Organisations comprise human and technical systems that typically perform a variety of business, engineering and production roles. Human systems comprise individuals, people groups and teams that work systematically to conceive, implement, develop and manage the purposes of any enterprise in response to customer requirements. Recently attention has been paid to modelling aspects of people working within production systems, with a view to improving: production performance, effective resource allocation and optimum resource management. In the research reported, graphical and computer executable models of people have been conceived and used in support of human systems engineering. The approach taken has been to systematically decompose and represent processes so that elemental production and management activities can be modelled as explicit descriptions of roles that human systems can occupy as role holders. First of all, a preliminary modelling method (MM1) was proposed for modelling human systems in support of engineering enterprise; then MM1 was implemented and tested in a case study company 1. Based on findings of this exploratory research study an improved modelling method (MM2) was conceived and instrumented. Here characterising customer related product dynamic impacts extended MM1 modelling concepts and methods and related work system changes. MM2 was then tested in case study company 2 to observe dynamic behaviours of selected system models derived from actual company knowledge and data. Case study 2 findings enabled MM2 to be further improved leading to MM3. MM3 improvements stem from the incorporation of so-called DPU (Dynamic Producer Unit) concepts, related to the modelling of human and technical resource system components . Case study 4 models a human system for targeted users i.e. production managers etc to facilitate analysis of human configuration and also cost modelling. Modelling approaches MM2, MM3 and also Case Study 4 add to knowledge about ways of facilitating quantitative analysis and comparison between different human system configurations. These new modelling methods allow resource system behaviours to be matched to specific, explicitly defined, process-oriented requirements drawn from manufacturing workplaces currently operating in general engineering, commercial furniture and white goods industry sectors.

In order to compete with the global giants, enterprises are concentrating on their core competencies and collaborating with organizations that compliment their skills and core activities. The current trend is to develop temporary alliances of independent enterprises, in which companies can come together to share skills, core competencies and resources. However, knowledge sharing and communication among multidiscipline companies is a complex and challenging problem. In a collaborative environment, the meaning of knowledge is drastically affected by the context in which it is viewed and interpreted; thus necessitating the treatment of structure as well as semantics of the data stored in enterprise repositories. Keeping the present market and technological scenario in mind, this research aims to propose tools and techniques that can enable companies to assimilate distributed information resources and achieve their business goals.

MEs are considered as the major sources of employment creation. Global experiences show that an efficient ME sector is conducive to industrial growth and a flexible industrial structure, which are the cornerstones of a vibrant entrepreneurial economy. The contributions of MEs to the national economy can be measured in terms of some inter-related issues: economic (income generation), social (poverty reduction) and political (wealth redistribution). Current studies show a strong link between entrepreneurship and economic development (ED). The impact of entrepreneurship on ED depends on the level of business performance, and economy is an affect for which entrepreneurship is the cause. ED theories generally emphasise on employment creation by industrialisation with the use of advanced technology. Thus economic histories of the developed countries show the notion that ED has benefited from widespread large scale entrepreneurial activity. However, developing countries (DC) have begun to realize the necessity of encouraging entrepreneurship to achieve their ED goals. But, they in reality can’t achieve these goals like the developed countries, because they don’t have sufficient capital and advanced technology. As a result they need to depend on small scale enterprise development by exploiting available resources, small capital, and indigenous technology. It indicates a strong link between micro enterprise development (MED) and entrepreneurship development. Therefore, national ED policies of DCs should focus on linking MED, entrepreneurship development and ED. Despite these recognized importance, MEs face severe problems and challenges in DCs. They lack appropriate policies and programmes to promote MEs towards ED. This study critically examines the existing MED Policies (MEDP) and the role of different MED Organizations (MEDOs) with a view to articulating appropriate policy recommendations. Based on the objectives and literature review four themes (state of affairs of MEDPs, support services to MEs, financing MEs and networking of ME stakeholders) were identified to establish the interview protocols. This study employed a qualitative inductive approach, case study strategy and in depth interviews with semi-structured protocols to collect primary data based on phenomenology. Thirty five respondents from different ME stakeholders (policy makers, implementing agencies, and the recipients) were interviewed and interpretative phenomenological analysis technique was used for data analysis. The findings confirm that there are fragmentations and incoherency in existing MEDPs, as a result, they failed to achieve the goals of MED. Specifically, support services and infrastructural facilities to MEs are not well designed, financing systems are not fully supportive to all the MEs, and networking of ME stakeholders are very floppy. Overall a favourable entrepreneurial culture to MED is absent in Bangladesh. The government has failed to plan realistically to mobilize the resources, to exercise control over factors of MED and to give appropriate direction to the developmental process. This study offers a list of practical recommendations to formulate a coherent and comprehensive MEDP based on solid evidences. Especially, a model for appropriate government intervention to MED by linking the main three concepts of this study MED, entrepreneurship development and ED, and an alternative model for ‘interest free ME financing’ are proposed. This study hopes that these recommendations will provide appropriate inputs to the policy makers and concerned ME stakeholders in the DCs, particularly Bangladesh and more generally to the MED literature.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are regarded as among the most innovative information technology products developed over the past two decades. Thus, they have become the backbone of management information systems in the organizations that have implemented them. The difficulties associated with their high failure rate, however, have been the subject of extensive studies. To expand on this knowledge, this study has two research objectives: to examine the relationship between corporate governance structures and implementation results and to investigate whether implementation outcomes vary by country. This study focuses on the project steering committee’s involvement, internal auditors’ participation, and the change management plan implementation. The results demonstrate that steering committee involvement is a primary factor that influenced the success of ERP implementation; and that institutional factors in country of deployment are important determinants of ERP project outcome.

