BIS'99 Proceedings

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Table of Contents

Inauguration Session

Building a Case for Consonance

Gary Klein,

James J. Jiang,

Michael Boyd

A number of theories and practices lean toward the importance of achieving agreement among various stakeholders and practices in organizations. Consonance is such a concept applied to systems development and allows likelihood of success to be measured at the start of a project rather than the conclusion. This paper reviews theory and preliminary studies that support the concept of consonance.

The Impact of Time Pressure on Idea Generation

Robert M. Myers,

Jay E. Aronson,

Robert B. Wharton

The issues of time pressure and idea generation are vital concerns for businesses today. In this paper, we examine the impact of time pres-sure on idea generation and creativity. One hundred and two business students were used to examine the impact of time pressure on: (a) the rate of ideas generated, and (b) the rate of the creativity of the generated ideas.
Results of the study supported the research hypotheses that the mean rate of: (a) idea generation, and (b) the creativity of the ideas is unequal in groups operating under differing time pressure conditions.

A Discussion on Process Losses in GSS: Suggested Ground Rules for
the Electronic Environment

Wm. Benjamin Martz, Jr.

As research with group support systems (GSS) moves forward, re-searchers must watch for and identify possible derivative process losses: proposed here as those process losses introduced into the group meeting process while researching a primary dysfunction. This paper reviews a set of GSS literature in order to find support for such derivative process losses. Five such derivative losses are proposed with corresponding ground rules for addressing them. One such loss, "stronger identification with non-consensus", is discussed in more detail.

Suggestions for Improving the Diffusion of GroupSystems in Organizations

Morgan M. Shepherd

As project teams and work groups are being challenged to "do more with less", organizations are turning to a new type of technology called Group Support Systems (GSS). This research was concerned with determining the major factors that affect the diffusion of GSS (specifically GroupSystems) in organizations. The variables that had the most significant effects were the size of the work groups, the hourly rate charged to use the technology, the amount of money initially spent on the technology, and the role of the facilitator.

Facilitating and Coordinating Distributed Joint Applications Development

James Suleiman,

Roberto Evaristo,

Gigi G. Kelly

Virtual teams have become a fixture of organizations in the 90s. Part of the reason for the creation of virtual teams is the existence of limited resources or need for people to share knowledge concurrently over long distances. Software development is not an exception to this problem, and it is likely to become even more of a distributed process in the near future. In this paper we address the problems that are likely to be found in distributed Joint Application Design (JAD) efforts. We then propose an interpretivistic study to perform a more complete analysis of the key issues in distributed JAD. Important applications to practice are raised.

Knowledge Management

Information Systems in Customer-Oriented, Dynamic Environments:
The Marketplace as a Metaphor

Peter C. Lockemann

The future of information systems lies in having a balanced view of both, their technical proficiency and their utility to persons and organizations. Complementing the two means finding some common ground for both. The premise of this paper is that this ground is provided by something like an information marketplace in which information products and services should be offered at fair market value. The objective of the paper is to argue that the marketplace can only evolve if there exists a suitable information infrastructure. The main argument is that this infrastructure should submit itself to the laws of a market economy. The main result is that the laws must acknowledge that the infrastructure consists of two tiers: A lower tier of so-called middleware and Internet functionality, possibly combined, and an upper tier which follows the I3 reference architecture and encompasses wrappers, mediators, facilitators and possibly browsers. The paper concludes by claiming that this view poses scientific challenges not just to technology but also to the economic and legal sciences.

Knowledge Management: Life Cycle and Implementation Techniques

August-Wilhelm Scheer,

Ursula Markus

The prerequisite for effective knowledge management is the joint orientation of strategies, processes, organisation, information technology and culture to the best possible creation and use of knowledge. Only a systematic approach to knowledge processing, and the appreciation of the human assets, can help organisations overcome the challenges of the future.

Utilising Knowledge Resources: An Activity Perspective of Knowledge Management

Henry Linger

The corporate world has embraced knowledge management as a contribution to business practice and as a strategic issue. Yet there is little consensus on what knowledge management is. This paper draws on a number of case studies that address knowledge management from the perspective of a community of practice. It presents a generalised framework that is grounded in a theoretical understanding of knowledge work.

