Johannes Bumiller

A generic system for Web-based group interaction

The WWW has become the most important information system. But the demand of Web-based human interaction in a lot of situations, scenarios and applications e.g. electronic commerce and tele-learning, is still unsupported. Founding on a scenario-based requirements analysis we developed concepts, a client server architecture and a prototype of a basic group interaction system (gia-system). It currently supports user and group awareness, and communication facilities such as that based either on dynamic group building or static acquaintance groups, and cooperative navigation. The gia-system, already evaluated within an electronic market place, is currently enhanced in two ways: First we investigate in more generic group building mechanisms than the existing location and acquaintance based one. Second we work on cooperation support for semi-structured activities.

Designing an economic-driven evaluation framework for process-oriented software technologies

During the last decade there has been a dramatic increase in the number of paradigms, standards and tools that can be used to realize process-oriented information systems. A major problem neglected in software engineering research so far has been the systematic determination of costs, benefits, and risks that are related to the use of these process-oriented software engineering methods and technologies. This task is quite difficult as the added value is influenced by many drivers. This paper sketches an economic-driven evaluation methodology to analyze costs, benefits, and risks of process-oriented software technologies and corresponding projects. We introduce an evaluation meta model and sketch a formalism to describe economic-driven evaluation scenarios.

Methods to Support Cooperative Product Development

World-wide distributed product development processes and manufacturer supplier co-operation has become more important in recent years. This requires support for collaboration on the one hand and the administration of the generated data on the other hand. In this paper methods for determination of co-operation needs during distributed product development processes are presented. The particular cooperation situation which shall be supported can be classified by given criteria. New data management methods to support a distributed co-operation process are shown. A mapping scheme is provided that allows to assign these new data management methods to the classified co-operation needs.

An Evaluation Approach for Analyzing Workflow Management Systems from a Value-based Perspective

Workflow management systems (WfMS) have become a widely accepted software technology, which enables the effective management, execution, and monitoring of computerized processes. Though the introduction of WfMS results in high costs, corresponding investments are often justified solely by referring to assumed benefits such as improved business process performance. In fact, there exists no framework to systematically evaluate WfMS from a value-based perspective. One major reason for this drawback is that research about the economic impact of WfMS has to deal with many challenges like the potential identification of impact factors, the handling of dependencies among these impact factors, the collection of real-world data, and the quantification of costs and intangible benefits. This paper presents an evaluation methodology to tackle these problems, which is based upon modeling and simulation

Web-basiertes, kooperatives Lernen auf Basis dynamischer Gruppenbildung

Hohe Innovationszyklen, wechselnde Rahmenbedingungen und laufend neue Anforderungen, erfordern standiges Lernen, von jedem Einzelnen, Gruppen und auch von Organisationen. Daraus resultiert ein wachsender Bedarf an geeigneten lernunterstutzenden Systemen. Dieser Beitrag beschreibt ein Web-basiertes System zur Unterstutzung kooperativen Lernens in einer anpasbaren, offenen Umgebung. Im Gegensatz zu vielen vorhandenen, traditionellen Systemen konzentriert sich dieser Ansatz auf gruppenorientiertes Lernen, im besonderen auf die Aspekte (1) Wahrnehmung anderer Lernenden, (2) dynamische Gruppenbildung, in Abhangigkeit von den Interessen und Wunschen des Lernenden und (3) Unterstutzung der Interaktion.