Wolffried Stucky

Exploring the Critical Success Factors for Mobile Commerce

The main purpose of this paper is to explore and identify the key factors for successfully implementing mobile commerce in businesses. We first provide an end-user perspective of mobile commerce and then a value-add-based acceptance model is proposed based on the analysis. A set of factors, which is deemed to positively affect the success, was identified, and a theoretical framework of CSF is presented.

INCOME/STAR: methodology and tools for the development of distributed information systems

Abstract INCOME/STAR is an experimental environment for the cooperative development of distributed information systems. This paper presents some of INCOME/STARs innovative features in the area of information systems engineering: First a new type of high-level Petri nets, so-called Nested Relation/Transition nets (NR/T-nets), is described. NR/T-nets allow the modeling of concurrent processes and related complex structured objects in distributed business applications. New concepts for entity and relationship clustering were developed to support a stepwise top-down approach for Entity/Relationship based object modeling. Distributed multi-user simulation and prototyping are used for the evaluation and analysis of NR/T-nets and the involved object schema. Finally, ProMISE — an evolutionary process model for information system development — is introduced. A role-based groupware component is part of the INCOME/STAR architecture to support communication, organization and social interaction in development projects.

Extending ER Model Clustering by Relationship Clustering

The entity relationship approach is a widely accepted method for conceptual database design. However, some problems arise if ER modelling is applied to the design of really large databases concerning whole enterprises. There is, e.g., no way to obtain a general view nor to perceive the global context of a detailed enterprise scheme with hundreds of entities and relationships. Different approaches use ER model clustering to overcome these problems. All approaches are based on an already existing detailed ER diagram. Based on this, the abstraction layers are built bottom-up. The approach proposed in this paper refines and extends the approaches mentioned above. It also takes into account the Nested Entity Relationship Model in order to refine relationship types. It can be used in a top-down database design process as well as in a bottom-up approach.

Product lines for digital information products

The growth of the Web has fueled the creation, storage, and exchange of digital information products (DIPs), whose main purpose is the delivery of information, entertainment, education, or training. Very often, after their initial creation, the growing amount of content also leads to a more complicated maintenance, since updates typically occur rather often and the potential variability of modifications is not limited in advance. Moreover, commonalities between different parts of similar information products are not exploited, which often leads to redundancy. At the moment, there is hardly any attempt to compose information products from different sources and to produce more complex information products in a coordinated way. To help remedy this situation, this paper introduces the Product Lines for digitAl iNformation producTs (PLANT) approach, which applies the concept of software product lines to DIPs. The PLANT approach explicitly manages the commonalities of similar DIPs by defining common requirements, limiting variability in advance, as well as planning and coordinating reuse. This article focuses on the modeling of such product lines. In particular, the developed general concepts will be exemplified throughout the paper in the area of e-learning, in which DIPs play an important role. The application of PLANT in other areas and an implemented tool that supports the creation of information products in a product line are outlined as well.

Die Integration von Informationsverarbeitungsressourcen im Rahmen von Mergers & Acquisitions

Mergers & acquisitions feature prominently in today’s business world. At the same time, numerous failed transactions exemplify that the integration of enterprise resources requires special management attention. As corporate value chains become ever more permeated with information technology, integration in mergers & acquisitions increasingly turns into an issue of combining firms’ IT-resources.In face-to-face interviews with IT-managers, detailed insights into the integration of data centers, application suites and IT-organizations were gained for 20 horizontal, synergy-oriented mergers & acquisitions. A contingency model is used to analyze different integration practices for their situational drivers and success impact. The results offer support for business and IT-management in successfully integrating IT-resources in mergers & acquisitions.

Integrity checking in data base systems

Abstract There is the problem, how to control data base integrity. For many types of integrity assertions it is an unsolved problem, how to prove them in justifiable time. This paper deals with methods for improving the testing of semantic integrity assertions. First a classification of integrity assertions is given and a proposal for the implementation of a subsystem for controlling semantic integrity is described. Special algorithms are presented for testing delayed integrity assertions after the end of transactions, for testing integrity assertions, which contain functions, and for testing integrity assertions, which define relationships between values of attributes of different tuples. Using these algorithms in many cases the integrity test can be performed without any access to secondary storage, so that the cost for the tests becomes justifiable.

Web Services Classification Based on Intelligent Clustering Techniques

The better way for Web services discovery is to classify the Web services into different categories when they are published in a registry. The method of intelligent clustering based classification of the Web services is mainly studied. A hybrid solution is proposed for building and populating a taxonomy structure by combining human knowledge with the techniques of artificial intelligence. The Web service is converted into standard vector format through Web service description language (WSDL) document. The self-organizing neural network based learning algorithm and clustering algorithm are designed and implemented to classify the Web services automatically.

Ein Vorgehensmodell zur Erstellung virtueller Bildungsinhalte

The process of developing courseware (i.e. web-based, hypermedia courses) has similarities with the traditional software development, since the result of both processes is a software product. In order to avoid adhoc-developments software engineering approaches are also necessary for the courseware development. Our process model describes the courseware development process and consists of the phases analysis, design, implementation and application/maintenance. Parallel to these phases project management activities run. In the analysis phase educational goals, content and target groups are defined. The content, the educational scenario, the data and the user interface are modelled in the design phase. The implementation phase is consisting of the activities authoring in-the-small and authoring in-the-large. At last the courses will be used and evaluated. The re-use of courseware plays an important role in the process model. The content will be modularised and different courses are built re-using the same education modules; separating content from its presentation makes it possible to define different views on the same content, and extending the education modules with standardised metadata facilitates a further search and re-use of courseware.

Petri net based modelling of procedures in complex object database applications

In this paper a new type of high level Petri nets is introduced for modelling procedures in complex object database applications. Places in these so-called nested relation/transition nets (NR/T-nets) represent schemes of unnormalized (nested) relations. The marking of each place is a nested relation of the respective type. Each transition represents a specific type of operation on the relations in the adjacent places. These operations may not only operate on whole tuples of a given relation but also on sub-tuples of existing tuples. Arcs in a net are inscribed with so-called filter tables which allow to formulate conditions on the specified (sub-) tuples. Each NR/T-net defines a class of possible system procedures.<<ETX>>

A model of business process support system for e-government

This paper proposes the architecture and a model of business process support (BPS) systems for e-government organizational boundaries. Today, processes are mostly adapted to existing technologies; in contrast, the proposed architecture intends to support typical e-government processes. The proposed system consists of three main IT components: a workflow system for administration and control of information flows; Web services enabling data transfer between computers; and a Web server controlling all applications for communication with all users in each organization. The proposed model of the workflow enactment server consists of two nodes: the rule base collection, and the workflow engine. The workflow engine consists of two components A and B for process execution and control.