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A major challenge to achieving business process agility is the fragmentation of business processes, especially in organizations with semiautonomous business units. This fragmentation manifests itself in the form of diversified business processes performing similar activities. To address this challenge and achieve synergies across business units, processes should be integrated. Extant research on business process management has not paid much attention to such integration. Motivated by this concern, the primary objectives of my research are: “1) to understand how integration of similar business processes is achieved by semiautonomous business units and 2) to develop a process modeling support system that can help find similarities among business process models to aid process designers and to empirically evaluate its effectiveness in supporting process modeling activities.” I use a two-phased approach to address above objectives. In the first phase, I draw upon the analytic concept of frames of reference to develop a socio-cognitive process model to understand cognitive processes of stakeholders involved in the business process integration. This is done by analyzing the shifts in frame salience and frame congruence to enable the development of common-yet-tailorable business process. Data collection was conducted at ManCo, a Fortune 500 manufacturing company that had undertaken a process integration initiative in its multi-billion dollar supply chain across its five business units. Using qualitative data analysis, I identify four frame domains. Shifts in the frame salience and congruence highlight how, through a series of events, process stakeholders bring about integration. Frames domains identified in phase 1 highlight how individual business units’ perceptions differ. The use of diverse terminologies to refer to similar concepts added to the inability of process designers to reuse existing process models. These observations motivated the design research conducted in the second phase. I develop a prototype system, BPSimilar, which helps users to retrieve semantically similar process models. The approach to retrieve process models combines structural and semantic similarity-matching. The need for such a mechanism to speed up the model development was suggested by the case study. The effectiveness of BPSimilar for improving performance of users is evaluated in a qualitative study using verbal protocol analysis.

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Em âmbito global, o ambiente em que as organizações estão inseridas vem apresentando mudanças cada vez mais complexas, caracterizadas por exigências cada vez maiores em termos de rapidez, qualidade, baixo custo, flexibilidade e satisfação do cliente. Nesse novo contexto – do qual as organizações do Brasil certamente não estão excluídas – o sucesso de uma organização reside na sua capacidade de responder à essas exigências por meio da contínua inovação em seus produtos, serviços e processos, a fim de criar vantagem competitiva sustentável. Este trabalho busca explorar uma das estratégias utilizadas para obter essa vantagem: a Reengenharia de Processos do Negócio – RPN. / Throughout the world, the environment organizations are inserted has been showing more and more complex changes featuring bigger and bigger demands in terms of speed, quality, low cost, flexibility and customer’s satisfaction. In this new context – which Brazilian organizations are certainly not excluded of – the success of an organization resides in its ability to respond to such demands through a continuous innovation of its products, services and processes in order to create a sustainable competitive advantage. This work aims at exploring one of the strategies that is used to obtain such advantage: The Business Process Reengineering – BPR.

Doctor of Philosophy(PhD) / An exciting trend in enterprise computing lies in the integration of applications across an organisation and even between organisations. This allows the provision of services by automated business processes that coordinate business activity among several collaborating organisations. The best successes in this type of integrated distributed system come through use of Web Services and Service-based Architecture, which allow interoperation between applications through open standards based on XML and SOAP. But still, there are unresolved issues when developers seek to build a reliable and robust system. An important goal for the designers of a loosely coupled distributed system is to maintain consistency for each long running business process in the presence of failures and concurrent activities. Our approach to assist the developers in this domain is to guide the developers with the key principles they must consider, and to provide programming models and protocols, which make it easier to detect and avoid consistency faults in service-based system. We start by defining a realistic e-procurement scenario to illustrate the common problems faced by the developers which prevent them from building a reliable and robust system. These problems make it hard to maintain the consistency of the data and state during the execution of a business process in the occurrence of failures and interference from concurrent activities. Through the analysis of the common problems, we identify key principles the developers must consider to avoid producing the common problems. Then based on the key principles, we provide a framework called GAT in the orchestration infrastructure. GAT allows developers to express all the necessary processing to handle deviations including those due to failures and concurrent activities. We discuss the GAT framework in detail with its structure and key features. Using an example taken from part of the e-procurement case study, we illustrate how developers can use the framework to design their business requirements. We also discuss how key features of the new framework help the developers to avoid producing consistency faults. We illustrate how systems based on our framework can be built using today’s proven technology. Finally, we provide a unified isolation mechanism called Promises that is not only applicable to our GAT framework, but also to any applications that run in the service-based world. We discuss the concept, how it works, and how it defines a protocol. We also provide a list of potential implementation techniques. Using some of the implementation techniques we mention, we provide a proof-of-concept prototype system.

