This paper proposes an innovative framework for knowledge management in service-oriented systems. An important novelty of our framework is that it allows for automatic instance level evolution of the ...knowledge base and that it integrates conceptual level knowledge base evolution with the overall service-oriented system framework. In the paper, we identify several opportunities that have arisen in the field of knowledge management with the wider acceptance of SOA and its technology stack, and we present a framework that addresses these opportunities. We focus on ontology-based knowledge management systems, which have become one of the most important technologies for implementation of knowledge management systems. The framework reduces the required input for knowledge management by knowledge engineers, increases information completeness in the knowledge base and provides a simple way for storing more up-to-date information in the knowledge base.
Due to more and more demanding requirements for business flexibility and agility, automation of end-to-end industrial processes has become an important topic. Systems supporting business process ...execution need to enable automated tasks execution as well as integrate human performed tasks (human tasks) into a business process. In this paper, we focus on collaboration tasks, which are an important type of composite human tasks. We propose a service-oriented architectural framework describing a service responsible for human task execution (Human task service), which not only implements collaboration tasks but also improves their execution by automated and semi-automated decision making and collaboration based on ontologies and agent technology. The approach is very generic and can be used for any type of business processes. A case study was performed for a human task intensive business process from an electric power transmission domain.
Agile software development projects often manage user requirements with models that are called user stories. Every good user story has to be independent, negotiable, valuable, estimable, small, and ...testable. A proper understanding of a user story also requires an understanding of its dependencies. The lack of explicit representation of such dependencies presumably leads to missing information regarding the context of a user story.
We propose a method that facilitates better understanding of execution order and integration dependencies of user stories by making use of business process models. The method associates user stories with the corresponding business process model activity element.
We adopted a situational method engineering approach to define our proposed method. In order to provide understanding of proposed method's constructs we used ontological concepts. Our method associates a user story to an activity element. In this way, the business process model can be used to infer information about the execution order and integration dependencies of the user story. We defined three levels of association granularity: a user story can be more abstract, approximately equal to, or more detailed than its associated business process model activity element. In our experiment we evaluate each of these three levels.
Our experiment uses a between-subject design. We applied comprehension, problem-solving and recall tasks to evaluate the hypotheses. The statistical results provide support for all of the hypotheses. Accordingly, there appears to be significantly greater understanding of the execution order and integration dependencies of user stories when associated business process models are available.
We addressed a problem which arises from managing user stories in software development projects and focuses on the missing context of a user story. Our method contributes to the discipline of conceptual modeling in agile development. Our experiment provides empirical insight into requirement dependencies.
Eliciting user stories is a major challenge for agile development approaches. Conceptual models are used to support the identification of user stories and increase their understanding. In many ...companies, existing model documentation stored as either use cases or BPMN models is available. However, these two types of business process models might not be equally effective for elicitation tasks due to their formats.
We address the effectiveness of different elicitation tasks when supported either with visual or textual conceptual model. Since the agile literature shows little attention to reusing existing BPMN documentation, we propose several hypotheses to compare it to the use of textual use case models.
We conducted an experiment to compare the effectiveness of the two business process formats: textual use cases and visual BPMN models. We studied their effects on three elicitation tasks: identifying user stories and understanding their execution-order and integration dependencies.
The subjects better understood execution-order dependencies when visual input in the form of BPMN models was provided. The performance of the other two tasks showed no statistical differences.
We addressed an important problem of user story elicitation: which informationally equivalent model (visual BPMN or textual use case) is more effective when identifying and understanding user stories.