The Strategic Role of Marketing Information Systems in Modern Business

Jacek Unold

In spite of the fact that the traditional approach in marketing has become obsolete, it still seems to have great potential. Unique opportunities arise from the incredible development of information technology. Together with the information explosion this development has been instrumental in fuelling the growing interest in marketing information systems (MkIS). The greatest single application of IT within marketing is the database. Database marketing constitutes the complex process of ongoing, two-way communication with the customer, affecting significantly the whole business.

Internet

Software Engineering on the Web

Joseph E. Urban

This paper addresses software development over the web with team members physically located in various locations. There is a discussion of software engineering tools and web-based development. A graduate level course project on web-based software requirements and specification tools is described in the paper. The course projects are described from the standpoint of the software prototypes, development methods, and project management. Future directions are discussed in the context of an undergraduate software engineering project two course sequence and multiple university involvement.

Data Warehousing

Data Warehousing Beyond Tools and Data: Justification, Organization, and Structured Development of Data Warehousing Applications

Robert Winter

Based on a short recapitulation of the Data Warehousing state of the art in large companies, three important non-technical issues of Data Warehousing are discussed. Analyses show that mostly intangible as-sets are being produced, so that justification must concentrate on incremental "quick win" projects and acquisition of sponsors. Organizational roles and responsibilities emerge that are partially contrary to the traditional, transaction oriented organization. Methodological sup-port for some novel systems development tasks is necessary, and some traditional development methods have to be redefined.

To the Stars through Dimensions and Facts

Jaroslav Pokorný

In this paper we present a conceptual and dimensional level of model-ling data warehouses. A four-level architecture is proposed and the conceptual and dimensional levels are discussed in detail. A dimensional model based on dimension tables and fact tables is developed. Some new aspects of dimensional modelling, which extend the previous approaches, are shown, e.g. query constraints and ISA-hierarchies combined with dimension hierarchies.

Generating Sample Data for Mining and Warehousing

Josef Schiefer,

A Min Tjoa

Generating representative sample data for data warehouses for testing, benchmarking and presentation purposes, can be seen as a very complex task. For the generation of sample data, it is important to precisely describe the requirements and properties of the data to be represented. We present in this paper an approach for generating sample data for OLAP data warehouses.

Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery in Business: Past, Present, and Future

Zdzisław S. Hippe

Data mining and knowledge discovery (DM&KD), until recently, has been largely an academic field of research. However, the tendency to turn data into information - met currently in large corporations - has forced the application of this technology in various branches of business, mainly for banking and finance, retail and marketing, telecommunication, and healthcare. In this paper, central issues to data mining and knowledge discovery will be briefly presented and discussed, giving an insight into recent progress in DM&KD. Giving the necessary background for three fundamental approaches (classification studies, clustering studies, and visualization studies), some general features of the data mining process and its basic steps will be dealt with, assigning particular attention to the problem of data visualization.

From Economical Theory to Management Systems

On the Difficulties of Cost/Benefit Analysis: What Management
is Buying when Buying Information Technology Systems

Kenneth Wong,

Wita Wojtkowski

The purpose of this paper is to outline and analyze the challenges en-countered when utilizing the prevailing methodologies used to determine the cost/benefit of implementing an information technology (IT) system. This paper will address the issues regarding the challenges of accurately determining the cost/benefits of implementing an IT system.

User Preferences in Evaluating Usability of Software Product: A Multicriteria Approach

Marcin Sikorski

This paper presents an attempt to combine usability testing of software product with multicriteria evaluation techniques. The author argues that user preferences as to quality characteristics can be identified and captured, so it is easier to track to what extend a software product satisfies users' needs, and in result to develop a product of high quality and usability.

Business Process Re-engineering

Re-engineering: problems with theory and practical application

Jerzy Kisielnicki

This paper is written from the position of re-engineering supporter who attempts, on the basis of literature and his own experience, to determine conditions and methodology of its application. Both theoretical and practical problems of re-engineering will be analysed. The paper presents the basic procedures, as well as the so-called rules of re-engineering. The results obtained by the author during realisation of a particular project, for which the re-engineering method has been applied, will be presented in the final part of this paper. The aim of the project was to reform the state administration management system on the voivodship level.

