Naoum Jamous

Light-Weight Composite Environmental Performance Indicators (LWC-EPI) Concept

Rapid environmental change requires a widely changing attitude starting from individuals over corporations to governments. A closer and more critical review of current environmental policies is needed. Corporate environmental management information systems (CEMIS) can play a major role to change attitudes by providing information that enables users to assess the current environmental impact of their processes and operations. One important question with regard to this is whether an organisation is complying with regulations. If the organisation is not complying with regulations the gap must be identified. Focusing on the growing environmental awareness and the needs of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SME) we shed light on the information provisioning role of CEMIS as well as on the environmental impact of SME operations as a whole. The main objective of our work is to provide a dashboard information system to control and monitor the organizations environmental performance indicators (EPI). This shall lead to a reduced gap between the estimated and current values of company’s environment impact on an almost daily basis. In this chapter we will focus on explaining the concept of Light-Weight Composite Environmental Performance Indicators (LWC-EPI), providing clear terms and definitions and presenting technologies which can be used to implement it.

Light-Weight Composite Environmental Performance Indicators (LWC-EPI) Solution: A Systematic Approach towards Users Requirements

The acceleration of change in the environment, the consequent legislation, and the thereby improved social awareness have challenged companies to enhance their business strategies with respect to improvements in sustainability. A clear and comprehensive communication of a companys sustainability efforts has become an increasingly important factor for success in todays markets. Performance indicators, aligned with sustainable topics and a companys ability for sustainability reporting, are a way to face this challenge. The paper elaborates on the increased demand of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) for an environmental management information system (EMIS), which adequately assesses the applications of relevant regulations to successfully curtail and reduce the enterprises impact on the environment while running its business. Based on a comprehensive survey of 272 companies, user requirements for an LWC-EPI solution are derived by applying an exploratory factor analysis (EFA), The results of the EFA are the foundation of the EMIS requirements model. This model helps companies focus on relevant issues when implementing or extending an environmental management information system.

The Application System Landscapes of IT Service Providers: A Multi Case Study

Achieving efficiency gains on all levels of enterprise architecture by such means as standardization has been and is a goal of researchers and practitioners working on the provisioning of IT services. At the process level, provisioning IT services is defined in common practice frameworks like the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). ITIL describes a trend where vendors offer new application systems for IT service providers with an increasingly holistic approach. However, it remains unanswered what these systems are, what the as-is situation of application system landscapes of providers is (regarding their application system mix), and if different types of providers use different types of systems. To address these questions, a case study approach was adopted: External and internal IT service providers provisioning industrial or personal services were sampled as cases, spanning all types (provider categories) within the adopted IT service provider categorization framework. We found that IT service providers from the same category have a similar mix of application systems. The paper contributes to the knowledge base by informing those who need to make pre-appraisals about a providers current application system landscape (e.g. within merger and acquisitions projects) as well as allowing practitioners to proactively construct their landscapes during market entry.

Environmental Performance Indicators

Environmental performance indicators (EPIs) help to measure an organization’s impact on the environment, including ecosystems, land, air and water. They clearly illustrate how the organization is performing, and provide management with the necessary information to make decisions for future improvements. This section provides a seamless and easy-to-follow set of guidelines of environmental policies and standards, a review of existing classifications of environmental indicators, and derives a selected list of EPIs, which are elaborated in the remaining chapters of this book.

A dynamic perspective: local interactions driving the spread of social networks

ABSTRACT This study takes a micro standpoint to quantitatively verify the extent to which local interactions affect the expansion of dynamic social networks. By reviewing and synthesizing the theoretical literature in this article, we seek to establish a pragmatic analytical framework to capture the underlying functioning of local interactions. It then aims to produce findings on seven distinct marketing campaigns in which the real-world virtual communities offer intact time-series connections. In our considered cases, the firm-to-consumer interactivity plays a pivotal role in social media marketing while the customer-driven influence advances individual information transmission. The significant positive relationships demonstrate features of interactivity within subgroups including reciprocal edges and directed 3-cliques associated with the evolution of the virtual community by electronic word-of-mouth (WOM) of both firm-to-consumer and consumer-to-consumer interactions. More importantly, the attenuation of local interactions to a large extent leads to the cut-off point of the growth of the dynamic social network.

