Thesis (Ph.D)--Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2010. / Committee Chair: Pu, Calton; Committee Member: Ahamad, Mustaque; Committee Member: Liu, Ling; Committee Member: Mark, Leo; Committee Member: Owen, Henry. Part of the SMARTech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Collection.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Washington State University, August 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 121-125).

Aim To understand why organizational barriers exist during the development of information management systems or enterprise applications. . This study investigates if organizational barriers actually occur and if so, how we can understand these phenomena. Method Deductive research and exploratory research. Secondary research is evaluated how it is applicable in practice. Qualitative research was applied across multiple subsidiaries. Standardized interviews were conducted among 30 interviewees. As it is exploratory research, this is sufficient to present certain patterns and indications. To support this method, Criterion-based sampling has been applied to ensure appropriate units for this study. Results & conclusion In a competitive environment, subcultural groups tend to be formed to protect similar interests. Rewards were based on power and achievements. By forcing accomplishment of the implementation of the information management system, groups would be rewarded. Others would be negatively affected. Therefore individuals and groups would act on behave of their own even if they would harm co-workers with their actions. Especially, groups without decision power were highly affected by these negative effects. Organizational politics controls the organization’s power. Counter-implementation strategies were identified; when groups tried to act on behave of the shareholder and customers to influence the decision-makers. After many delays, they were unable to prevent the integration of a new Information management system.

The focus of this project will be on introducing the concept of an extended enterprise to business leaders, subsequently presenting e- Business Integration and the supporting role that it can play in the establishment of an extended enterprise. Various literature sources will be consolidated to describe the integration approaches and supporting integration technologies and standards that can be employed in establishing integrated communication between the members of the extended enterprise. Finally, a phased approach will be proposed that can be employed in supporting the establishment of an extended enterprise through e-Business Integration.

Denna rapport behandlar ett tämligen outforskat delområde inom elektroniskt handel, nämligen integration av affärssystem och e-handelssystem. Huvudfrågan i denna rapport går ut på att undersöka hur företag har integrerat sitt affärssystem med sitt e-handelssystem. För att besvara huvudfrågan delades den upp i tre delfrågor. Dessa sökte besvara dels på vilken nivå inom Enterprise Application Integration som företagen hade integrerat systemen, dels vilka integrationstekniker företagen använder för att integrera systemen samt dels vilka effekter integrationen medfört för företagen. För att besvara problemställningen utfördes telefonintervjuer med fyra företag. Resultatet av undersökningen var att samtliga företag hade integrerat på Enterprise Application Integrations datanivå, vilket även var den nivå de hade börjat med att integrera. De integrationstekniker som användes varierade. Det var dock inte särskilt vanligt att använda nyare integrationstekniker. Integrationen medförde genomgående positiva effekter för företagen, även om vissa problem kvarstod. Inga större nya problem uppkom dock.

Hardware sizing has come to play an important role when designing and implementing business critical applications because it is crucial that the existing or defined business and application requirements are interpreted into an appropriate hardware configuration. If it is not done correctly, it may destabilize the environment which means interruptions and unplanned downtimes that in turn will cause business loosing not only vital revenue but also customer confidence in the process. This is one of the reasons for why hardware sizing has become a discipline of its own and as such, each combination of workload and hardware configuration is treated differently. Many application vendors have their own set of tools and recommendations to perform the sizing. Once the sizing is performed, the results can be mapped to hardware that is already benchmarked. This also means the hardware can be configured specially to support the application workload in question. It also implies that sizing is one of the major activities when creating a technical architecture where it is used to select the right hardware.   The purpose of this document is to perform a complete sizing exercise based on the requirements for a mission critical business application and then translate them into an appropriate hardware configuration. Furthermore, a set of sizing methodologies and tools are analyzed in detail as well in order to give an as vendor neutral view as possible. Specific requirements such as high availability, scalability and other important areas are also taken into consideration when designing and creating the hardware architecture.