The field of enterprise architectures lacks architecture patterns that would support analysis of a given enterprise architecture, comparison of different enterprise architecture solutions and provide ...guidelines for development of a target enterprise architecture based on the analysis of existing enterprise architecture. In this paper, we focus on business process support analysis using information derived from enterprise architecture description. We give a systematic overview of important aspects. We establish and formally define foundational enterprise architecture patterns for business process support analysis. They are implementation independent and enable more efficient qualitative architecture analysis of business process support, which is the basis for achieving more optimal business operation. We have defined the patterns using the standard enterprise architecture language – ArchiMate. They are formalized in a way that enables their implementation in enterprise architecture tools. This is an important characteristic that allows for efficient work by automatic detection of different, more or less suitable, architecture structures. We have derived the patterns based on real-world enterprise architecture descriptions and have used and verified them in enterprise architecture analysis and planning projects for four large organizations. The enterprise architecture analysis patterns address an important research issue in the field of enterprise architectures that has so far not been systematically researched.
Decision support is one of the main objectives of ontology-based knowledge management systems. However, there is no standard method that would define how to model decisions in ontologies. Despite ...many research efforts and established methods for decision modelling and support, they have not yet been systematically applied to the field of ontologies. This paper proposes an ontology based multi-criteria decision making method that enables one to define decision models using ontology as the base construct. It structures decision models in such a way that the problem solution can be obtained by reasoning upon the ontology. We propose a generic approach that can be applied to an arbitrary domain. The proposed method is based on qualitative multi-criteria decision making, which is applied to the field of ontologies. OWL is used as the ontology representation language. As a proof of concept we have developed an ontology-based decision support system for an electric power transmission company. The proposed method represents an important step forward in the field of ontologies. Its main advantages are: a higher level of decision support provided by the ontology, direct use of information captured in ontology for decision making, a higher level of business process automation, and reuse of decision model concepts in definitions of more complex ontology concepts.
Critical success and failure factors of software projects were extensively studied. However, software project risk management has rarely researched organizational risks even though most problems ...occur when the social aspects are not addressed. By employing the resistance to change theory, our paper develops an organizational risk diagnosing (ORD) framework in order to show how can organizational risks be better understood and managed. Organizational risk factors may have non-trivial underlying root causes. A failure to diagnose them may result in ineffective risk responses that address the symptoms. A case study of a loan application software project has been conducted in one of the biggest banks in South-Eastern Europe. An analysis of the risk management process in the studied case allows a better understanding of organizational risk management.
•Hardly detectable root causes may be underlying organizational risks in software projects.•Discussing various stakeholder views helps diagnosing organizational risks.•Checklists alone may not be effective for managing organizational risks.•Defined the difference between “user resistance” and “stakeholder resistance”.•A novel resistance checklist based on extant research.
Business rules are evidently important for organisations as they describe how they are doing business. Their value has also been recognised within the information system (IS) domain, mostly because ...of their ability to make applications flexible and amenable to change. In this paper, we propose a methodology that helps business people and developers to keep business rules at the business level inline with the rules that are implemented at the system level. In contrast to several existing approaches that primarily focus on business rules in the scope of an application, our methodology addresses the entire IS of an organisation. The paper also describes requirements for a tool support that would be appropriate to support the methodology.
Both practitioners and researchers agree that if software development methods were more adjustable to project-specific situations, this would increase their use in practice. Empirical investigations ...show that otherwise methods exist just on paper while in practice developers avoid them or do not follow them rigorously. In this paper we present an approach that deals with this problem. Process Configuration, as we named the approach, tells how to create a project-specific method from an existing one, taking into account the project circumstances. Compared to other approaches that deal with the creation of project-specific methods, our approach tends to be more flexible and easier to implement in practice as it introduces few simplifications. The proposed approach is practice-driven, i.e. it has been developed in cooperation with software development companies.
This paper proposes an innovative framework for knowledge management in service-oriented systems. An important novelty of our framework is that it allows for automatic instance level evolution of the ...knowledge base and that it integrates conceptual level knowledge base evolution with the overall service-oriented system framework. In the paper, we identify several opportunities that have arisen in the field of knowledge management with the wider acceptance of SOA and its technology stack, and we present a framework that addresses these opportunities. We focus on ontology-based knowledge management systems, which have become one of the most important technologies for implementation of knowledge management systems. The framework reduces the required input for knowledge management by knowledge engineers, increases information completeness in the knowledge base and provides a simple way for storing more up-to-date information in the knowledge base.
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