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Research visit at the University of Vienna

Enterprise Modelling, Information Systems, Photo, SYSLAB, Visit

Last week, I found myself in Vienna invited by Prof. Dimitris Karagiannis, head of the Knowledge and Business Engineering Research Group at the University of Vienna. During my stay there I had the chance to learn more about the OpenModels initiative, a platform-based community to build, share and reuse models openly, and get a hands-on training on ADOxx, a meta-modeling platform developed by a team led by Prof. Karagiannis which is an evolution of the ADONIS tool for Business Process Modeling. I also gave a guest lecture on Modeling Business Strategy for Business-IT Alignment to master students for the modeling course offered by the department.

While the group is working mostly on business process management, their work around ADOxx expands to other areas as well, where meta-models of varying methods have been developed, such as i*, EKD, and more.

Additionally the modeling philosophy of the groups is quite similar to ours at SYSLAB which constitutes fruitful ground for future collaboration.

Finally, I should definitely stress how thankful I am to Prof. Karagiannis and his group both for the invitation as well as for their warming and outstanding hospitality in Vienna.

Case Studies and Grounded Theory in SE

Uncategorized

I stumbled upon a post of Neil Ernst (Post Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of British Columbia) with interesting thoughts on Case Studies and Grounded Theory in Software Engineering.

In software development, many advances (by which I mean “better ways of developing software”, where better is defined with respect to perhaps cost, time, value-delivery …) have come from industry and consultants proposing solutions to the problems they have come across1, of which some examples include Scrum, Kanban,Go, Continuous Delivery, etc. The argument could be made that one person’s hundreds of consultations with troubled software projects provides him or her much more in the way of actionable observation than does a researcher’s single site visit at a large organization, even if the latter is rigorously conducted. Several researchers have argued that the case study is not necessarily non-generalizable, and that it is probably the most useful empirical method for software engineering. However, I think this raises a bigger question: how does a well-conducted academic case study compare with the plethora of anecdotal evidence from software consultants?

The rest of the post can be found here.

Paper accepted at iStar 2011

Enterprise Modelling, Information Systems, Publication, Research Paper, SYSLAB

Modeling Strategy Maps and Balanced Scorecards using iStar
Giannoulis C. & Zdravkovic J.

Aligning business strategy to enterprise models requires explicit models from both areas, mapped to each other. Mapping existingbusiness strategy definition approaches to requirement engineering practices improves strategy dissemination towards development. In this paperwe present an illustration of such a mapping using the Strategy Mapsand Balanced Scorecards as a business strategy approach and iStar (i*)as a requirements engineering practice exemplified using a case scenario. (Full paper here)

iStar 2011: 5th International i* Workshop co-located with the 19th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE’11)

3 papers presented: RCIS2011, BIS2011, BUSITAL2011

Business Processes, Enterprise Modelling, Information Systems, Publication, Research Paper, SYSLAB
  • RCIS 2011
    Modeling Business Strategy: A meta-model of Strategy Maps and Balanced Scorecards
    Giannoulis C., Petit M., Zdravkovic J.
    Business strategy is aimed to support the vision of anenterprise, by paving the way to achieve it through goals thatdirect the strategy’s execution. However, there is a lack of means to establish and assess the alignment of business strategy andgoal oriented requirements engineering. The objective of our ongoing research is to model business strategy in order to establish well-defined and traceable links with system requirements. In this paper, we propose a business strategy metamodelfor Strategy maps and Balanced Scorecards. The validity of the meta-model is tested through a case scenario using OWLand Telos.
  • BIS2011
    Towards a Goal-Driven Approach for Business Process Improvement Using Process-Oriented Data Warehouse
     Shahzad K. & Giannoulis C.
    An emerging approach for business process analysis is to usebusiness intelligence practices by employing data warehouse and decision making techniques. However, little work has been done on developing coremethods and tools to guide process analysis and improvement. Our researchaddresses this issue by introducing a goal-driven approach for business processimprovement using process warehouse. In this paper, we present our three stepmethod and its evaluation through an empirical study. The results showed thatthe impact of applying our method for process improvement has been perceived positively. (Full paper here)
  • BUSITAL 2011
    Modeling Competition-Driven Business Strategyfor Business IT Alignment
    Giannoulis C., Petit M., Zdravkovic J.
    Business strategy aims at supporting the vision of an enterprise,by paving the way to achieve it through goals that direct thestrategy’s execution. Aligning business strategy to system requirements requires explicit models from both business strategy and requirementsengineering. However, existing business strategy definition approachesare informal and their syntax is based on natural language, therefore,they cannot be used in model-driven alignment. An objective of ourresearch is to define a well-structured business strategy modeling language.In this paper, we propose a business strategy meta-model basedon Porter’s work on competition driven strategy and its extension byStabell and Fjeldstad. Our UML meta-model is formalized in Telos and OWL. An initial validation is performed by instantiating the meta-modelusing a case scenario. (Full paper here)