The Classification of Business Model for the Exchange of Distributed Components of Federated ERP Systems on the Basis of Web Services

In the last few years business in Internet become more and more significance. On other hand new development of Internet technology is rapid and changed every day. Thus business models have to be continually adapted to meet the requirements of newest Internet business technologies. Thereby many aspects have to be considered: (1)Technical and economical aspects; (2) The assistance and the transformation of the traditional business model; (3) The appearance of new business ideas based on Internet technology. One of these new and important ideas is: how to supply the needs of small and medium sized enterprises with business software (E.g. enterprise resource planning system (ERP)) which is distributed in Internet and uses Web services technology. This kind of new business requires new design of a business model. First step, we classify the new business on the basis of different substructures.

The ECET Assessment Framework for Environmental Performance Indicators

Due to accelerated adverse changes in the environment, much legislation has been passed on the topic of sustainability. This, coupled with improved social awareness, has challenged companies to enhance their business strategies with respect to improvements in sustainability. A clear and comprehensive communication of a company’s sustainability efforts has become an increasingly important factor for success in today’s markets. Performance indicators, aligned with sustainable topics and a company’s ability for sustainability reporting, are a way to face this challenge. This paper elaborates on the increased demand of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) for Environmental Management Information Systems (EMISs) and adequately assesses the applications of relevant regulations to successfully curtail and reduce the enterprise‘s impact on the environment while running its business. In this paper we present a new assessment framework model for EMIS adoption and key success factors for using it in an SME. In order to build the model, an exploratory study of 272 companies was conducted to identify the requirements, and it led to a conceptual model based on four identified success constructs and named the ECET Assessment Framework. The focus of this paper is to explain the confirmative approach used to validate this conceptual model. The ECET framework was evaluated by 138 companies by means of a Structural Equation Model (SEM). This SEM provides the validity of the success constructs and gives additional insight into their interdependencies. The evaluated success model helps companies to position themselves based on their EMIS determining factors and to gain knowledge about what needs to be improved in order to achieve a successful implementation of an EMIS.

New E-Commerce User Interest Patterns

The number of online purchases is increasing constantly. Companies have recognized the related opportunities and they are using online channels progressively. In order to acquire potential customers, companies often try to gain a better understanding through the use of web analytics. One of the most useful sources are web log files. Basically, these provide an abundance of important information about the user behavior on a website, such as the path or access time. Mining this so-called clickstream data in the most comprehensive way has become an important task in order to predict the behavior of online customers, optimize webpages, and give personalized recommendations. As the number of customers constantly rises, the volume of the generated data log files also increases, both in terms of size and quantity. Thus, for certain companies, the currently used technologies are no longer sufficient. In this work, a comprehensive workflow will be proposed using a clustering algorithm in a Hadoop ecosystem to investigate user interest patterns. The complete workflow will be demonstrated on an application scenario of one of the largest business-to-business (B2B) electronic commerce websites in Germany. Furthermore, an experimental evaluation method will be applied to verify the applicability and efficiency of the used algorithm, along with the associated framework.

The I-ID - An IT Solution to Supplement Conventional Identification Cards: The Air Transportation Systems Use Case

The documentation of births has been started in ancient human civilizations. Today, each person holds many cards and documents such as ID, passport, driving license etc. The loss of one of these documents causes a great amount of work for the affected person and for many governmental and non-governmental offices. Starting the middle of the last century, mobility of people has increased dramatically. Trains, cars, airplanes and other methods of transportation facilitated movements of people around the world. Many hundred thousands persons are crossing the borders every minute. The necessity of tracking this movement and identifying people entering or leaving a country is essential, especially for security reasons. Therefore, authorities provide identified passports to be used, helping other authorities to recognize who is entering their territory. The I-ID is a global idea to supplement conventional identification cards (personal ID, health insurance cards, driving licenses, passports, etc.) with an IT based integrated solution where no need for paper documents. In this paper, after proposing the I-ID concept, and its technical feasibility, an IT solution to supplement conventional passports will be provided and investigated as a use case.

Introducing Greenhouse Emissions in Cost Optimization of Fault-Tolerant Data Center Design

Global climate change is one of the challenges of our time. Due to ever increasing demand, data center providers have to consider the ecological effects of their business. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are very likely to contribute significantly to climate change and, therefore, should be reduced. In data centers, GHG emissions are not only caused by the consumed energy for data center operation, but also originate from other life cycle phases of IT components, such as manufacturing. However, when minimizing GHG emissions of data centers, the effects on cost and quality of offered IT services should also be considered. Therefore, an optimization problem is introduced in this paper on the basis of redundancy allocation problems which minimizes IT service costs and GHG emissions subject to an availability service level objective. Conducted experiments using data from a real-world use case demonstrate that emissions can be reduced significantly with only slightly increased cost if these are considered in an optimization approach.