МЕТОДИЧЕСКИЕ ПОЛОЖЕНИЯ ПО ВЕРОЯТНОСТНОМУ ПРОГНОЗИРОВАНИЮ КАЧЕСТВА ФУНКЦИОНИРОВАНИЯ ИНФОРМАЦИОННЫХ СИСТЕМ. Часть 3. МОДЕЛИРОВАНИЕ СЛОЖНЫХ СИСТЕМ. ИНТЕГРАЛЬНЫЙ АНАЛИЗ

Existing approaches to organizing the life cycle of information systems are associated with problems of mutual understanding between the customer and the developer. In view of the implementation of communication between the participants in the development process through polysemantic or indefinite concepts, the naming of which causes an erroneous opinion about the uniform perception of their meaning, the image of the target system formulated by the customer from such concepts and the image of the created system, consisting of the concepts implemented by the developer of the same name, but different in meaning, concepts can differ significantly. The phased division of the life cycle of information systems exacerbates the situation, since at each stage introduced, new meanings of polysemantic concepts are formed. To get away from this problem, a new life cycle model is proposed, the essence of which is the parallel work of all participants in the life cycle on the same set of concepts formulated by the user or customer. Parallelism is proposed to be ensured through the coordination of the meaning of the concept, and the concept itself to be represented using the abstraction of the mechanism of action as a unity of form and content that describe the action to create it.

The paper introduces a method for identifying, classifying, and analyzing the concerns of the stakeholders of a business system (i.e. an enterprise). The method is useful when we are going to develop an information system (IS) in the context of a given business. Understanding and resolving these concerns allow us to more easily gather the requirements for the new IS. Understanding the concerns means to be able to describe them. Therefore, for each concern a high level specification should be elaborated. This specification describes the concern associated problem and the care of one or more stakeholders. Taxonomy of concerns emerging during a IS life cycle is proposed by introducing four perspectives on the system development: social, informational, functional, and technological. From each of these perspectives concerns emerge that have to be taken in consideration in order to develop a new system or modify an existing one.

While significant effort is expended in developing a conceptual model for an information system, critical knowledge is discarded during implementation. Consequently, designers and users must employ less complete logical level knowledge to access data. Unfortunately, many users do not possess the detailed logical level knowledge required to formulate queries corresponding to ad hoc requests. By using the conceptual schema directly, however, it is possible to formulate such queries automatically. This paper describes how to augment the conceptual schema with knowledge of strongly associated conceptual level objects so that automated query formulation, semantic query optimization, and design feedback are supported. As a result, the conceptual schema assumes a central role throughout an information system's life cycle, and the design of intelligent interfaces is facilitated.

The article investigates the legal regulation of cross-border information systems that operate within the Schengen area. These information systems are the Schengen Information System, Visa Information System and the European Travel Information and Authorisation System. The information systems provide the opportunity of free access to the database of border and law enforcement authorities of the Schengen area member states. These authorities are able to quick and efficient collaboration as well as in interaction in support of national security, public order and effective fight against organized crime, border-crossing of illegal immigrants, drug trafficking etc. The article defines that in addition to cooperation between the competent and relevant authorities of the Schengen area member states the information systems are to be the instruments of the freedom of movement of persons, contributing at the same time of public order and national security of each of the European countries. The article analyses the main tasks and purposes of a new European travel information and authorization system. In particular, the system concerns those countries that have already signed agreements on visa-free regime with the EU. In practice, it means that the citizens of "visa-free" countries will be able to travel to the Schengen area member states without a visa, but they are required to be authorized through this system before the trip. The research also analyzes the regulations of the European Union, western and national doctrine in respect of the operation of cross-border information systems within the Schengen area.

