Junichi Iijima

The discipline of enterprise engineering

A century ago, Taylor published a landmark in the organisational sciences: his Principles of Scientific Management. Many researchers have elaborated on Taylor’s principles, or have been influenced otherwise. The authors of the current paper evaluate a century of enterprise development, and conclude that a paradigm shift is needed for dealing adequately with the challenges that modern enterprises face. Three generic goals are identified. The first one, intellectual manageability, is the basis for mastering complexity; current approaches fall short in assisting professionals to master the complexity of enterprises and enterprise changes. The second goal, organisational concinnity, is conditional for making strategic initiatives operational; current approaches do not, or inadequately, address this objective. The third goal, social devotion, is the basis for achieving employee empowerment as well as knowledgeable management and governance; modern employees are highly educated knowledge workers; yet, the mindset of managers has not evolved accordingly. The emerging discipline of Enterprise Engineering, as conceived by the authors, is considered to be a suitable vehicle for achieving these goals. It does so by providing new, powerful theories and effective methodologies. A theoretical framework is presented for positioning the theories, goals, and fundamentals of enterprise engineering in four classes: philosophical, ontological, ideological and technological.

A Study on Digital Watermarking Usage in the Mobile Marketing Field: Cases in Japan

and company brochures have Internet URLs printed on them. Details that cannot be printed on paper such as the latest information or information about related services are published on the Internet. However there are various problems. Inputting a URL while looking at the printed material is troublesome, input mistakes can happen, and even if there are multiple information items introduced on the printed material usually only the URL to the top page of the website is noted, making it difficult to locate the desired information. Also, while cellular phones with attached cameras are rapidly spreading worldwide, QR code is gaining popularity in Japan as a technology to link existing media. However, the usage of many recognition technologies has been hampered by problems with the layout and design regarding existing media. This research examines mobile marketing methods using digital watermarking technology as a method to conquer these problems.

A HIERARCHY OF DECISION MAKING CONCEPTS: CONCEPTUAL FOUNDATION OF DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS

This paper describes the concepts related to decision making within a unified framework from the point of view of general systems theory. Decision support systems (DSS) are computer systems intended to support the decision making process. Current DSSs are, however, mainly designed to provide a direct support for a decision problem only when its model is numerically well formulated. We believe that a computer should and can provide the decision making process with more active supports. Therefore, ii is necessary to have an integrated image of the relationships among the concepts of decision making for the construction of this kind of systems. We start from an abstract general input-output model and finally reach a concrete solution finding model introducing new concepts step by step. The assertion of this paper is that the various concepts related lo decision making can be arranged as a hierarchy in this way

Architecture on a Hybrid Business Process Design and Verification System

Recently business process management system (BPMS) has become one of the hottest research topics related to enterprise information systems. Based on some requirements in the emerging BPMS, this paper proposes an original architecture on a hybrid business process design and verification system (BPDVS). This architecture attempts to build a system that integrates the informal and formal approaches in the BPM related fields. In this way it can obtain practicability and robustness, which are presently strengths separately from the informal and formal approaches. The industrial standard - XPDL - is used as the informal process description language while a logic language - situation calculus - is employed as the underlying formalism to precisely specify a process. The hybrid BPDVS will integrate these two different process models and attempts to provide a more integrative and dynamic design environment for business processes.

Common structure and properties of filtering systems

Recommendation systems have been studied actively since the 1990s. Generally, recommendation systems choose one or more candidates from a set of candidates through a filtering process. Methods of filtering can be divided into two categories: collaborative filtering, in which candidates are chosen based on choices of other persons whose interests or tastes are similar, and content-based filtering, in which items are chosen based on the profile or action history of the recommendee. However, these methods share the same structure in the sense that both of them recommend items based on relevance degrees of items and references, as well as relevance degrees between the recommendee and each reference. Most discussions about recommendation systems focus on the methods of choosing recommended candidates; few focus on foundational concepts of recommendation conditions that systems must satisfy, and problems that current systems have compared with these conditions. In this paper, recommendation systems are reconsidered from the viewpoint of multi-criteria decision making. Conventional filtering methods (e.g., collaborative filtering and content-based filtering) are formulated as linear weighted sum type recommendation systems. Several properties of linear weighted sum type recommendation systems are identified and formulated from the viewpoint of voting.

