Ricardo Mendes

A framework for modeling strategy, business processes and information systems

In order to continuously improve its knowledge and to identify problems and possible solutions, an organization requires understanding of the way business is aligned with the organizational strategy and how information systems are supporting the business. The paper presents a framework for describing and associating organizational concepts at multiple levels of detail using three separate areas of concerns: goals and strategy, business processes, and information systems. The framework is presented as an extension to the Unified Modeling Language (UML) using a standard UML Profile. The framework concepts are illustrated by modeling the purchase and sales business operations of a retail store from the strategic, process and information systems viewpoints.

Combined effects of temperature and salinity on the larval development of the estuarine mud prawn Upogebia africana (Crustacea, Thalassinidea)

The larval stages of the mud prawn Upogebia africana were reared in the laboratory, from hatchings of females collected in the Mgazana estuary, South Africa. The larvae were tested for the combined effects of temperature and salinity in a factorial designed experiment, using 3 females and 2 replicates of 10 larvae per combination. Combinations were made from 5 temperatures (15, 20, 25, 30 and 35 °C) and 4 salinities (15, 25, 35 and 45). Results were tested by ANOVA and multiple regression was applyed to generate contour models by polynomial equation. Results showed that U. africana develops optimally in near to sea water salinity at around 25 °C, with slightly wider tolerance to low salinity in zoeal stage I, and with increased moult rate at lower salinity in late stages. A comparison with similar experimental results for other species is made, namely in view of the life cycle strategies for dispersal and return migration.

Use of satellite remote sensing for coastal conservation in the Eastern African Coast: advantages and shortcomings

Abstract Landsat 5 TM imagery from 2005 was used to map (at a coarse descriptive resolution) coastal habitats along the Tanzania/Mozambique transboundary zone. The map (available at http://www.transmap.fc.ul.pt/) was a reference for the study of environmental and social aspects, and for conservation, was disseminated among local stakeholders, ENGOs and various decision-making authorities and managers, and was used in the development of a transfrontier conservation area. Large scale remote sensing constitutes a cost-effective approach for research and management, as, with limited human, technical, temporal, and financial resources, it provides synoptic views of territories and allows for the estimation of quantitative changes in land use.

Using organizational modeling to evaluate health care IS/IT projects

This paper presents a research project that aims at creating a methodology for evaluating IS/IT projects in the Portuguese health care system. This project is being jointly developed by the Center for Organizational Engineering and a task force from Saude XXI, the Portuguese health operational program. In order to create a framework on which to base project evaluation, the project team developed a model of the Portuguese health system, using the CEO framework. The CEO framework is a UML based organizational modeling framework that uses business process and information systems modeling techniques to represent, monitor and simulate organizational behavior. The model created reflects the reality of the Portuguese health care system, including the entities involved, the inter and intra-organizational processes that are executed, the current information systems architecture and the in force information systems strategy. Based on the created organizational model, the project team created a tool that facilitates the evaluation of IS/IT projects, by measuring (1) the support to the current processes; (2) the conformance to the IS architecture and strategy; (3) the relation with other past or current projects. This paper describes the organizational modeling process that was executed, the developed evaluation methodologies and tools, and the preliminary results regarding ongoing project evaluation.

Understanding Strategy: a Goal Modeling Methodology

This paper introduces advances to the topic of business goal modeling. The major guidelines to the presented work are the increasing of representational power of goal models, the introduction of goal achievement indicators and the development of a methodology for capturing goals and associating them with business processes. Increased representational power on goal models can be gained by introducing management theories’ concepts like measures and indicators and the business stakeholders and pressure groups.

Exploring Key-Value Stores in Multi-Writer Byzantine-Resilient Register Emulations

Resilient register emulation is a fundamental technique to implement dependable storage and distributed systems. In data-centric models, where servers are modeled as fail-prone base objects, classical solutions achieve resilience by using fault-tolerant quorums of read-write registers or read-modify-write objects. Recently, this model has attracted renewed interest due to the popularity of cloud storage providers (e.g., Amazon S3), that can be modeled as key-value stores (KVSs) and combined for providing secure and dependable multi-cloud storage services. In this paper we present three novel wait-free multi-writer multi-reader regular register emulations on top of Byzantine-prone KVSs. We implemented and evaluated these constructions using five existing cloud storage services and show that their performance matches or surpasses existing data-centric register emulations.