<p>Change is endemic in modern business competition. In an age of globalisation, with the rapid development of information technologies (IT), changes occur at a much faster pace, and are also more unpredictable. Being agile in a turbulent environment has been ranked highly by executives in surveys of business issues conducted in past five years. Today nearly all organisations rely on information systems (IS) to operate. IS Agility is critical in achieving overall agility and performance in business. However, despite the strong interest from the practitioner community, IS Agility in academia has often been perceived as an overly abstract concept that is difficult to study. Resultantly, despite its importance, little has been published on how to systematically solve IS Agility problems with theoretical rigour and practical relevance. This “how to” question is a challenging one to researchers and is the major motivation of the present study. A key difficulty to study IS Agility is the lack of a solid conceptualisation. In this thesis, based on a multidisciplinary literature review looking for a unified theory of IS Agility, we proposed the IS Agility Nomological Network (ISANN) as a holistic conceptualisation to be used for problem solving. Such a conceptualisation includes an IS Agility Cycle illustrating four stages (i.e. Sense, Diagnose, Select, and Execute) of the dynamic interactions between IS and its human agents (e.g. IS users and IS developers), a decision tree presenting four main IS Agility drivers (i.e. Change Frequency, Uncertainty, Information Intensity, and Time Criticality), and a pyramid incorporating four IS Agility Providers (i.e. Agile System-Development, Agile-System Architecture, Agile System-Operation, and Agile-System Configuration ). We classify IS Agility as having at least two sides, Dev Agility and Ops Agility. The former represents the agility of IS development function while the later refers to the IS operation function. We believe they are not the same, as agility in system development process doesn’t necessarily translate to agility in the resulting system operation. To be able to answer the “how to” question and design a systematic problem-solving approach, we then operationalised ISANN by developing data and task models in real-world settings. These models were used to investigate and analyse IS Agility problems faced by Software as a Service (SaaS) adopters. Such a SaaS environment, due to its multi-tenancy nature, provides a great opportunity to observe the interactions and trade-offs between Dev Agility (e.g. stories from engineers and developers) and Ops Agility (e.g. stories from operators and users), as well as an abundant source of IS Agility related business problems. Eventually, more elements and factors emerged from this SaaS practice and were merged into the final artefact created in this study: ISACAM (Information System Agility Causation Analysis Method). ISACAM incorporates all the dimensions and facts derived from the theoretical conceptualisation and the ongoing real-world problem-solving practice. The effectiveness of ISACAM in solving IS Agility problems has been observed through improved performance in real-life businesses. Furthermore, five technological rules have been synthesised to offer a prescription for designing solutions to improve IS Agility.</p>

Information systems should contribute to enterprise effectiveness, and usually do so during the operational phase of their lifecycle. From the experience of practitioners, the duration of this lifecycle is often not predetermined, therefore resulting in information systems with a relatively long lifespan and information systems with a relatively short lifespan. An important aspect of application management, is managing the application lifecycle. In the experience of practitioners, deciding the moment to end the lifecycle, refactor it, or leave it be are often not thoroughly researched. The decision to move on to a newer information system is therefore not always sufficiently justified and relies more on a gut feeling. What if the older information system is still able to perform and comply with the changes the enterprise desires? Prolonging the length of an application lifecycle could result in cost reduction in an application portfolio. In this paper, we aim to create a method of assessment of the ability to change of a legacy information system and identifying potential areas in which a legacy information system would need improvement in order to increase this ability to change.

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this study is to explore how well a curriculum that combines operations management and information systems uniquely prepares students for the workforce. To address our research questions, a Web‐based survey was developed. We sent our survey to 203 alumni that graduated from the Department of Operations Management and Information Systems at Northern Illinois University. We assess alumni perceptions of how well our department prepared them in general and technical skills as well as how important these skills were in their current position. We investigate factors useful in predicting preparedness for both general business and technical skills. Overall, students felt prepared in most of the important skills we studied. We also found a significant positive relationship between alumni‐perceived importance of general and technical skills and perceived preparedness for those skills. More recent graduates felt the most prepared for both general business and technical skills. Our findings highlight the importance of general skills for future advancement and caution educators against overemphasizing currently popular technical tools at the expense of teaching the more general business skills. Results presented here provide new knowledge for curriculum designers at the intended institution and lessons for other schools. This research also provides a methodology or process that can be repeated at other institutions that combine information systems with operations management, or with other functions such as decision sciences or accounting. An implication of the results is that schools redesigning their programs may want to consider a curriculum that combines operations management and information systems.

Information systems strategies for multinational companies in Arab Gulf countries

Subject. This article discusses the role of information in ensuring the innovation process in the region’s economy. Objectives. The article aims to explore the areas of implementation of the State innovation policy, considering the Southern Federal District as a case study. Methods. For the study, I used the methods of systems analysis, modeling, generalization, grouping, and forecasting. Results. The article presents a theoretical generalization and outlines a new solution to an important scientific problem concerning the development of theoretical and methodological provisions and practical recommendations regarding the State innovation policy. Conclusions. The current national system of scientific and technical information should become a framework of innovation policy at the regional level.

현대 미래전에서 네트워크를 기반으로 한 합동 연합작전의 수요가 증가함에 따라 다양한 무기체계 간에 상호운용이 요구되고 있다. 이러한 이유로 미 국방성에서는 정보체계 기획단계에서부터 개발단계까지의 시스템 개발에 구현된 표준기술에 대한 상호운용성 수준을 평가하기 위해서 LISI(Level of Information System Interoperability)를 적용하고 있다. 우리나라에서도 국방정보체계 간의 상호운용성 수준을 평가하기 위하여 LISI 기반의 상호운용성 시험평가 도구인 SITES(Systems Interoperability Test & Evaluation System)을 개발하여 적용하고 있다. 그러나, 국방정보체계 뿐만 아니라 무기체계를 포함하는 상호운용성 수준을 평가하기 위해서는 기존의 정보체계 평가모델을 무기체계 영역으로 확장이 필요하다. 본 논문에서는 국방정보체계와 무기체계에 적용 가능한 상호운용성 평가모델을 제시하고, 제시된 모델을 E-SITES(Extended SITES)에 구현하고 12개 무기체계 대상으로 실험하고 결과를 분석하였다. There are many demands for interoperability between weapon systems as the operational needs for joint and coalition based on network in modern and future warfare have been increasingly needed. In DoD, LISI has been applied throughout information system life cycle from the planning phase to the development phase to assess the level of interoperability. We also developed SITES which is a tool to assess the level of interoperability in information systems. But we should extend the assessment model from the previous information systems to the weapon systems to assess the level of interoperability including weapon systems as well as information systems. In this paper, we proposed the assessment model of interoperability, implemented the E-SITE based on the proposed model, applied 12 weapon systems and analyzed the experimental result.