Business process simulation in the context of enterprise engineering

Traditional business process-based discrete event simulation is not sufficiently powerful to support change-related business process reengineering (BPR). The simulation methods are inadequate for describing large, complex systems and are difficult to change so as to simulate new BPR designs. The limitations are caused by (1) focusing on workflow; (2) low-abstraction conceptual models; and (3) a lack of separate opinions on design and implementation. Our research is based on enterprise engineering, a construction-based approach, rather than workflow. By clarifying the differences between and dependencies of the ontological and implementation models, this research proposes a generic framework for generating a modularized and component-based simulation model with increased reusability as well as with the capacity to make controllable changes in enterprise simulation. The method is assumed to assist BPR by reducing complexity and through its focus on enterprise engineering-based design thinking and human-centered interactions.

A study on data management using mobile computing with digital watermark technology

The Internet user population has experienced explosive growth with the spread of broadband communication. This growth has caused the use of large amounts of high quality digital content to increase. Digital content has the characteristic that its quality does not deteriorate even if the content is duplicated, and digital content is also easy to handle. On the other hand, the fact that the quality does not deteriorate also introduces the risk that digital content can be easily duplicated illegally. Currently, RFID and QR codes are attracting attention as new technologies for data management. However, these technologies have a problem from the point of view of safety management, security, and their high cost of introduction. To overcome these problems, we consider a management method that uses a digital watermarking technology, and propose a management model for that method. This paper also introduces comparisons with the existing methods and their characteristics.

Logical approach for dynamic system in situation dependent services

With the arrival of the age of wireless technology, there has been a notable increase in consumer use of m-commerce applications. Among extensively developed mobile services, as a new concept, situation dependent services have been focused as one of powerful drivers for the whole m-commerce market. But related studies mainly concentrate on introduction and discussion from the standpoint of conceptual and organizational aspects, the implementation of the situation dependency concept is still a challenge in terms of its technical realization aspect. The purpose of this research is to present a logical approach for implementing intelligent situation dependent services in the area of mobile services. In this study, a new architecture is proposed based on the situation calculus. On the basis of the architecture, mobile users can call on server to offer situation dependent services that dynamically respond to their changing situations. In order to show how the architecture works, a case is implemented to demonstrate feasibility of the proposed logical approach.

A Study of the Patterns for Reducing Exceptions and Improving Business Process Flexibility

Exceptions are the events or situations that prevent business processes from completing normally. When exceptions such as cancellation of customer order occur, additional time and resources are often needed to resolve them. It is important for enterprise to pay attention to exceptions, for reducing exceptions efficiently and effectively may trace business process oriented improvement or innovation. In this study, a conceptual level pattern for reducing exceptions is proposed and discussed. This study contributes to research by 1) understanding how DEMO can help to reduce exceptions and improve business process flexibility through a case study of a Japanese company; 2) discussing suggestions for reducing exceptions and improving business process flexibility in general, 3) analyzing reasons of exceptions generating in the context of business model change from production centered to customer-centered, and how DEMO could help to enhance this change.

Some properties of feedback transformation: feedback controllability

Abstract Feedback is one of the most important and fundamental concepts in systems theory. The objective of this paper is to clarify why feedback works well. There are three types of problem with feedback: well-posedness, property preservation and feedback controllability. This paper concentrates on the third problem. Feedback is formulated as a transformation on a class of discrete-time basic linear systems. The concepts of characteristic polynomial, ergodicity which linear systems possess in general, and one-step ergodicity are introduced. It is then shown that if a state representation is one-step ergodic, the characteristic polynomial is completely feedback controllable, and a reachable system can be converted into a one-step ergodic system by the linear feedback transformation. In order to interpret how the characteristic polynomial is related to the behaviour of a system and to obtain its explicit form, the output-scalarization technique is used. Consequently, it is shown that it is not the state co...