Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

The direct banking business is characterized by integrated distribution channel politics and holistic sales approaches combined with multi-channel-management. Direct banks in Europe and especially in Germany are currently facing increasing market competition. The crucial factors for growth are product innovation, cost control and the flexibility to react individually to each customer in a rapidly changing business environment. In order to compete, direct banks are forced to undergo a drastic transformation of business processes as well as organizational and managerial structures. The application of new concepts in building information systems is therefore necessary in order to further support business needs and allow for the management and adaptation of systems that are dependent on the fast changing market requirements. This paper shows how the information technology (IT) landscape of one of the five leading direct banks in Germany could be optimized by means of a service-based orientation. The case outlined in this paper focuses on the customer service domain. The main goal is to concurrently reduce costs by automating business processes and to increase the quality of customer services. A reference model for these customer service processes is then introduced. Based on this model, this paper describes a business component-oriented system architecture according to identified business components, and their corresponding services.

The Internet has become the major platform for future inter-organizational knowledge-based applications. There is a need for knowledge modeling and processing techniques to perform event management and rule processing in such a distributed environment. We present an Event-Trigger-Rule (ETR) model, which differs from the conventional ECA rule model in that events and rules can be defined and managed independently by different people/organizations at different sites. Triggers are specifications that link distributed events with potentially complex structures of distributed rules to capture semantically rich and useful knowledge. Triggers can also be specified by different people/organizations in a distributed environment. Based on the ETR model, we have implemented an ETR Server that can be installed at multiple sites over the Internet. The ETR Server provides platform inde-pendence, extensibility, processing of event histories and rule structures, dynamic rule change at run-time, and Web-based GUI tools. The ETR Model and the implemented ETR Server can support various inter-organizational collaborative knowledge-based applications such as a Web-based negotiation system, supply chains, dynamic workflow management system, Knowledge Networks, and transnational information system.

Location Based services (LBS) is a recent concept that integrates a mobile device’s location with other information in order to provide added value to a user. Although Location Based Services provide users with much comfortable information, there are some complex issues. One of the most important issue is managing and sharing heterogeneous and numerous data in decentralized environments. The problem makes interoperability among LBS middleware, LBS contents providers, and LBS applications difficult. In this paper, we propose Semantic LBS Model as one of the solution to resolve the problem. Semantic LBS Model is a LBS middleware model that includes a data model for LBS POI information and its processing mechanism based on Semantic Web technologies. Semantic LBS Model provide rich expressiveness, interoperability, flexibility, and advanced POI retrieval services by associating POI Description Language (POIDL) ontology with heterogeneous domain specific ontologies.

Inter-organizational business cooperations can be described from different viewpoints each fulfilling a specific purpose. Since all viewpoints describe the same system they must not contradict each other, thus, must be consistent. Consistency can be checked based on common semantic concepts of the different viewpoints. This is sufficient for equal concepts, while weakly related concepts, e.g. related to runtime behavior of viewpoints, have to be considered explicitly. In this paper we identify dynamic consistency issues correlated to the runtime behavior between value and coordination viewpoints on behalf of an example. In particular, an issue class on occurrence estimations of execution options and an issue class on granularity differences in modelling are identified and illustrated.

This paper introduces “PROMONT”, a project management ontology. PROMONT models project management specifications from a number of sources, most notably the upcoming DIN 69901 model for the exchange of project data. As a reference ontology it helps to build a common understanding of project related terms and methods thus facilitating the management of projects conducted in dynamic virtual environments. It is especially well suited for cross-enterprise project related business processes such as integration management, communication and controlling. A distributed project scenario is used to illustrate how a project plan is broken down for individual partners, and how activities are coordinated in a heterogeneous group.

This paper discusses the importance of software process improvement in a virtual environment where several organizations are cooperatively involved in the development of a software product, each one using its own development process. The main focus of the paper is a methodology, called Process and Project Alignment Methodology, to improve the development process of a single organization based on projects knowledge. However, the authors believe that the same fundaments can be applied in a virtual organization and discuss the extension of the presented methodology to a virtual organizational context.

In the domain of business-to-business (B2B) collaboration, companies are pursuing the objective of electronically linking their business processes for improving their supply chains. For creating such inter-organizational collaboration, intra- and inter-organizational knowledge workers (IKWs) function as assisting experts. However, IKWs must not constantly ”reinvent the wheel” but should instead be supported by a repository that contains knowledge about how to design business processes. Thus, this paper proposes the support of IKWs by a pattern repository for the effective and efficient design of inter-organizational business processes. A pattern is conceptually formulated knowledge that is technology independent. By storing patterns in a uniform specification template of a meta model, it is possible to perform systematic reasoning. Having information readily available about the technology support of individual patterns, IKWs can quickly analyse with which intersection of pattern sets it is possible to link intra-organizational business processes.

Within organizations, workflow systems can automate business processes by centrally coordinating activity sequences. But outside their borders, organizations are autonomous entities that cannot be subject to centralized process control. Their internal processes are autonomously defined and controlled, and what they need is to synchronize those concurrent processes. Just like Petri nets are a valuable tool to model activity sequencing in local business processes, -calculus becomes a useful tool to model concurrency in inter-organizational processes. After a review of the main developments in cross-organizational workflow management, this paper illustrates the use of -calculus to model the interactions between business processes running concurrently in different organizations. These interactions range from invoking external services to more complex patterns such as contract negotiation and partner search and selection. The paper concludes with a case study that illustrates the application of the proposed approach in a more realistic business scenario.

Business process modeling has gained fundamental importance for describing the collaboration in and between enterprises. However, the lack of standardization and range of levels of detail used in corporate practice pose practical challenges. This is particularly true in transformations like outsourcing or mergers and acquisitions, where a high degree of flexibility is required from both organization structures and information and communication technology (ICT). Rather than suggesting a process modeling standard to fit all purposes, this paper presents three complementary and reality-checked levels of process design tailored at different audiences and serving corresponding modeling purposes in transformation projects.

Nowadays enterprises face more and more ambitious projects which require the cooperative participation of different organizations. The modeling of one organization information is a crucial issue. There are several approaches for analyzing or representing how an organization is structured and operates. Much recent research points to ontologies as an appropriate technology for modeling enterprise systems. This paper presents a proposal for modeling cross-enterprise business processes from the perspective of cooperative systems. The proposal consists of a multi-level design scheme for the construction of cooperative system ontologies, and it is exemplified through a real case study. Benefits related to ontology integration are also presented.