This study utilize the goal-driven methodology, from Wu et al (2006), to derive high-level strategies concerning the value activities and potential competitive advantages, and thereby determine the requirement specification of core e-services for a B2C Website development. A real word case of B2C Website application development from H Company firm is use to illustrate its concept, elicitation process and applicability. The results indicate that this approach not only provides e-business managers a framework to help them develop differentiated EC strategies and gain the competitive advantages, but also assists system designers to effectively translate the core e-services into critical system requirements.

The definition of metrics capable of reporting on quality issues is a difficult task in the health care sector. This thesis proposes a goal-driven methodology for the development, collection, and analysis of health care quality metrics that expose in a quantifiable way the progress of measurement goals stated by interested stakeholders. In other words, this methodology produces reports containing metrics that enable the understanding of information out of health care data. The resulting Health Care Goal Question Metric (HC-GQM) methodology is based on the Goal Question Metric (GQM) approach, a methodology originally created for the software development industry and adapted to the context and specificities of the health care sector. HC-GQM benefits from a double loop validation process where the methodology is first implemented, then analysed, and finally improved. The validation process takes place in the context of adverse event management and incident reporting initiatives at a Canadian teaching hospital, where the HC-GQM provides a set of meaningful metrics and reports on the occurrence of adverse events and incidents to the stakeholders involved. The results of a survey suggest that the users of HC-GQM have found it beneficial and would use it again.

The definition of metrics capable of reporting on quality issues is a difficult task in the health care sector. This thesis proposes a goal-driven methodology for the development, collection, and analysis of health care quality metrics that expose in a quantifiable way the progress of measurement goals stated by interested stakeholders. In other words, this methodology produces reports containing metrics that enable the understanding of information out of health care data. The resulting Health Care Goal Question Metric (HC-GQM) methodology is based on the Goal Question Metric (GQM) approach, a methodology originally created for the software development industry and adapted to the context and specificities of the health care sector. HC-GQM benefits from a double loop validation process where the methodology is first implemented, then analysed, and finally improved. The validation process takes place in the context of adverse event management and incident reporting initiatives at a Canadian teaching hospital, where the HC-GQM provides a set of meaningful metrics and reports on the occurrence of adverse events and incidents to the stakeholders involved. The results of a survey suggest that the users of HC-GQM have found it beneficial and would use it again.

The definition of metrics capable of reporting on quality issues is a difficult task in the health care sector. This thesis proposes a goal-driven methodology for the development, collection, and analysis of health care quality metrics that expose in a quantifiable way the progress of measurement goals stated by interested stakeholders. In other words, this methodology produces reports containing metrics that enable the understanding of information out of health care data. The resulting Health Care Goal Question Metric (HC-GQM) methodology is based on the Goal Question Metric (GQM) approach, a methodology originally created for the software development industry and adapted to the context and specificities of the health care sector. HC-GQM benefits from a double loop validation process where the methodology is first implemented, then analysed, and finally improved. The validation process takes place in the context of adverse event management and incident reporting initiatives at a Canadian teaching hospital, where the HC-GQM provides a set of meaningful metrics and reports on the occurrence of adverse events and incidents to the stakeholders involved. The results of a survey suggest that the users of HC-GQM have found it beneficial and would use it again.

The definition of metrics capable of reporting on quality issues is a difficult task in the health care sector. This thesis proposes a goal-driven methodology for the development, collection, and analysis of health care quality metrics that expose in a quantifiable way the progress of measurement goals stated by interested stakeholders. In other words, this methodology produces reports containing metrics that enable the understanding of information out of health care data. The resulting Health Care Goal Question Metric (HC-GQM) methodology is based on the Goal Question Metric (GQM) approach, a methodology originally created for the software development industry and adapted to the context and specificities of the health care sector. HC-GQM benefits from a double loop validation process where the methodology is first implemented, then analysed, and finally improved. The validation process takes place in the context of adverse event management and incident reporting initiatives at a Canadian teaching hospital, where the HC-GQM provides a set of meaningful metrics and reports on the occurrence of adverse events and incidents to the stakeholders involved. The results of a survey suggest that the users of HC-GQM have found it beneficial and would use it again.

