Nicklas Holmberg

Service orienting the Swedish vaccination recommendation activity with the business rules centric digital service VacSam

Uniform control and coordination of immigrant childrens vaccination is a critical current problem in the Swedish child health safety work. In this paper we discuss the Business Rules (BR) centric and SOA architected digital service VacSam. VacSam incorporates principles of SOA, Business Rules Approach, and Business Process Management. The incorporation is used for deriving VacSam from a part of the Swedish vaccination business process by separating decision logic from process logic. Based on regulatory texts and empirical investigations, VacSam BRs presently provides vaccination diagnosis of and recommendations to immigrant children. By ensuring the basic principles of SOA, VacSam becomes an eligible, SOA executable digital service. VacSam is in development and has hitherto been evaluated in an artificial context, where we show that the service can provide explained diagnosis of and recommendations to immigrant childrens vaccinations totally based on natural language BRs.Design Science Research (DSR) is concerned with demonstrating design principles. In order to prove the utility of these principles, design ideas are materialized into artifacts and put into an environment sufficient to host the testing of these principles. When DSR is used in combination with action research, constraints in the environment may restrain researchers to fully inscribe or test such principles. In this paper it is argued that scholars pursuing DSR has paid insufficient attention to the type of change necessary in the local practice. We draw upon theories on IS change as punctuated equilibrium to illustrate when DSR demonstrators can be used to make substantial contributions to local practice as well as to the scientific body of knowledge.

Better Support for User Participation using Business Rules Approach

User participation in requirement analysis (RA) is necessary for IS quality and user acceptance. A prerequisite for meaningful user participation is that the coming users also understand the requirements. This understanding is made difficult by abstract and “technical” modelling languages and notations which require learning and experience. The Business Rules Approach (BRA) builds on a notion of Business Rules (BR) formulated in natural language sentences aimed at the business audience; hence BRA should make user participation easy. This is tested in a workshop with a vaccination expert (VE) in a project on designing a BR oriented, digital service for health care workers (HCWs). The results indicate that natural language BRs in RA really are easily understood and intuitive for the VE and that quality checking BRs requires no special learning.

A Comprehensive Decision Support System for Enhanced Emergency Decision Management and Training

Emergency decision makers face a challenge taking rapid and high-risk decisions during an emergency situation, especially when the emergency is cross-border and requires multi-agency cooperation. The emergency decision makers use emergency management (EM) system and sometimes decision support systems (DSS) when responding to a crisis. To date the emergency decision makers have not had access to a system that supports them in all facets of the full EM cycle. This paper describes work in progress designing and building a comprehensive system of systems that intend to be that support for emergency decision makers. The system has successfully demonstrated its value from a technical and user perspective. Future tests will demonstrate if it will enhance decision management in reality-based emergency scenarios.

Viewing Enterprise Resource Planning Systems as Services: A Conceptual View, Based on Practical Experiences, of Designing Information Systems as Services

Viewing information systems (IS) as services is beneficial but still an unexplored approach for IS in organizations. The aim of this exercise is to contribute to the knowledge base on designing IS as services. This paper presents an analysis of enterprise resource planning (ERPs) systems through the lens of service oriented architecture (SOA). Services are explained and defined through SOA theory. IS are explained and defined through ERP theory. This paper contributes to the debate on viewing IS as services by presenting a view of ERPs facilitating to fulfill business needs. This paper is influenced by systems and design thinking, and service oriented IS development. Framed by shared promises between SOA and ERP systems we discuss the question whether SOA or ERP fulfills business needs? The analysis of ERPs from a SOA perspective provides us with the conclusion that the question is not about SOA or ERP but rather to provide SOA architected ERPs. It can be said that by viewing ERPs as services it is clear that the combination of ERPs and SOA could be seen as one way forward when designing software aiming at bridging the gaps supporting IS and business processes and allowing the business shaping the IS (Less)

Better Support for User Participation Using Business Rules Approach

User participation in requirement analysis (RA) is necessary for IS quality and user acceptance. A prerequisite for meaningful user participation is that the coming users also understand the requirements. This understanding is made difficult by abstract and “technical” modelling languages and notations which require learning and experience. The Business Rules Approach (BRA) builds on a notion of Business Rules (BR) formulated in natural language sentences aimed at the business audience; hence BRA should make user participation easy. This is tested in a workshop with a vaccination expert (VE) in a project on designing a BR oriented, digital service for health care workers (HCWs). The results indicate that natural language BRs in RA really are easily understood and intuitive for the VE and that quality checking BRs requires no special learning. (Less)Information Systems Development: Business Systems and Services: Modeling and Development, is the collected proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Information Systems Development held in Prague, Czech Republic, August 25 - 27, 2010. It follows in the tradition of previous conferences in the series in exploring the connections between industry, research and education. These proceedings represent ongoing reflections within the academic community on established information systems topics and emerging concepts, approaches and ideas. It is hoped that the papers herein contribute towards disseminating research and improving practice.

A Conceptual View of Enterprise Resource Planning Systems as Services

This paper brings forward a conceptual view, based on practical experiences from designing information systems as services. Viewing information systems (IS) as services is beneficial but still an unexplored approach in organizations. The aim of this exercise is to contribute to the knowledge base of IS designers and modelers. In the paper, we present an analysis of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERPs) systems through a conceptual lens of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). This paper contributes to the debate on viewing ISs as services by presenting a view of SOA-architected ERPs as facilitating to fulfill business needs. This paper is influenced by systems and design thinking, and service oriented IS design. Based on shared promises between SOA and ERP we discuss the question whether SOA or ERP fulfills business needs? The analysis of ERPs from a SOA perspective provides us with the conclusion that the question is not about SOA or ERP but rather to provide SOA architected ERPs. It can be said that by viewing ERPs as services it is clear that the combination of ERPs and SOA could be seen as one way forward when designing ISs that aims at bridging gaps between IS and business e.g., processes and, allowing the business to fuse with IS forming servitized SOA based ERPs.