Arquitectura de Sistemas de Informação: A Ferramenta de Alinhamento Negócio / Sistemas de Informação?

O Acto de gerir adquiriu ao longo do tempo uma crescente complexidade. Cada vez sao mais as incertezas quanto ao seu resultado, e cada vez maior o numero de variaveis que tendem a influencia-la. Como tal, os Sistemas de Informacao sao hoje um recurso chave no apoio a tarefa “Gerir”. Nunca foi tao importante explorar ao maximo toda a informacao que prolifera numa dada organizacao. “Gerir e decidir em cenario de incerteza, com suporte probabilistico e intuicao, na procura constante de antecipar o futuro, actuando o mais cedo possivel, com um determinado nivel de risco. A informacao constitui o recurso-chave para a reducao da incerteza na gestao empresarial. Saber gerir a informacao de forma a apoiar a gestao global da unidade economica, e actualmente um dos principais desafios que se coloca as empresas” [Zorrinho, Carlos 1995]. Aproveitar os meios que as TIC (Tecnologias de Informacao e Comunicacao) disponibilizam, passou a ser nao somente um factor de sucesso mas essencialmente um factor de sobrevivencia.Apresenta-se um sistema de apoio a decisao (SAD) cujo principal objectivo e aplicar metodos formais de apoio a decisao, no âmbito da gestao de uma rede rodoviaria. Partindo de uma analise efectuada a dados disponibilizados pelo Instituto para a Conservacao e Exploracao da Rede Rodoviaria (ICERR), foi adaptada uma estrutura de dados que permitiu eliminar as redundâncias, inconsistencias e lacunas detectadas. O Sistema de Informacao (SI) desenvolvido corresponde aos requisitos fundamentais de um sistema de apoio a decisao (flexibilidade e interactividade), e permite a visualizacao dos resultados em ambiente grafico. Integra um Sistema de Informacao Geografica (SIG) – ArcView - e um Sistema de Gestao de Bases de Dados Relacional (SGBDR) - 4th Dimension. O metodo de apoio a decisao implementado foi o ELECTRE TRI, por se abordar este caso como sendo um problema de afectacao, de situacoes observadas, a classes que sao pre-definidas a partir de situacoes de referencia. A classificacao em classes tem por objectivo permitir ao Agente de Decisao (AD) tomar decisoes de forma coerente e fundamentada, no que respeita a afectacao de recursos (sempre escassos) para as operacoes de conservacao de uma rede de estradas.Neste artigo aborda-se o tema gestao do conhecimento nas organizacoes, apresentando-se o estudo de caso do Departamento de Informatica da Universidade da Beira Interior. Estuda-se o processo de geracao, transmissao e partilha de conhecimento no contexto deste Departamento e, propoe-se um Modelo de Gestao do Conhecimento que facilite a interaccao entre as pessoas, armazene e favoreca a partilha de informacao e conhecimento no Departamento. No modelo proposto, consideram-se dois niveis: o nivel organizacional e o nivel aplicacional/tecnologico. Ao nivel organizacional sao abordados os aspectos que devem ser considerados para implementar um processo de gestao do conhecimento no Departamento. Ao nivel aplicacional e desenvolvido um Sistema de Gestao do Conhecimento integrado na intranet do Departamento, suportado em tecnologias que facilitam o armazenamento e a partilha de informacao e conhecimento e que inclui, nomeadamente, documentacao cientifica e administrativa, fora de discussao e “melhores praticas”. O sistema serve de suporte ao modelo em termos organizacionais. Como abordagem metodologica adequada para o desenvolvimento deste trabalho, foi escolhido um estudo de caso explicativo e interpretativo, recorrendo-se a triangulacao de metodos, atraves da administracao de um questionario, da observacao participante e da analise documental.Com a finalidade de auxiliar os usuarios, proporcionando recursos e procedimentos para um gerenciamento eficiente das informacoes, a Universidade do Sul de Santa Catarina – Unisul implantou um Sistema Integrado de Gestao (Enterprise Resources Planning - ERP), apoiado por uma Arquitetura de Sistemas de Informacao (Information Systems Architecture - ISA). Este artigo apresenta algumas experiencias da implantacao do SAP/R3 e do uso do ARIS na reestruturacao da Unisul, para promover uma melhor integracao dos alunos, docentes e colaboradores aos processos de gestao universitaria, sendo que o aperfeicoamento e a manutencao destes sistemas e apoiada por um grupo de pesquisa, que tambem proporciona suporte e inovacao aos processos