 

1st DSV-PhD Workshop on Computer and Systems Sciences

SYSLAB

Last Friday, November 27th, 2009, DSV’s Director of Postgraduate Studies, Anne Håkansson, and the DSV PhD Student Board (phds.dsv.su.se), hosted the 1st DSV-PhD Workshop on Computer and Systems Sciences.

The main objective was to bring together all PhD students within DSV and allow them to interact and present their work to each other stirring discussions and hopefully future collaborations.

Lunch seminar on Design Science

SYSLAB

Today I had the chance to share with colleagues at SYSLAB my experience of the ERCIS Design Science summer school, which I attended at the end of August (ercis-phd-summer-school-design). I covered key points from literature intending to provide a broader scope of Design Science than what is covered by Hevner et. al. 2004 (the most well known paper on Design Science research). Furthemore, I briefly covered all main aspects of the area as tackled during the summer school. These could be summarized into a set of questions and open issues:

• What is and what is not design science research?
• What are the philosophical assumptions of design science?
• What is an artifact in design science?
• What is the/a design science research process?
• What is a design science theory?

• Open issues: the relation of a kernel theory and design science theory, epistemology in design theory, utility, how to codify design theory, etc.

Here is the presentation
(literature references used, coming from the ERCIS Design Science summer school, are listed in the slides).

ERCIS PhD Summer School “Design Science”

SYSLAB

Last week I attended the 1st PhD summer school on”Design Science” organized by the European Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS) on a sailing boat in the Netherlands.

Along with another 12 PhD students and the two chairs of the summer school, Prof. Karlheinz Kautz (Copenhagen Business School, Denmark) and Dr.Dr. Björn Niehaves (ERCIS, University of Münster, Germany) we spent the week with seminars on foundation papers of “Design Science” (e.g. Hevner et. al. 2004, March & Smith 1995, Simon 1981, etc.) and its applicability.

Our discussions and theme of the paper analysis evolved around 5 questions and a set of open issues:
• What is and what is not design science research?
• What are the philosophical assumptions of design science?
• What is an artifact in design science?
• What is the/a design science research process?
• What is a design science theory?
• Open issues: the relation of a kernel theory and design science theory, epistemology in design theory, utility, how to codify design theory, etc.

It was a pleasure attending the seminars that brought up different views of the papers examined; putting on the table more questions on Design Science to be answered. It was a valuable experience especially for someone like me trying to clarify my research topic and research methods.

More information about the summer school should be soon available via ERCIS: www.ercis.de

REVVA 2 presentation

SYSLAB

As a member of the technical team representing the Swedish Defense Research Agency (FOI), Today, I had the opportunity to present the outcome of the work done within the REVVA 2 consortium. Under the auspices of the Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization (SISO), the project was focused on developing a generic and comprehensive Verification, Validation & Acceptance (VV&A) methodology for modeling and simulation (M&S) products. The outcome is meant to be submitted as an internationally recognized standard and recommended practice for the application of VV&A, the Generic Methodology for Verification, Validation and Acceptance (GM-VV).

The GM-VV provides a generic framework to efficiently develop an argument to justify why identified models, simulations, underlying data, outcomes and capabilities are believed to be acceptable for deployment in the target (intended) operational (use) context. This argument is intended to support stakeholders in their acceptance decision-making process on the utilization the aforementioned M&S artifacts to satisfy their business goals. The methodology provides this support throughout the whole life-cycle of these (M&S) artifacts (development, employment and (re)use). More importantly, the GM-VV defines the required information and argumentation mechanisms that allow well-balanced and risk informed arguments for acceptance decision making with various levels of formality.

The presentation can be found here:2009.04.08 REVVA2 for SYSLAB.pdf, while the full document set (the GM-VV Handbook, the GM-VV RPG and the GM-VV Reference Manual) can be found at SISO’s product development group webpage.