Ebru Gökalp

Development of an Assessment Model for Industry 4.0: Industry 4.0-MM

The application of new technologies in the manufacturing environment is ushering a new era referred to as the 4th industrial revolution, and this digital transformation appeals to companies due to various competitive advantages it provides. Accordingly, there is a fundamental need for assisting companies in the transition to Industry 4.0 technologies/practices, and guiding them for improving their capabilities in a standardized, objective, and repeatable way. Maturity Models (MMs) aim to assist organizations by providing comprehensive guidance. Therefore, the literature is reviewed systematically with the aim of identifying existing studies related to MMs proposed in the context of Industry 4.0. Seven identified MMs are analyzed by comparing their characteristics of scope, purpose, completeness, clearness, and objectivity. It is concluded that none of them satisfies all expected criteria. In order to satisfy the need for a structured Industry 4.0 assessment/maturity model, SPICE-based Industry 4.0-MM is proposed in this study. Industry 4.0-MM has a holistic approach consisting of the assessment of process transformation, application management, data governance, asset management, and organizational alignment areas. The aim is to create a common base for performing an assessment of the establishment of Industry 4.0 technologies, and to guide companies towards achieving a higher maturity stage in order to maximize the economic benefits of Industry 4.0. Hence, Industry 4.0-MM provides standardization in continuous benchmarking and improvement of businesses in the manufacturing industry.

Government Process Capability Model: An Exploratory Case Study

The customization of software process capability/maturity models to specific domains/sectors or development methodologies represents one of the most critical challenges of the process improvement domain. As a result of the literature review, it is observed that there is a lack of a guideline for how to improve process quality in governmental institutions. Therefore, in this study, development of a government process capability model based on ISO/IEC 15504 is aimed in order to ensure that processes are consistently applied, managed, and controlled across a governmental institution. Towards this goal, a government business process classification framework consisting of management of government resources and support processes and government specific processes is constructed. As a government specific process; public investment management process is defined and assessed as a case study to explore the applicability of this framework. Initial findings of the study indicate the usefulness and adequacy of the proposed approach.

Towards a Process Capability Assessment Model for Government Domain

Government Process Capability Determination Model is developed based on ISO/IEC 15504 by the authors in order to assess the extent of the processes to be consistently applied, managed, and controlled across governmental agencies. Government Process Reference Model consists of definitions of common processes across all governmental agencies as well as a generic process definition for agency-specific governmental processes. This study covers the development of the generic process definition in detail. AWL introduced by Medina-Mora is taken as a starting point to develop the generic process definition. A capability dimension based on the capability dimension of 15504-2 is defined. The outcomes and BPs described are, however, considered to be the minimum necessary to meet ISO/IEC 15504 requirements. In order to explore the applicability of the proposed definition, case studies are conducted. Public investment management process definition, ad-hoc defined beforehand, compared to the generic process definition. Moreover, The Graduate Student Selection process performed in METU is assessed and capability level of the process is determined; correspondingly, a roadmap to improve process capability level is derived. The findings of the study indicate the usefulness and adequacy of the proposed approach.

Proposing an ISO/IEC 15504 Based Process Improvement Method for the Government Domain

Model based process improvement has been successfully applied for software organizations. After observing this success, customizing it to specific domains/sectors becomes one of the most critical challenges. On the other side, there are some quality problems in government domain as: low efficiency and process performance, employee and citizen dissatisfaction, high cost and defect rates. Assuming that successful processes will be reflected in higher quality, the government processes have to be improved. However known capability/maturity models don’t deal with particularities of government domain. Therefore, it’s necessary to design and evaluate a domain-specific capability model. Towards this goal, we develop Government Process Capability Determination Model based on ISO/IEC 15504. Moreover, we propose a method which is a disciplined guidance for governmental organizations to perform process capability assessment systematically. The method is described in detail in the study.

Developing Process Definition for Financial and Physical Resource Management Process in Government Domain

Public Financial and Physical Resource Management (PFPRM) is becoming a core competency critical to a government organization’s competitive advantage. Recent studies have shown that organizations with established PFPRM are able to generate millions of dollars in additional savings and have a distinct competitive advantage. Our literature review showed that there is also a lack of a guideline for process capability determination and improvement of PFPRM. On the other hand, after observing benefits in software organizations, The ISO/IEC 15504 is used as a baseline to generate capability/maturity models for different specific domains/sectors. Accordingly, the same approach is utilized in the government domain, and process definition of PFPRM based on the requirements of ISO/IEC 15504 is developed. Therefore, PFPRM can be assessed based on ISO/IEC 15504 to be consistently applied, managed, and controlled across governmental agencies. A case study, including the assessment of an organization’s PFPRM capability level is performed. The assessment results are used to develop a road-map for implementing process improvement in the study. The initial findings show the applicability and adequacy of the proposed approach.

