Alexander Hars

Working for free? Motivations of participating in open source projects

The success of the Linux operating system has demonstrated the viability of an alternative form of software development: open source software, which challenges traditional assumptions about software markets. Understanding what drives open source developers to participate in open source projects is crucial for assessing the impact of open source software. The article identifies two broad types of motivations that account for their participation in open source projects. The first category includes internal factors such as intrinsic motivation and altruism, and the second category focuses on external rewards such as expected future returns and personal needs. The article also reports the results of a survey administered to open source programmers.

Designing Scientific Knowledge Infrastructures: The Contribution of Epistemology

Scientific knowledge is increasingly being stored in online infrastructures such as electronic journals, digital libraries and online encyclopedias. Their designers need to find an adequate approach for representing this knowledge. Unfortunately, most online infrastructures adopt the traditional article-issue-journal model which is based on print technology. This article develops an alternative model for the representation of scientific knowledge which is based on epistemology—the theory of knowledge. The characteristics of scientific knowledge identified by four philosophers of science—Popper, Nagel, Dubin and Bunge—are synthesized into a conceptual model which can be used as the foundation of scientific knowledge infrastructures in an online environment. The article shows that much more fine-grained structures are needed for representing scientific knowledge. Knowledge should not be accumulated as a collection of articles but as a network of epistemologically relevant elements such as theories, concepts, statements, facts etc.

Competence and impact of tools for BPR

Software tools for Business Process Reengineering (BPR) promise to reduce cost and improve quality of projects. This paper discusses the contribution of BPR tools in BPR projects and identifies critical factors for their success. A model was built based on previous research on tool success. The analysis of empirical data shows that BPR tools are related to effectiveness rather than efficiency of the projects. Process visualization and process analysis features are key to BPR tool competence. Also success factors for BPR tools are different from those for CASE tools.

Reengineering IS Research and Its Intellectual Infrastructure for the Electronic Economy

The emerging electronic economy is bringing with it rapid advances in open networks and information technology (IT) capabilities, increasing global complexity and interdependence, and increasingly short business cycle times. Many enterprises are reengineering the way they carry out their business to take advantage of these new conditions. In this article, we contend that it is also time for information systems (IS) academics to fundamentally rethink the IS research process and the intellectual infrastructure that enables it in light of these new conditions. We first examine why the current IS research process needs to be changed. We then systematically analyze needed change along 6 dimensions. The change potentials are used to propose an IS research paradigm that is based on interactive knowledge repositories and collaborative electronic networks. We propose a new intellectual infrastructure that is based on a new type of IT-enabled electronic space for the research community, which we term a cybrarium. A cybrarium is focused not only on the storage and dissemination but also on the synthesis of knowledge generated in the research community. We articulate the basic distinctions between electronic Web journals and cybrariums and show how a cybrarium leads to a fundamentally changed research process. We contend that such a redefined research process and its underlying intellectual infrastructure will enable the IS research community to make the transition to a large-scale global collaborative alliance that is faster, more forward looking, and cumulative.

Academic Journals on the Internet

While much research examines the internet’s impact on ‘electronic business’ information technology may have an equally profound impact on what might be called ‘electronic science’. Although the internet has the potential of revolutionizing research, it is not clear in which ways the structure of journals and the associated research processes will be affected. The purpose of this article is to provide a better foundation for the engineering of scientific knowledge infrastructures on the internet. Alternative models of academic sites which are dedicated to the creation and dissemination of scientific knowledge are studied. Characteristics of different categories of electronic journals, e.g. traditional electronic journals, knowledge repositories, collaborates etc. are examined and synthesized into a list of key characteristics which then can be used as basis for the design and investigation into the evolution of such systems.

Natural language-enabled data modeling: improving validation and integration

Although data modeling has been an area of intensive research, there is a lack of operational procedures for measuring model quality and for integrating large-scale models. Progress has been limited because the meaning associated with the individual elements of a model needs to be taken into account. This meaning rarely is made explicit and therefore not directly available for validation and integration procedures. In this paper we show that natural language processing techniques based on a custom-built dictionary can be used to interpret data models and leverage meaning for validation and integration procedures. We describe a general-purpose dictionary which contains syntactic and semantic word categories for 23.000 English words. We show how the syntactic and semantic information in the dictionary can be used to detect semantic inconsistencies, reject inconsistent naming, identify unregistered abbreviations and detect synonym candidates. To prove feasibility of our approach, we describe a prototype tool which has been implemented on a standard personal computer.

Using BPR Tools in Business Process Education

Software plays an increasingly important role in education. It not only provides the student with the mastery of a tool that he may use in his work life. It also immerses the student very effectively in complex business settings. Therefore, at the Marshall School of Business we are striving to integrate leading-edge technology into high curriculum. In 1994 we selected the ARIS toolset as the main software engineering and business process analysis tool for our information systems analysis classes both on the graduate level and on the undergraduate level. In this article, we will first describe the background of our decision to adopt the ARIS toolset. We will then describe the integration into the curriculum. Finally, we will focus lessons learned and future steps to be taken with ARIS.

Knowledge-Based Reengineering of Business Processes: Leveraging the Power of Natural Language

The number of business process reengineering projects in industry and the number of persons involved in such projects has risen rapidly since Hammer and Champy introduced the concept in 1993. As substantial costs are associated with reengineering projects, much effort has been concentrated in developing tools to support BPR projects. In the last three years alone, more than 50 BPR tools have been brought to market. Many of these tools are extensions of tools for Computer-Aided Software Engineering or have been modeled after CASE tools. They therefore face some of the same obstacles, such as step learning curves and acceptance problems (Summer and Ryan, 1994). As a study by Elzinga et al. (1995) showed, participants in BPR projects perceive the lack of user-friendly tools as one of the key problems for more effective BPR projects. One of the reasons for these problems is the generic nature of current tools, which typically incorporate very little knowledge about realistic business situations. In this paper, we show that it is possible to develop a new generation of BPR tools which leverage some of the knowledge contained in natural language. To prove our point, we present a prototype BPR tool which transforms a natural language description of a business process into a process diagram.