Flexible Business Process Models and their Application

Christian Mittasch

Software components are becoming more and more important for business applications. Meanwhile, middleware technologies, CORBA, DCOM and Java/Internet, are supporting methodologies for development and runtime control of business objects. While the questions of the description of such business objects have been investigated, their flexible and extendible runtime support must be hardly improved. This contribution discusses main clauses of the flexible support of such components and emphasizes the use of these descriptions during runtime.

Business Processes Based Information Systems Development

Vaclav Repa

The paper is aimed at the idea that analysing business processes as the substantial basis for IS development is the necessary way to ensure the required adaptability of the IS. Basic concepts and principles of BP analysis are stated and the impacts on the related fields are discussed. The paper also briefly describes a methodology, developed at the Department of Information Technologies of the Prague University of Economics, for analysing business processes.

Database in Support of BIS

Towards Exploitation of the Data Universe - Database Technology for Comprehensive Query Services 

Klaus R. Dittrich,

Ruxandra Domenig

Multimedia technology, global information infrastructures and other developments allow users to access more and more information sources of various types. However, the "technical" availability alone (by means of networks, WWW, mail systems, databases, etc.) is not at all sufficient for making meaningful and advanced use of all information available on-line. Therefore, the problem of effectively and efficiently accessing and querying heterogeneous and distributed data sources is an important research direction. This paper aims first at classifying existing approaches which can be used to query heterogeneous data sources. Second, we consider one of the approaches - mediated query systems - in more detail and provide a classification framework for it. Third, we present our own approach, the SINGAPORE system, and point out some issues we are currently working on.

Prototype Validation of the Rectangular Attribute Cardinality Map for Query Optimization in Database Systems

Murali Thiyagarajah,

B. John Oommen

Current business database systems utilize histograms to approximate frequency distributions of attribute values of relations. These are used to efficiently estimate query result sizes and access plan costs and thus minimize the query response time for business (and non-commercial) database systems. In two recent works [10, 11] we proposed two new forms of histogram-like techniques called the Rectangular and Trapezoidal Attribute Cardinality Maps (ACM) respectively, that give much smaller estimation errors than the traditional equiwidth and equidepth histograms currently being used by many commercial database systems. In [10, 11] we also provided a fairly extensive mathematical analysis for their average and worst case errors for their frequency estimates - which, in turn, were verified for synthetic data.
This paper reports the prototype validation for the Rectangular-ACM (R-ACM) for query optimization in real-world database systems. By using an extensive set of experiments using real-life data [1, 2], we demonstrate that the R-ACM scheme is much more accurate than the traditional histograms for query result size estimation. We anticipate that it could become an invaluable tool for query optimization in the future.

Workflow Management Issues

Time Management in Workflow Systems

Johann Eder,

Euthimios Panagos,

Heinz Pozewaunig,

Michael Rabinovich

Management of workflow processes is more than just enactment of process activities according to business rules. Time management functionality should be provided to control the lifecycle of processes. Time management should address planning of workflow executions in time, provide various estimates about activity execution durations, avoid violations of deadlines assigned to activities and the entire process, and react to deadline violations when they occur. In this paper we describe how time information can be captured in the workflow definition, and we propose a technique for calculating internal activity deadlines with the goal to meet the overall deadlines during process execution.

On Capturing Process Requirements of Workflow Based Business Information Systems

Wasim Sadiq, Maria E. Orlowska

The workflow technology manages the execution of business activities and coordinates the flow of information throughout the enterprise. It is emerging as one of the fastest growing disciplines in in-formation technology. It is essential to correctly and effectively capture the workflow specific requirements of business information systems before their deployment through workflow management systems. In this paper, we look at different issues in capturing such requirements and propose a systematic layered modeling approach. We split the workflow specification requirements into five basic dimensions: structure, data, execution, temporal, and transactional. The concepts introduced in this paper have been applied as a foundation to the development of a workflows modeling and verification tool, FlowMake.

7th International Conference BIS 2004