Title: Support for Enterprise Applications in SOFA 2 Author: Tibor Blénessy Department: Department of Distributed and Dependable Systems Supervisor of the master thesis: RNDr. Tomáš Bureš, Ph.D. Abstract: Industry standards defining various aspects of enterprise systems were developed in order to make development of such systems faster and to increase interoperability. For systems created with Java platform, these standards are contained under Java Enterprise Edition. SOFA 2 component system provides a solid base for development of ex- tensive component oriented systems. Goal of this work is to propose and empirically verify the possibility of integration of existing industry standards for enterprise applications in SOFA 2. Proposed solution extends SOFA 2 with components for web user in- terfaces based on Java Servlet API standard and with components for persisting data into relational databases based on Java Peristence API. In addition, it integrates core technologies from the Java Enterprise Edition platform, which should make integration of further standards easier. Keywords: enteprise applications, component system, SOFA 2, Java EE

Approved for public release; distribution in unlimited. / The Army is undergoing a major realignment in accordance with the Joint Vision 2010/2020 transformation to establish an enterprise command that is the single authority to operate and manage the Army Enterprise Information Infrastructure (Infrastructure). However, there are a number of critical network management issues that the Army will have to overcome before attaining the full capabilities to manage the full spectrum of Army networks at the enterprise level. The Army network environment consists of an excessive number of heterogeneous applications, systems, and network architectures that are incompatible. There are a number of legacy systems and proprietary platforms. Most of the NM architectures in the Army are based on traditional centralized NM approaches such as the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). Although SNMP is the most pervasive protocol, it lacks the scalability, reliability, flexibility and adaptability necessary to effectively support an enterprise network as large and complex as the Army. Attempting to scale these technologies to this magnitude can be extremely difficult and very costly. This thesis makes the argument that intelligent-agent-based technologies are a leading solution, among the other current technologies, to achieve the Army's enterprise network management goals. / Major, United States Army

A Integração de Aplicativos Empresariais (EAI, Enterprise Application Integration) entre empresas de uma mesma cadeia produtiva é uma inovação organizacional que proporciona grandes ganhos em competitividade, o que chega a ser vital no atual ambiente de negócios. Essa integração necessita de recursos nem sempre disponíveis nesses sistemas de gestão. Este estudo fez um levantamento dos Sistemas Integrados de Gestão Empresarial (ERP, Enterprise Resource Planning) mais utilizados no Brasil, a respectiva participação no mercado brasileiro e identificou para cada um deles quais seus recursos existentes para integração com outros ERP de outras organizações da cadeia. Tem-se como resultado um panorama no qual se pode apoiar para tomada de decisão ou usá-lo como ponto de partida para pesquisa do nível de utilização do recurso de integração de sistemas entre empresas no Brasil e das barreiras à implementação da mesma. Trata-se de uma pesquisa exploratória que pela análise dos documentos disponibilizados pelos desenvolvedores dos softwares fez a identificação dos recursos de integração dos cinco sistemas ERP mais utilizados no Brasil. / Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) among companies of the same production chain is an organization innovation that provides meaningful gains in competitiveness, which may be critical in current business environment. This integration needs resources not always available in this management systems. This paper investigated Brazil most used ERP, their market share, and identified each ones existing resources to integrate with other ERP in other organizations in the chain. As a result, there is a full view on which to rely for decision making or to be taken as a start for an research on the system integration resource utilization level among Brazil companies and implementation barriers to it. It is a exploratory research, where by means of documentation made available by the softwares developers identified the integration resources of the five ERP systems most used in Brazil.