Growing an online community takes time and effort. Relationships in an online community must be initiated based on trust followed by privacy, and then carefully cultivated. People are using web based social networks more than recent past, but they always want to protect their private data from unknown access; meanwhile also eager to know more people whom they are interested. Among all other system, trust based recommenders have been one of the most used and demanding system which takes the advantage of social trust to generate more accurate predictions. In this work we have proposed for Meven (An Enterprise trust-based profile recommendation with privacy), which uses Social Network Content (User Profiles and trends) with Trust and privacy control policy. The idea of system is to provide Social Networks with the ability to quickly find related information about the users having similar behaviors as the current user. The users will also be able to set the privacy metrics on their profiles so they will not get recommendation of those they feel less important and this is achieved by Privacy metrics. To generate accurate predictions, we defined trust between two users as a strong bond which is computed using different metrics based on user’s activities with respect to different content such as blogging, writing articles, commenting, and liking along with profile information such as organization, region, interests or skills. We have also introduced privacy metric in such a way so that users have full freedom to hide themselves from the recommendation system or they can also have the opportunity to customize their profiles to be visible to certain level of trustworthy users. We have exposed our application as a web service(api) so that any social network web portal can access the recommendations and publish them as a widget in social network.

Enterprise systems and applications are getting more and more complex. In 30 years computing has transformed from big single machines to highly heterogeneous systems. Businesses are today depending on a super-sized mixed bag of applications that have been introduced over the years. Businesses have much to gain by obtaining a holistic view of their data and integrating business processes that are spread over different systems. This master of thesis explores critical success factors (CSF) for enterprise application integration (EAI) from the perspective of developing new application into such environment. Based on current research in the field of EAI, and experiences gained from a real-life scenario the report argues for the importance of integration and what the most influential factors for success are. Among many significantly important factors, two main trends emerge as especially important: developer guidance and documentation, and integration functionality. The former leads to success by focusing on developer productivity through the use scorecards, principles and guidance, well-specified interfaces, and skilled EAI employees; and the latter by extending integration functionality to include many-tomany integration strategies and workflows to model the business.

In the modern computing landscape, the challenge of tuning software systems is exacerbated by the necessity to accommodate multiple divergent execution environments and stakeholders. Achieving optimal performance requires a different configuration for every combination of hardware setups and business requirements. In addition, the state of the art in system tuning can involve complex statistical models and tools which require deep expertise not commonly possessed by the average software engineer. As an alternative approach to performance tuning, this thesis puts forward the use of sonification-conveying information via non-speech audio-to aid software engineers in tuning complex systems. In particular, this thesis designs, develops, and evaluates a tuning system that interactively (i.e., in response to user actions) sonifies the performance metrics of a computer system. This thesis demonstrates that interactive sonification can effectively guide software engineers through performance tuning of a computer system. To that end, a scientific survey determined which sound characteristics (e.g., loudness, panning, pitch, tempo, etc.) are best suited to express information to the engineer. These characteristics were used to create a proof-of-concept tuning system that was applied to tune the parameters of a real world enterprise application server. Equipped with the tuning system, engineers-not experts in enterprise computing nor performance tuning-were able to tune the server, so that its resulting performance surpasses that exhibited under the standard configuration. The results indicate that sound-based tuning approaches can provide valuable solutions to the challenges of configuring complex computer systems. / Master of Science

M. Tech. Business Information Systems / Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is an integration framework that encapsulates a set of services and technologies that forms a middle tier to enable integration of varied systems and applications across the enterprise. It is a mechanism to combine processes, software, standards, and hardware to seamlessly integrate two or more enterprise application systems allowing them to operate as a unit. There are various challenges with EAI in terms of the approach, the architecture, implementation and its operation in a business environment. Even more so in a Third-party logistics (3PL) environment, where its function is directly associated with the performance of the business. Third Party Logistic is a supply chain service provider that carries out supply chain activities on behalf of a client, also known as a shipper, for part, or all of their supply chain management. However, regardless of the value put on the 3PL, IT capabilities shippers are still not satisfied with the performance, and there are no specific guidelines for EAI usage in 3PL environment. The goal of this study was to design an Enterprise Application Integration framework for Third-Party logistics.