The Business Process Management (BPM) lifecycle consists of four phases: design and analysis, configuration, enactment, and evaluation - also known as performance analysis and improvement. Performance analysis and improvement of business processes, one of the core phases in the BPM life cycle, is becoming on top of the agenda for many enterprises. An emerging approach to that is to use the business intelligence approaches that attempt to facilitate the analytical capabilities of business process management systems by implementing process-oriented data warehouse and mining techniques. However, little work has been has done on developing core methods and tools for performance analysis and improvement of business processes. In particular, adequate methods, clearly defined steps or instructions that can guide process managers for analyzing and improving processes using process warehouse (PW) are not available. In the absence of such methods, guidelines or clearly defined steps, important steps may be ignored and credible improvements steps cannot be taken. This research addresses the described limitations by developing a method for performance analysis and improvement of business processes. The key feature of the developed method is, it employs business-orientation in the design and utilization of a PW. The method is composed of three steps, building goal-structure, integrating goal-structure with PW, and analyzing and improving business processes. During the first step, a set of top-level performance goals are identified for the process of interest. Subsequently, the identified  goals are decomposed to generate a goal-structure that is aligned with the functional decomposition of the process of interest. The second step describes a technique for integrating the generated goal-structure with PW. The third step describes, a performance estimation model, a decision model and a step by step approach that focuses on utilizing PW for analysis and improvement of business processes. In order to facilitate the use of the proposed method a prototype is developed. The prototype offers a graphical user interface for defining goal structure, integrating goals with PW, and goal-based navigation of PW. In order to evaluate the proposed method, we first develop an evaluation framework and subsequently use it for the evaluation of the proposed method. The framework consists of three components, each representing a type of evaluation. The components are, methodological-structure evaluation, performance-based evaluation and perception-based evaluation. The results of the evaluation show partial support for the methodological structure. However, the results of performance and perception evaluation show promising results of the proposed method. / <p>QC 20121217</p>

Parfois dans le développement logiciel, les fautes potentielles peuvent être omises, par exemple quand la complexité cache les fautes même en présence d’un processus de développement rigoureux, ou quand en raison des contraintes en termes de coûts et de temps sur les démarches de tolérance aux fautes, des risques sont assumés.La première contribution de cette thèse est l’élaboration d’un cadre de développement pour produire des logiciels tolérants aux fautes imprévues, c.à.d. fautes qui ne sont pas couvertes dans la mise en œuvre. Nous proposons 1) l’utilisation d’une architecture multi-agent avec des agents dirigés pas des buts pour le confinement des erreurs et la récupération du système ; 2) des exigences au niveau du langage de programmation ayant pour but de limiter les fautes possibles et de localiser les zones où d’autres fautes peuvent être présentes et 3) des exigences au niveau de la plate-forme d’exécution. Nous illustrons l’approche en étudiant la conception et la mise en œuvre avec un langage de programmation adapté et sa plate-forme.La deuxième contribution concerne la manière dont les agents dirigés par des buts sont programmés. Le problème est que de nombreuses approches pour la modélisation des agents cognitifs autorisent les développeurs à entrelacer les niveaux des plans et des buts, grâce à l’adoption de nouveaux buts à l’intérieur des plans. La complexité résultante peut rendre le comportement des agents difficilement traçable. Nous proposons d’imposer une séparation claire entre les niveaux de raisonnement et d’action des agents. En contraignant le modèle d’agent nous gagnons en lisibilité, avec un bénéfice pour le processus de développement. / There are situations in software development when potential faults can be omitted, e.g. when the complexity hides faults from a rigorous development process, or when due to cost and time constraints on the fault tolerance effort, risks are assumed, either consciously or not. The first contribution of this thesis is a development framework – design, language and platform requirements – for producing software that is tolerant to unforeseen faults, i.e. faults that were not covered in the implementation. We propose (1) the use of a multi-agent architecture with goal-driven agents benefits the confinement of errors and the subsequent system recovery; (2) language requirements that constrain the programmers in order to limit the possible faults and in the same time localise the areas where other faults can be present and (3) execution platform requirements in order to ensure the desired fault tolerance properties. We illustrate the approach by discussing design and implementation using an adapted agent programming language and platform. The second contribution focuses on the way goal-driven agents are programmed. The issue is that many approaches to cognitive agent modelling permit the agent developers to interweave the levels of plans and goals, through the adoption of new goals inside plans. These goals will have plans of their own, and the definition can extend on many levels, with the resulting complexity rendering the agents’ behaviour difficult to trace. We thus propose imposing a clear separation between the reasoning and the acting levels of the agent. We argue that by constraining the agent model we gain in clarity therefore benefiting the development process.