Doctor of Philosophy(PhD) / An exciting trend in enterprise computing lies in the integration of applications across an organisation and even between organisations. This allows the provision of services by automated business processes that coordinate business activity among several collaborating organisations. The best successes in this type of integrated distributed system come through use of Web Services and Service-based Architecture, which allow interoperation between applications through open standards based on XML and SOAP. But still, there are unresolved issues when developers seek to build a reliable and robust system. An important goal for the designers of a loosely coupled distributed system is to maintain consistency for each long running business process in the presence of failures and concurrent activities. Our approach to assist the developers in this domain is to guide the developers with the key principles they must consider, and to provide programming models and protocols, which make it easier to detect and avoid consistency faults in service-based system. We start by defining a realistic e-procurement scenario to illustrate the common problems faced by the developers which prevent them from building a reliable and robust system. These problems make it hard to maintain the consistency of the data and state during the execution of a business process in the occurrence of failures and interference from concurrent activities. Through the analysis of the common problems, we identify key principles the developers must consider to avoid producing the common problems. Then based on the key principles, we provide a framework called GAT in the orchestration infrastructure. GAT allows developers to express all the necessary processing to handle deviations including those due to failures and concurrent activities. We discuss the GAT framework in detail with its structure and key features. Using an example taken from part of the e-procurement case study, we illustrate how developers can use the framework to design their business requirements. We also discuss how key features of the new framework help the developers to avoid producing consistency faults. We illustrate how systems based on our framework can be built using today’s proven technology. Finally, we provide a unified isolation mechanism called Promises that is not only applicable to our GAT framework, but also to any applications that run in the service-based world. We discuss the concept, how it works, and how it defines a protocol. We also provide a list of potential implementation techniques. Using some of the implementation techniques we mention, we provide a proof-of-concept prototype system.

Magister Commercii (Information Management) - MCom(IM) / Managerial decision-making has always involved the use of numerous distinct information resources. Modern managerial decision-making processes require a wealth of information that is enhanced and transformed into knowledge in order to take effective action. Mobility in business is increasingly exercising influence on core business processes of organisations. The shift to wireless technologies coupled with the rapid growth of mobile devices in business has led to a new era in business computing. Mobile Business Intelligence (Mobile BI) is a system that has been conceived to assist, accelerate and to enhance the managerial decision-making processes. This thesis focuses on the e ect of Mobile BI on managerial decision-making. This thesis was able to answer the research question and to meet the research objectives through an extensive study of literature on the two most important spheres of influence i.e Business Intelligence and Managerial decision-making. Moreover, the objectives were met through the implementation of practical empirical research. The latter was carried out through a survey research design using questionnaire method of data collection. This research produced an number of ndings. The results indicated that Mobile BI played an important influencing role in the way managers make decisions. This study found that Mobile BI improved the quality of decisions made by managers used it for decision support subsequently improving performance of the organisation. Overall, four factors were found to be the predictors of Mobile BI for managerial decision making in organisations: Perceived Ease of Use of Mobile BI, Attitudes towards Use of Mobile BI, Perceived Value of Mobile BI with Behavioural Intention to Use of Mobile BI emerging as the most important predictors of Managerial Organisational decision-making.

Em âmbito global, o ambiente em que as organizações estão inseridas vem apresentando mudanças cada vez mais complexas, caracterizadas por exigências cada vez maiores em termos de rapidez, qualidade, baixo custo, flexibilidade e satisfação do cliente. Nesse novo contexto – do qual as organizações do Brasil certamente não estão excluídas – o sucesso de uma organização reside na sua capacidade de responder à essas exigências por meio da contínua inovação em seus produtos, serviços e processos, a fim de criar vantagem competitiva sustentável. Este trabalho busca explorar uma das estratégias utilizadas para obter essa vantagem: a Reengenharia de Processos do Negócio – RPN. / Throughout the world, the environment organizations are inserted has been showing more and more complex changes featuring bigger and bigger demands in terms of speed, quality, low cost, flexibility and customer’s satisfaction. In this new context – which Brazilian organizations are certainly not excluded of – the success of an organization resides in its ability to respond to such demands through a continuous innovation of its products, services and processes in order to create a sustainable competitive advantage. This work aims at exploring one of the strategies that is used to obtain such advantage: The Business Process Reengineering – BPR.

The thesis is focused on the description of the method for the selection of the information system for the company KOPS spol. Ltd. The work is based on theoretical knowledge for a proper understanding of the issue. In the next part, an analysis of the current state of the company is performed, while monitoring the factors influencing the company and especially the information system. The last part describes the procedure for selecting a system and the possibilities of its implementation to the company.

The master thesis is focusing on modelling and optimizing of business processes. The selected group of processes is oriented to software development area. As the result of the analysis, problematic issues of processes are revealed. The optimizing of processes is primary focused on reducing total performance time of processes and related costs.