Sérgio Guerreiro

Enterprise Dynamic Systems Control Enforcement of Run-Time Business Transactions

Business transactions models prescribe the design freedom restrictions of the business transactions dynamics but per se do not guarantee that organizational actors perform them accordingly. Enterprise dynamic systems control (EDSC) guarantees that the prescriptions are followed in the operation by performing a continuously cycle of observation, decision and control action. Control action actuates with a change in the business transaction models prescription to avoid the recurrence of unintended operations or a change in the control rules if the deviation from prescription is recognized as being innovative. This paper proposes a full DEMO-based ontology to enforce EDSC in the run-time operation of business transactions. The EDSC proposal is exemplified using (i) DEMO business transaction ontological specification, (ii) actor’s qualification mechanim integrated with business transactions and (iii) business rules enforced in the actor’s ex-post acts.

Enterprise Operational Analysis Using DEMO and the Enterprise Operating System

Monitoring and analyzing the operation of enterprises is a key capability of Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) solutions and is relevant for high-risk organizations, such as financial services. The potential of state-of-the-art process mining (data-driven process analysis) is limited by quality issues with transactional data registration and extraction. A novel approach is proposed to address these challenges: the Enterprise Operational Analysis (EOA) founded in DEMO and the Enterprise Operating System (EOS). The EOS is a software system based on enterprise engineering, and stores, interprets, and executes DEMO models as native source code. The EOS provides workflow-like capabilities and supports EOA. Combining the EOS with state-of-the-art process mining offers the following advantages: guaranteed completeness of analysis, elimination of ‘mining’ for events, facilitating process conformance checking, analysis on various levels of granularity from various perspectives. It enables enterprises to systematically analyze, improve and deploy business procedures. A professional business case is analyzed.

Engineering the Decision-Making Process Using Multiple Markov Theories and DEMO

In the current fast-changing and turbulent operational environments, the organizations are continually being pressured by many endogenous and exogenous environmental variables. Many and complex effects occur simultaneously and large volumes of data are available. For this reason, in a process-based organization, when change is demanded (e.g., business processes re-engineering) it is difficult to collect, and interpret, the complete information about the current state of the organization. Therefore, a problem is how to decide which design actions should be enacted with the incomplete information available from the executed business processes. In this context, this paper combines information systems engineering (DEMO business transactions design) and operation research (Markov theories) to contribute to the decision-making body of knowledge. As the result, this solution enforces the organization with resiliency capabilities that are triggered whenever any misalignment occurs. The proposed solution is evaluated through argumentation and by a qualitative comparison between two Markov theories (MDP and POMDP) based on a real-world case study.

Executing Enterprise Dynamic Systems Control with the Demo Processor: The Business Transactions Transition Space Validation

Business transactions models are useful to share a common understanding between the stakeholders in a process-based organization; however alone they do not guarantee that the actors perform their actions correspondingly. This paper proposes and exemplifies a solution to the Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) generation and operation using a Model Driven Engineering (MDE) approach founded and derived from Enterprise Ontology (EO) theory. The obtained EIS are (i) descriptive information systems that monitor and deliver a truthful representation of the enterprise on a software engine: the DEMO processor and (ii) prescriptive information system supported by an ontology specifically researched for controlling the operation of business transactions: the enterprise dynamic systems control (EDSC). The achieved benefits are (i) partially automatic validation of EDSC ontology; (ii) self-contained environment to test and validate the DEMO processor and (iii) full workflow capabilities calculated from DEMO models, with formal rigor, minimizing anomalies and minimizing the programming effort.

Adaptive Access Control Modes Enforcement in Organizations

Granting the correct access between the agents and the artifacts is nowadays in the organizations agendas. The risk of allowing unauthorized accesses to critical information requires new solutions that are capable of dealing with a holistic perspective. Adaptive OACM refers to the capability of enforcing fine-grained access policies to business processes, services and information systems whenever facing changes, for instance, governance policies. This paper proposes an OACM ontology based in the RBAC, UUID, Rules and architectural model concepts. For exemplification purposes we instantiate the concepts of the ontology to an approval expense problem.

Towards Multi-level Organizational Control Framework to Manage the Business Transaction Workarounds

Organizations strive to find solutions that perform their business processes more efficiently and effective. Steering the organizational operation using a priori prescribed models derives from the classical control engineering theories. These approaches are valid for business information systems domain but require contextual adaptation for dealing with concerns such as change management. In the context of business transaction, the models prescribe the design freedom restrictions for producing a new service or product, and share a common understanding between the stakeholders that have diverse interpretations of it. However, for many and diverse reasons, organizational actors perform workarounds at operation time that could be extremely different from the previous prescribed business transaction models. This paper reviews the organizational control related work and synthesizes it in a conceptual framework. The goal is to establish a set of concepts, and their relationships, to identify workarounds occurring at operation time and then feedback the organizational management with reviewed models, where the control solution encompasses three competence levels: enterprise governance, business rules and access control.

A Meta Model for Interoperability of Secure Business Transactions - Using BlockChain and DEMO.

Business transactions executed between organizations and individuals are largely operated on digital environments, conducting to an industrial interoperability challenge demanding secure environmen ...

Reorganização Dinâmica em Situações de Gestão de Crise

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.