Quand des entreprises collaborent entre elles pour atteindre leurs objectifs métiers, des problèmes d'interopérabilité seront rencontrés. Afin de résoudre ces problèmes, nous étudions les domaines suivants : les processus métier collaboratifs, MDA, SOA, ESB et l'ontologie. Nous proposons alors un cadre intégrant ces cinq domaines pour les solutions TI (technologies de l’'information) aux problèmes d'interopérabilité. Pour construire ce cadre, nous proposons une Méthode Basée sur des Processus pour l'Interopérabilité d'Entreprise (MBPIE), qui utilise des processus collaboratifs pour représenter des exigences de collaboration. MBPIE transforme des processus collaboratifs en plusieurs processus d'interopérabilité exécutables par des transformations de modèles. En MBPIE, l'ontologie est utilisée pour annoter les processus collaboratifs. Pendant la transformation des processus, de nouvelles informations ontologiques sont ajoutées dans les processus pour les rendre exécutables. Nous avons conçu un bus de services sémantiques Basé sur l'Ontologie et Dirigé par des Buts (BODB) pour supporter l'exécution des processus d'interopérabilité. Ce bus est basé sur un mécanisme symétrique pour l'invocation de services sémantiques. Ce mécanisme utilise l’extension de SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) qui est composée de trois parties : le format des messages BODB, le module BODB et le modèle de traitement BODB. Ce mécanisme a trois propriétés de transparence (emplacement, sémantique et technique) qui sont essentielles à l'exécution des processus d'interopérabilité. Ensemble, MBPIE et le bus constituent une approche fédérée pour résoudre les problèmes d'interopérabilité. / When enterprises collaborate with others to achieve business objectives, enterprise interoperability problems will be encountered. In order to solve the problems, in this thesis, we analyze the five related research domains: collaborative business process, MDA, SOA, ESB and ontology. Consequently, we propose a framework for IT solutions to interoperability problems, which integrates the above five domains together. In order to realize the framework, we propose a Process-Based Method for Enterprise Interoperability (PBMEI), which employs collaborative processes to represent collaboration requirements between enterprises. PBMEI transforms collaborative processes into multiple executable interoperability processes through model transformations. In PBMEI, ontology is used to annotate collaborative processes. During model transformation, new ontology information will be added into processes. Such information will contribute to process execution. In order to support execution of interoperability processes, an ontology-based and goal-driven (OBGD) semantic service bus is designed. This bus is based on a symmetric mechanism for OBGD service invocation. The mechanism is designed according to OBGD Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) which is composed of three parts: OBGD message format, OBGD module and OBGD processing model. This mechanism has three properties: location transparency, semantics transparency and technique transparency, which are critical to execution of interoperability processes. The bus also supports federated deployment for inter-enterprise interoperability. PBMEI and the OBGD bus together constitute a federated approach for solving interoperability problems.

