Belastingdienst

Circular economy (CE) and sustainability are high on the political agenda of governments nationally and internationally. Governments are developing instruments to stimulate the CE, but without monitoring in place, these measures can be subject to abuse, failing to achieve the desired effects. CE monitoring, however, is still a nascent topic in academic literature. In this paper we propose the concept of the extended data pipeline to support CE visibility. Governments, but also banks and auditing firms can use this visibility to monitor CE flows to design and evaluate instruments and measures to enhance the CE.

Customs continue to use a wide range of technology in protecting against terrorism and the movement of illicit trade and prohibited imports. The throughput of scanned vehicles and cargo increases and just keeps on growing. Therefore, the need of automated algorithms to help screening officers in inspection, examination or surveillance of vehicles and containers is crucial. In this context, the successful collaboration between manufacturers and customs offices is of key importance. Facing this topic, within the seventh framework program of the European Commission, the project ACXIS “Automated Comparison of X-ray Images for cargo Scanning” arose. This project develops a reference database for X-ray images of illegal and legitimate cargo, procedures and algorithms to uniform X-ray images of different cargo scanners, and an automated identification of potentially illegal cargo.

This chapter presents a communication perspective of enterprise architectures. We provide both a theoretical and a practical perspective of the issues involved in the communication of enterprise architectures. The general idea is that the chapter helps the reader see how architecture development and modelling can be optimally supported by discussing why certain forms of modelling are used in some situation and how this fits the goals in the process. The theoretical perspective will focus on communication during system development in general, where the word system should be interpreted as any open and active system, consisting of both human and computerised actors, that is purposely designed. The practical perspective will take shape as a set of practical guidelines that should aid architects in the selection and definition of architecture description approaches that are apt for a specific (communication) context.

This chapter discusses the implementation of workplace innovation (WPI) in European companies. Based on a 51-case study research in 10 EU Member States this chapter addresses four questions: (1) Why do companies apply workplace innovation; (2) What are different motives for management, employees and employee representatives to implement WPI; (3) What are important leverage factors for the implementation of WPI; and (4) What is known about the (expected) effects according to management, employees and employee representatives? Results show that successful WPI is an interplay of management-driven business goals and employee-driven quality of work goals. Companies differ in their implementing strategies but constructive cooperation between management and employees is a key success factor for successful WPI.

Model Driven Software Engineering is a discipline that only recently has begun to be used in mainstream practise. At the DTCA, we use this approach successfully for a major part of the Dutch Social Benefits system, a nationwide online system serving 6 million citizens. We report on our experiences with bringing forth and maintaining this system, and on our future plans for extending this approach to other key systems of our organisation. The DTCA is responsible for collecting taxes and paying social benefits. The supporting software systems typically have a lot of functionality and process huge volumes of data. Furthermore, the systems should be easy to adapt within short notice: laws do change often, and once a change to a law has been approved by the parliament, there is only little time to implement the changes. To adapt complex systems quickly, we use Functional Model Driven Development (FMDD), a variant of Model Driven Software Engineering. The FMDD approach separates functionality from other aspects of an application, hence its name. We outline the basic way of working by describing the main artefacts and roles. We detail the some of the techniques we applied in the Social Benefits System.