Cloud-Based Enterprise Information Systems: Determinants of Adoption in the Context of Organizations

Cloud computing is growing at a very fast pace. Enterprise information systems (EISs) such as ERP, SCM, and CRM are used in organizations in order to increase customer satisfaction, operational excellence, and to decrease operational costs. Looking at the widespread literature available on both EIS and Cloud Computing, few researchers have examined the integration of both systems. While this area has not been fully investigated in the academia due to limited available literature, it has attracted significant interest from general practitioners. Accordingly, the Cloud-EIS can be considered as an important research problem. In this study, we attempt to investigate the factors influencing the usage and adoption of Cloud-EISs by considering Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) framework as the basis to give directions to cloud service providers on how to design their products in order to increase adoption and usage. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is used in order to rank the determined factors. The results show that the most significant factors influencing the usage and adoption of Cloud-EISs are security & privacy, business activity- cloud EIS fitness, top management support, trust, and organization’s IT resource.

HealthGuide: A Personalized Mobile Patient Guidance System

Patients have to carry out various complex tasks when they visit hospitals. In this context, workflow management systems offer a structured solution for modeling these tasks with workflows in order to guide patients. Furthermore, the integration of smartphones and pervasive technologies with workflows facilitates both the collection of relevant data and the delivery of timely information to users. In this chapter, we present a mobile application working in conjunction with a pervasive workflow management system, highlighting the design of mobile health (mHealth) solution, named HealthGuide. As advocated by the socio-technical system design (STSD) approach, the system design is guided by incorporating the user perspective in order to reduce the risk of failure. Accordingly, we design HealthGuide by considering critical adoption factors in the mHealth literature in addition to identifying user needs through user involvement. The system aims to provide guidance to users regarding their tasks in a hospital so that they can accomplish their tasks accurately and in the correct order, both inside and outside the hospital. Hence, HealthGuide empowers patients and helps improve the user experience and satisfaction by providing personalized services in a timely manner while also increasing the quality of healthcare services and the efficiency of healthcare providers. The outpatient treatment process is given as a sample scenario to demonstrate the capabilities of HealthGuide from the perspective of users. Benefits and challenges associated with HealthGuide are also discussed to highlight the implications of the system.

Analyzing the Impact of a Decision Support System on a Medium Sized Apparel Company

Decision Support Systems (DSS) have been considered as a crucial tool providing competitive advantages, productivity as well as flexibility. The system analysis of a representative medium sized apparel company is performed to derive the requirements of the specific DSS developed to analyze the effects of using it in the apparel company. The observed benefits of the DSS after one year of use are providing efficient use of capacity, accordingly decreasing production costs, effective and accurate calculation of pre-cost estimation, improved user performance and response time to customers, as well as increased financial turnover rate, customer service and decision quality.

Analysing Opportunities and Challenges of Integrated Blockchain Technologies in Healthcare

Blockchain is a disruptive technology with the potential to have a significant impact on business models and industries, similar to the adoption of Internet. Blockchain promotes distributed, open, inclusive, immutable, and secure architectural approaches, instead of centralized, hidden, exclusive, and alterable alternatives. The adoption of blockchain in the healthcare domain offers promising solutions for securing communications among stakeholders, efficient delivery of clinical reports, and integrating various kinds of private health records of individuals on a secure infrastructure. Accordingly, the main aim of this study is to propose a holistic blockchain structure covering all stakeholders in the healthcare domain and to analyse opportunities and challenges by presenting an integrated blockchain architecture. The comprehensive view of blockchain based healthcare system consists of services as follows: personal medical health record storage and access, personal genomic data storage and access, inventory tracking and buy-sell mechanism, health research commons, health document notary services, doctor services, digital health wallet, peer-to peer insurance. The opportunities of using blockchain in the healthcare domain are considered with respect to several viewpoints such as transparency, accountability, decentralization, record accuracy, secure transactions, interoperability, lower costs, collaboration, agility, individualized care with specialized treatment, improved diagnosis methods, risk of insurance contract, prevention of counterfeit drugs and improved quality of medical research. Challenges associated with the implementation of blockchain in the healthcare domain are also highlighted, such as governance, lack of legacy, privacy, sustainability, scalability, adoption of participation, and cost of operations.

ClouDSS: A Decision Support System for Cloud Service Selection

Cloud computing brings in significant technical advantages and enables companies, especially small and medium size enterprises (SMEs), to eliminate up-front capital expenditures. This is due to the various benefits it provides, such as pay-as-you-go service model, flexibility of services, and on-demand accessibility. The proliferation of cloud services leads to their wide spread use and calls for comprehensive evaluation approaches in order to be able to choose the most suitable alternatives. To this end, existing studies in the literature generally provide solutions incorporating a single method for making such decisions. Therefore, this study proposes a more comprehensive solution in the form of a decision support system named as ClouDSS which employs various Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methods with the aim of optimizing cloud service selection decisions. ClouDSS has a default decision model, which can be customized according to enterprise-specific requirements, for evaluating the suitability of cloud services with respect to business needs. After presenting the main components of ClouDSS, the employed cloud service selection process is described in order to highlight the associated tasks, including both objective and subjective evaluation approaches. Furthermore, the applicability of the proposed system is demonstrated through a case study.