Abstract Software and ICT companies fail due less to technological factors than socioorganizational factors, among which the most common is unrealistic goals and objectives. The socioorganizational factors are present in companies and organizations of all sizes. Organizations need to know whether their goals and strategies are working and whether the strategies are effectively providing a reasonable return on investment for the effort that is being applied, i.e. to understand how valuable they are for the organization. In addition, organizations need to recognize what the risks are in achieving those goals and evaluate their probability. And, when goals are set properly then they have directive and energizing functions, they tend to utilize available resources better and serve as activators of cognitive processes and knowledge sharing cycles. In this dissertation the GQM+Strategies approach was used. The approach was designed to help organizations to align goal-driven measurement schemes, i.e. GQM, with organizational goal hierarchy. The extensions developed in this dissertation (i.e., the solution proposed here) evolve the GQM+Strategies approach by providing an organization with capabilities to: (1) apply the work of value-based software engineering to directly address the return on investment (ROI) of their goals and strategies via evaluation of the costs and benefits of the goals and strategies chosen, (2) calculate a set of earned value metrics that allows organizations to effectively monitor the implementation of the organizational goals and strategies, (3) identify the risks associated with not achieving various sub-goals in a grid by analyzing goal risk exposures and acceptable risk levels, and (4) assess the threats of risky goals on other goals in the grid via evaluation of goal dependencies using the formal goal-strategies-goals models. The GQM+Strategies approach was piloted in four different organizations involving more than 60 participants. The feedback from the participants was used to identify the research questions posed in this dissertation. The research approach (solution development process) adopted the design science framework and utilized analytical and empirical paradigms in different phases of the solution development. The analytical paradigms were used for solution development and evaluation, while empirical paradigms where used for evaluating certain aspects of the solution. / Tiivistelmä Ohjelmisto- ja tietotekniikkayritysten epäonnistumiset johtuvat useimmin sosio-organisationaalisista tekijöistä kuin teknologisista tekijöistä. Näistä sosio-organisationaalisista tekijöistä yleisin on epärealististen tavoitteiden asettaminen. Sosio-organisatoriset tekijät ovat läsnä kaiken kokoisissa yrityksissä ja organisaatioissa. Organisaatioiden tulee tietää ovatko heidän tavoitteensa ja strategiansa toimivia ja tarjoavatko heidän strategiansa kohtuullisen tuoton suhteessa käytettyihin investointeihin. Toisin sanoen, organisaatioiden tulee ymmärtää kuinka arvokkaita heidän strategiansa ovat. Tämän lisäksi organisaatioiden täytyy kyetä tunnistamaan riskit asetettujen tavoitteiden saavuttamisessa sekä arvioimaan näiden riskien todennäköisyys. Kun tavoitteet on asetettu asianmukaisesti niillä on ohjaava ja energisoiva vaikutus. Ne sekä ohjaavat hyödyntämään tehokkaammin käytettävissä olevia rerursseja että toimivat kognitiivisten prosessien ja tiedonjakosyklien aktivaattoreina. Tässä väitöskirjassa käytettiin GQM+Strategies lähestymistapaa. Tämä lähestymistapa on suunniteltu auttamaan organisaatiota linjaamaan tavoitelähtöisiä mittausmenetelmiä, kuten GQM, organisaation tavoitehierarkian suhteen. Tässä väitöskirjassa esitetty laajennus kehittää GQM+Strategies lähestymistapaa tarjoamalla organisaatioille kyvykkyyksiä: (1) soveltaa arvoperustaisen ohjelmistotuotannon menetelmiä tavoitteiden ja strategioiden investoinnin tuottojen tarkasteluihin arvioimalla valittujen tavoitteiden ja strategioiden kustannuksia ja hyötyjä, (2) laskea joukko saavutetun arvon mittareita jotka mahdollistavat organisaatioille toteutettujen organisationaalisten tavoitteiden ja strategioiden tehokkaan seurannan, (3) identifioida riskejä jotka liittyvät eri alitavoitteiden saavuttamattomuuteen analysoimalla tavoiteriskeihin altistumista ja hyväksyttäviä riskitasoja ja (4) arvioida riskejä sisältävien tavoitteiden uhkia suhteessa muihin tavoitteisiin arvioimalla tavoitteiden riippuvuuksia käyttäen formaaleja tavoite-strategiat-tavoite -malleja. GQM+Strategies lähestymistapaa pilotoitiin neljässä organisaatiossa yhteensä yli 60 osallistujan kanssa. Tutkimuksen osallistujilta saatua palautetta käytettiin väitöskirjan tutkimuskysymysten identifiointiin. Tutkimuksen lähestymistavassa (ratkaisun kehittämisprosessi) sovellettiin design science -kehikkoa ja ratkaisun kehittämisen eri vaiheissa hyödynnettiin analyyttisiä ja empiirisiä paradigmoja. Analyyttisiä paradigmoja käytettiin ratkaisun kehittämisessä ja arvioinnissa ja empiirisiä paradigmoja ratkaisujen määrättyjen aspektien arvioinnissa.

No description available.