de aprendizagem que se vem praticando. Alem disso, descreve-se neste trabalho, uma abordagem do ensino de Reengenharia de Processos de Negocios (Business Process Re-engineering - BPR), considerando que mudancas tecnologicas possibilitam a execucao de tarefas, de modo bem diferente dos anteriores. Tendo em vista que a reestruturacao da universidade e a implantacao do ERP sao tarefas de longo prazo e que exigem melhorias continuas, o principal objetivo deste artigo e contribuir com a aplicacao de conceitos de integracao, mudancas organizacionais e tecnologicas nos procedimentos de ensino.Apresentamos um modelo para geracao automatica de programas para invocacao de transaccoes em sistemas ERP em operacao desconectada. O modelo estende estes sistemas para alem da sua natureza cliente-servidor tradicional, permitindo a existencia de um novo tipo de aplicacoes cliente, executaveis em PDA, capazes de invocar transaccoes das varias areas funcionais dos ERP. Este processo de geracao tem por base as API ja existentes nos ERP, permitindo a construcao de aplicacoes simples correspondentes aos processos elementares do negocio, com capacidade de sincronizacao com o sistema central.Compara-se neste artigo o papel dos Sistemas de Informacao e das Tecnologias de Informacao em duas industrias: texteis e do vestuario; e moldes de plastico. A comparacao e efectuada na optica da cooperacao entre empresas dessas industrias. A presenca mais intensa e generalizada de Sistemas Informacao e Tecnologias de Informacao na industria dos moldes de plastico favorece esta industria, na forma como se envolve em processos de cooperacao inter-organizacionais. A concentracao geografica das empresas das duas industrias em estudo, aponta para a existencia de clusters. No entanto, na industria de moldes de plastico, a evidencia de concentracao geografica das empresas ligadas a industria e mais forte do que para as industrias texteis e do vestuario. Este aspecto parece gerar maiores oportunidades de cooperacao.ERP implementation success is influenced by a large number of factors, which most of the times are difficult to measure objectively. User involvement and participation is one of the most cited critical success factors in ERP implementation projects, and one of the most critical ones for the their satisfactory outcome. This study attempts to define a set of metrics for monitoring user involvement and participation within ERP implementation projects by using the Goals/Questions/Metrics method. The results of this work are twofold. First, a literature review is presented on the user involvement and participation topic as related with ERP implementation projects. And second, a Goals/Questions/Metrics preliminary plan is proposed to monitor and control user involvement and participation within ERP implementation projects.

On the consistency of heterogeneous composite objects

Several recent cloud-backed storage systems advocates the composition of a number of cloud services for improving performance and fault tolerance (e.g., [1, 3, 4]). An interesting aspect of these compositions is that the consistency guarantees they provide depend on the consistency of such base services, which are normally different.

Sharing Files Using Cloud Storage Services

The widespread use of cloud storage in the last few years can be attributed to the existence of appealing applications such as file backup, data archival and file sharing. File sharing in particular, is implemented in different ways by distinct cloud storage services. These differences can appear at the offered permission types and in the form they are applied. We present a survey of these differences for several popular cloud storage services. We also show how to realize secure data sharing using these services, allowing the implementation of equivalent data sharing features in different clouds, an important requirement for secure multi-cloud systems.

An Object-Oriented Framework for Goal and Process Modeling

To continuously improve its knowledge and to identify problems and possible solutions, an organization requires understanding of the way business is aligned with the organizational strategy and how information systems are sipporting the business. This paper presents an object-oriented framework, presented as a UML Profile, for describing three organizational concerns: strategy and goals, business processes and information systems.