Atenção especial tem sido dada às atividades de documentação e suporte a projetos em Engenharia de Software, principalmente quando estão relacionadas a sistemas complexos e equipes distribuídas. Geralmente apenas se registram as informações relativas às decisões finais de determinada fase. Não são documentadas as razões de cada decisão e nem as alternativas que foram consideradas e descartadas. A captura e recuperação, de maneira eficiente, deste tipo de informação é a finalidade do estudo do Design Rationale. O registro destas informações pode facilitar a manutenção, o reuso e também a própria fase de elaboração do projeto, na medida em que possibilita um melhor entendimento do sistema, por meio da disseminação de conhecimento, comunicação e integração entre a equipe de projeto. A questão é quando e como capturar estas informações sem muita interferência junto às atividades usuais dos projetistas, a fim de que os benefícios possam superar os custos envolvidos nesta tarefa. O presente trabalho tem como objetivo mostrar com razões plausíveis a grande utilidade da aplicação da técnica de Design Rationale em projetos de sistemas ERP, propondo um novo modelo de representação das decisões de projeto para estes sistemas. / Special attention has been given to documentation and support activities in Software Engineering design, mainly when they are related to complex systems and distributed teams. Usually, information related to the final decisions of each phase is registered. However, the reasons of each decision and the alternatives that were considered and discarded are not documented. Capture and recovery of this type of information, in an efficient way, are the purposes of the Design Rationale study. Recording this information can facilitates maintenance, reuse and even the design phase, providing a better understanding of the system, by knowledge spread, communication and integration among the project team. The main concern is when and how to capture this information with low interference in designers\' usual activities, so that benefits can overcome costs involved in this task. The purpose of the present work is to show with plausible reasons the great usefulness of the application of Design Rationale technique in ERP systems design, proposing a new representation model for recording design decisions in these system.

The focus of this research questions the role of change management in successfully implementing an Enterprise Resource Planning solution in the retail industry. The importance of the study could reveal a change approach more useful and relevant to the retail industry and offer opportunities for further research in this industry. / Graduate School of Business Leadership / MBA

A Integração de Aplicativos Empresariais (EAI, Enterprise Application Integration) entre empresas de uma mesma cadeia produtiva é uma inovação organizacional que proporciona grandes ganhos em competitividade, o que chega a ser vital no atual ambiente de negócios. Essa integração necessita de recursos nem sempre disponíveis nesses sistemas de gestão. Este estudo fez um levantamento dos Sistemas Integrados de Gestão Empresarial (ERP, Enterprise Resource Planning) mais utilizados no Brasil, a respectiva participação no mercado brasileiro e identificou para cada um deles quais seus recursos existentes para integração com outros ERP de outras organizações da cadeia. Tem-se como resultado um panorama no qual se pode apoiar para tomada de decisão ou usá-lo como ponto de partida para pesquisa do nível de utilização do recurso de integração de sistemas entre empresas no Brasil e das barreiras à implementação da mesma. Trata-se de uma pesquisa exploratória que pela análise dos documentos disponibilizados pelos desenvolvedores dos softwares fez a identificação dos recursos de integração dos cinco sistemas ERP mais utilizados no Brasil. / Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) among companies of the same production chain is an organization innovation that provides meaningful gains in competitiveness, which may be critical in current business environment. This integration needs resources not always available in this management systems. This paper investigated Brazil most used ERP, their market share, and identified each ones existing resources to integrate with other ERP in other organizations in the chain. As a result, there is a full view on which to rely for decision making or to be taken as a start for an research on the system integration resource utilization level among Brazil companies and implementation barriers to it. It is a exploratory research, where by means of documentation made available by the softwares developers identified the integration resources of the five ERP systems most used in Brazil.