues in managing system patches provides an appropriate background to consider a model for evaluating the maturity of an organization's change management process in an information system environment. The highly respected COBIT guidance from the ISACA is included throughout much of the discussion to provide support for many of the suggested change management practices.

Evolution of ArchiMate and ArchiMate Models

Models are a fundamental aspect of enterprise architecture, as they capture the concepts and relationships that describe the essentials of the different enterprise domains. These models are tightly coupled to an enterprise architecture modeling language that defines the rules for creating and updating such models. In the model-driven engineering field, these languages are formalized as meta-models. Over time, to keep up with the need to capture a more complex reality in their enterprise architecture models, organizations need to enrich the meta-model and, consequently, migrate the existing models. Model migration poses a strenuous modeling effort with the gathering of enterprise data and model redesign, leading to an error-prone and time-consuming task. In this chapter, the authors present a catalog of co-evolution operations for enabling automation of ArchiMate model migration based on a set of meta-model changes.

Managing Variability as a Means to Promote Composability

Complex systems usually have to deal with a huge number of potential situations and contingencies. Therefore, a mechanism is required that enables the expression of variability at design-time so that it can be efficiently resolved at run-time. As composability plays an increasingly relevant role in building systems in an economic way, variability management should also contribute to and be taken into account in terms of composability. This chapter presents a variability management workflow aimed at supporting different developer roles in an ecosystem context. Two kinds of variability are addressed: in system operation and associated with quality of service. The former provides robustness to contingencies, while the latter focuses on the quality of the application (in terms of non-functional properties) under changing situations and limited resources. The concepts introduced in this chapter conform to the structures and principles of the H2020 European Project RobMoSys, which consolidates composability in the robotics domain.