Markus Helfert

Challenges of business processes management in healthcare: Experience in the Irish healthcare sector

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to outline a framework for analyzing healthcare process management projects. By using this framework, it seeks to analyze a system implementation in Ireland. The system aims to standardize healthcare human resource and payroll for the Irish healthcare sector.Design/methodology/approach – A popular system and business process implementation is analyzed in Ireland. The research intends to use this case scenario to identify success and failure, which in turn forms the basis to propose a conceptual reference method for introducing healthcare process management.Findings – The healthcare sector has shown that it has, compared with other sectors, a relatively underdeveloped information system structure. In this context, the importance of reducing healthcare costs and streamlining workflows, processes, and care pathways is ever more seriously recognized. However, despite the importance of process management, currently, internationally very few guidelines are provided for int...

Software and Data Technologies

This book constitutes the best papers of the First International Conference on Software and Data Technologies, ICSOFT 2006, held in Setbal, Portugal, September 11-14, 2006. The 25 revised full papers presented together with 5 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 187 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on programming languages, software engineering, distributed and parallel systems, information systems and data management, as well as knowledge engineering.

Modelling information manufacturing systems

The manufacture of an information product (IP) is akin to the manufacture of a physical product. Current approaches to model such information manufacturing systems (IMS), lack the ability to systematically represent the dynamic changes involved in manufacturing (or creating) an IP. They also have limitations to consistently include aspects of process and information management at an organisational level. This paper aims to address these limitations and presents a modelling approach, the IASDO model. Our work also represents a framework to evaluate the quality of the meta-models for IMS modelling which enable us to compare the IASDO model with current approaches.

Practical Aspects of Design Science

This paper describes the design science process and iterative design cycles used to develop a new design pattern for Chief Information Officers (CIOs). The IT-CMF is a formal archetype of the levels and stages through which an organization traverses and evolves as it defines, implements, measures, controls and improves its IT capability in support of value creation for the organization. The paper draws upon the concept of emergence from complexity science to describe the process of emergence of the IT-CMF from seemingly unordered pieces of information and artifacts into order. The early iterative phases of rigor, relevance and design science cycles are discussed as well as the initial classification schema developed for the IT-CMF. Additionally the paper briefly discusses the role of the IT-CMF as an important design pattern for the CIO.

Data and Information Quality Assessment in Information Manufacturing Systems

Organizations are more and more concerned about the increasing data and information quality issues in their information (manufacturing) systems. These issues have caused various organizational problems such as losing customers, missing opportunities and making incorrect decisions. Recognizing these issues, one of the crucial aspects for organizations to sustain business growth and competitive advantage is to be able to assess data and information quality. However limited research has been done to investigate data and information quality assessment in information manufacturing systems. This paper proposes a model to assess the quality of two major information sources in information manufacturing systems: data stored in database and information products delivered to users. The proposed model is applied to an information manufacturing system and an example database. The research findings have shown that the poor quality of data found in example databases is correlated to the quality of information products perceived by users.

Effects of information quality on inventory management

This paper investigated how different IQ categories affect the quality of inventory control decisions. The result has shown that intrinsic IQ and contextual IQ are positively related to inventory decision quality, indicating that intrinsic IQ and contextual IQ are the underlying concerns in improving inventory decision quality. It is also found that the effect of representational IQ on inventory decision quality is non-significant. However, under just-in-time inventory policy, representational IQ and contextual IQ jointly affect inventory decision quality. This result indicates that improving representational IQ may intensify the positive effects of contextual IQ.

An Analysis of Enterprise Architecture Maturity Frameworks

Enterprise Architecture (EA) has gained a lot of attention in literature and industry in recent years since it serves as valuable instrument to guide the enterprise through the transformation from a current to a future state by means of providing standardization, rules and principles. This ensures currently the best known way to achieve flexibility, reusability and a common understanding of the enterprise and its functions within the IT domain. The evolvement of EA is best captured by employing a maturity model which indicates the status quo of the EA and provides a means of further improving this evolvement. Several frameworks and approaches have been proposed throughout the years and we conducted an analysis of selected of EA Maturity frameworks in terms of five – in our opinion crucial - key characteristics. Moreover, as EA covers the enterprise IT holistically on a high level of abstraction, we found an overarching framework available for assessing all of the critical IT functions.

A Context Aware Information Quality Framework

In an age dominated by information, information quality (IQ) is one of the most important factors to consider for obtaining competitive advantages. The general approach to the study of IQ has offered numerous management approaches, IQ frameworks and list of IQ criteria. There are many IQ measures proposed for several application domains; however organizations still are challenged to apply IQ frameworks and measurement approaches within a specific context. An analysis of related literature reveals that most approaches are context dependent, although the contextual dimension is usually not represented in IQ frameworks. With this paper we aim to address this limitation and extend current work on IQ frameworks. We base our research on the theoretical concept of semiotics with emphasizes on pragmatics. Subsequently we propose a context-aware IQ framework that can be applied in various contexts. Our framework is applied in an experimental setting that shows that context is an important consideration for IQ assessment. Our result can be used in further research studies or can assist practitioners to develop suitable IQ measures. Based on these results we aim to develop a context-aware IQ measurement tool.

The IT-CMF: a practical application of design science

The IT-Capability Maturity Model [IT-CMF] is a high-level process capability maturity framework for managing the IT function within an organization The purpose of this paper is to explore and explain the IT-CMF as a “ method meta-model” for IT management, emphasizing the novel approach to addressing the application of design processes and design artifacts by means of a very structured use of engaged scholarship and open innovation techniques to the ongoing challenge of managing organizations IT capability.

Business Informatics: An Engineering Perspective on Information Systems

Over the last three decades many universities have offered various programmes related to Infor-mation Systems. However, the rapid changes in recent years demand constant evaluation and modification of education programmes. Recent challenges include, for instance, the move to-wards programmes that are more applied and professionally-orientated. The Bologna Declaration in Europe with its three level study structure as well as the increasing pressure to ensure funding within most departments adds further pressure to many universities. Despite attempts being made to provide reference to curricula and guidelines, many universities and faculties struggle with the proper direction and design of the information systems curricula. Common reference curricula related to information systems are, for example: the IS 2002; Cur-riculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Degree Programs in information systems; the MSIS 2000: Model Curriculum and Guidelines for Graduate Degree Programs in Information Systems. Al-though these guidelines have existed for many years, many discussions and disagreements exist on the content and direction of information systems curricula and information systems as a disci-pline. Recently a joint task force of the Association for Computing Machinery and Association of Information Systems is aiming at revising the IS 2002 undergraduate curriculum (Topi et al., 2007). At the same time we are experiencing decreasing enrolments in information system pro-grammes worldwide (Granger, Dick, Luftman, Slyke, & Watson, 2007). This article views information systems study programmes from an engineering perspective and presents a framework for structuring information systems programmes within Europe. We amal-gamated the IS 2002 and MSIS 2000 model curriculum with a recommendation for studying business informatics, published from the German Society for Informatics (Gesellschaft fur Infor-matik, 2003). The framework was used to identify differences between selected study pro-grammes currently in place for information systems curricula. For the study we selected two his-torically different educational systems: the United Kingdom and Ireland as representative for the Anglophone area and Germany, Austria, and Switzerland as representative of a continental Euro-pean approach. We collected data from 20 Universities and classified the studied subject areas along our framework. Our results show that even in the context of the Bologna Declaration and common credit transfer systems, the study programmes nation-ally and internationally remain very di-verse. Indeed, this makes comparisons between study programmes difficult to ascertain. The analysis reveals indica-tions that the controversy in information