This thesis presents a new modelling method for information systems analysis and design, where the concept of service and the principles of service orientation are used for integrated modelling and reasoning about information systems architectures across organisational and technical systems boundaries. The concept of service enables cohesion of the intersubjective and objective modelling traditions by using a single type of diagram that facilitates detection of semantic inconsistency, incompleteness, ambiguity and discontinuity between the static and dynamic aspects of information systems specifications. The thesis is focused on three research topics, which are fundamental to the development of a new service-oriented modelling method. The first research topic concerns a pragmatic-driven specification of information systems. It clarifies answers to the research question: How can a conceptual modelling process be driven by pragmatic considerations? The second research topic provides a service-oriented modelling foundation for information systems analysis and design. It answers the research questions: How can the concept of service be used explicitly for the analysis and design of information systems and how can the static and dynamic aspects of information systems specifications be integrated at the conceptual level? The third research topic presents transition principles to implementation-specific design and answers the research question: How can service-oriented conceptual representations be aligned with implementation-specific design? The thesis contributes with a new knowledge to the area of conceptual modelling of information systems. The service-oriented modelling method consists of the modelling process, modelling language and techniques for the analysis and design of information systems on three levels of abstraction: pragmatic, semantic and syntactic. These three levels are necessary for a holistic understanding of enterprise architecture by stakeholders. The advantage of the service-oriented modelling method is that it can help to control traceability from information system design to original requirements. The method facilitates the semantic integration of the structural, behavioural and interactive aspects of information systems conceptual representations by using a single diagram type. The modelling language provides service-oriented constructs that are fundamental to building the major systems analysis patterns. The service-oriented modelling process contributes with seven steps of incremental design, which justifies various information systems components. The method provides the basis for a gradual and systematic way of modelling and an understanding of how pragmatic, semantic and logical information system requirements are linked together. The possibility to detect and eliminate undesirable characteristics of service-oriented diagrams can help to improve communication among stakeholders. Service-oriented specifications are computation-neutral and therefore they are more comprehensible for business analysis experts in comparison to implementation specific graphical representations of information systems. Finally, this thesis presents the challenges for future research, one of which is the development of the automated tools for the alignment of business models with implementation-specific information systems specifications.

Illustrates the main functionalities and development methodologies of the ISYDES (Information SYstem DEsign Support) system, which is a CASE tool for information system (IS) design and development. Such a tool is mainly composed of two software tools: the first allows the definition of the static structure of data, whereas the second allows the complete specification of all the functions which constitute the dynamic part of an IS. This second step is very important in the design phase of an IS, as all the IS operations and processes are based on the specification of such functions. The proposed ISYDES tool adopts an object-oriented approach to the IS conceptual design; in particular, it provides a way to specify the information processes that can be easily translated into the actual IS-coded procedures.

Management are keen to maximize the life span of an information system because of the high cost, organizational disruption, and risk of failure associated with the re‐development or replacement of an information system. This research investigates the effects that various factors have on an information system's life span by understanding how the factors affect an information system's stability. The research builds on a previously developed two‐stage model of information system change whereby an information system is either in a stable state of evolution in which the information system's functionality is evolving, or in a state of revolution, in which the information system is being replaced because it is not providing the functionality expected by its users.A case study surveyed a number of systems within one organization. The aim was to test whether a relationship existed between the base value of the volatility index (a measure of the stability of an information system) and certain system characteristics. Data relating to some 3000 user change requests covering 40 systems over a 10‐year period were obtained. The following factors were hypothesized to have significant associations with the base value of the volatility index: language level (generation of language of construction), system size, system age, and the timing of changes applied to a system. Significant associations were found in the hypothesized directions except that the timing of user changes was not associated with any change in the value of thevolatility index. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

As the integration of informatization and industrialization goes deeper in State Grid Jiangsu Electric Power Company, the lean management of O&M (operation and maintenance) of information system plays a more important role in the company’s production and management. On the ground of a full investigation of the current information system of the company, this paper has improved the model of business impact analysis (BIA) and, based on which, proposed a new method to classify O&M of information system. As proved in our practices in the company, the proposed model and method are efficient in controlling the cost of optimizing the operation of the information system, raising the efficiency of resource utilization as well as in improving the O&M management.

Digital development for a progressive networked society