Sergiusz Strykowski

Application of the Service-Oriented Architecture at the Inter-Organizational Level

In this chapter, flexibility and adaptation of collaborative processes occurring among organizations by applying the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) at the inter-organizational level are considered. First, an in-depth rationale for a service-oriented approach to inter-organizational collaboration is presented. The need for SOA at the inter-organizational level is explained by the ubiquity of services and the economically legitimated need of organizations to collaborate to gain and retain competitive advantage. Second, two SOA-based methods are proposed: the CMEAP method supporting flexibility, and a method for adaptation of service protocols supporting process adaptation. The CMEAP method allows administrative procedures to be automatically composed in a flexible manner, based on modeling legislative provisions in a form of elementary processes, decision rules, and domain ontology. The proposed method for adaptation of service protocols allows collaborators to modify the process model ruling their collaboration at run time, taking into account their social relations. Third, two prototype systems, the PEOPA platform and the ErGo system, implementing the proposed methods for the needs of the collaborators of the construction sector are detailed. Finally, a case study illustrates how the prototype systems may support the construction processes.

Social government: a concept supporting communities in co-creation and co-production of public services

Administrations increasingly struggle with changing requirements demanding more transparency, better connectivity and collaboration among different actors, and better responding to particular needs and social innovations of their constituencies. Using the Internet, social media, crowd-sourcing and mobile technologies influence communication structures, expectations and behavior of citizens and businesses. At the same time, financial constraints in the public sector result in less staff available for keeping pace with these fast developments in the digital era. Strengthening the partnership and collaboration between government and private as well as civic sector actors has emerged as a strong demand of open government and new governance models of state. Based on these settings, this paper introduces a concept of social government (SocialGov) that unites methods, concepts and tools of co-creation, co-production and social communities (including the use of social media) with those of open government (enabling transparency, participation, and also exploring open data and open services) in public service provisioning. The social government concept includes an environment, in which governments, citizens and businesses collaborate in order to identify, design, create, execute, and monitor public services and to share ideas on how to tackle public and societal challenges.

Composable modeling and execution of administrative procedures

One of the important objectives of e-government is to improve the quality and efficiency of the administrative procedure execution. The most often, this objective is supported by means of workflow systems which work according to monolithic models. During monolithic modeling and execution of administrative procedures, a number of problems arise; for example, susceptibility to errors, difficulties in adjusting procedure models to legislation changes, inconsistency in representing the same act in different procedure models. Courses of administrative procedures are regulated by legislation, and thus the course of a single administrative procedure can be influenced by multiple acts, while a single act can be applied to a number of different procedures. In this work, we propose a novel approach to modeling and execution of administrative procedures based on composition of elementary processes. The elementary processes correspond to unit legal aspects. During realization of administrative procedures, elementary processes are being composed and executed according to legal circumstances relevant to specific cases.

Deploying the E-Commerce Application System in Wholesale Commerce

Electronic business solutions are believed to improve a company’s operations. The success of such solution depends on: first, the reengineering of current business processes, and second, acceptance by people who are expected to use it. In this paper we present an e-commerce system that was designed and successfully deployed in the Polish division of a big, international corporation.

In-Store Proximity Marketing by Means of IoT Devices.

Recently we observe a boom of e-shopping and e-marketing, with plenty of tools, systems, and improvements to encourage customers to purchase more goods and services and to cut off the costs. One may enumerate here the recommendation systems, JIT strategy, instant shopping channels connected to the advertisement, personal targeting, and many more. To facilitate the implementation and operation of such systems, we collect several data related to users’ behavior by means of cookies, server logs, link and timing analysis, etc. Up to now, limited attention has been paid to apply all of these mechanisms to real stores and marketplaces. To fill the gap, in this paper we propose a multi-level system to (1) contextually analyze customer behavior at a shopping space by means of Internet-of-Things devices and services, (2) process this information at server-side to compute some instant purchasing recommendations and incentives, and (3) immediately send these recommendations to the customers, either in a form of classical marketing message, or as a personal advice, possibly linked with a discount, “special offer”, etc. In such a way, each customer is served personally and thus has more motivations to buy the recommended or discounted items.

Towards a Personalized Virtual Customer Experience

In an experience economy, customers are no longer satisfied with products and services themselves. Products and services are required to create memorable events, perfectly suited to individual needs and expectations of each customer. Such personalization that can potentially lead to an increased customer experience is currently recognized as the most important strategic goal for retailers. To reach this goal, the substantial use and contribution of new technologies seems to be of paramount importance. In this paper, a conceptual model of a virtual retail store for a personalized customer shopping experience is proposed. The model employs process mining, recommender systems, and big data analysis to create both personalized offers and personalized virtual shopping spaces which customers can immerse themselves in when making purchase decisions.

Conceptual Architecture of Knowledge Base for Administrative Procedure Execution

The majority of public services require public offices to perform some formal administrative procedures. An increasing number of offices develop models of these procedures. The more detailed model the better because the quality of public office work depends less on the knowledge and competences of a specific employee. However, such detailed models would overwhelm an employee’s list of to-do tasks with a great number of minor, routine activities. The remedy to this problem is automation of those tasks in an IT system. However, to make this happen, the system must be provided with the knowledge of all relevant circumstances affecting the courses of administrative procedures and manners of performing tasks included in these procedures. In this paper, a conceptual architecture of Administrative Knowledge Base for administrative procedure execution is proposed. The knowledge base assumes collecting three types of knowledge: common legal knowledge, public office knowledge, and administrative procedure knowledge, which are necessary for the automated execution of routine tasks.