Abstract In recent years, Taiwanese industries investing in Mainland China have switched from traditional industries to hi-tech enterprises and their investment strategies have changed from production cost saving to division of labor and industry integration. However, without support of efficient and effective IT system, enterprises cannot quickly adjust to business environment varying from minute to minute. Thus, in this research, a study is conducted to investigate the roles of IT systems in facilitating hi-tech companies to gain accurate information and support just-in-time operations. The findings suggest that most IT system adopted by the subsidiary in China are transferred directly from the parent company in Taiwan. They are not built from the scratch nor modified by the subsidiary due to considerations such as smoothing usual operation, building up the same domain knowledge, and shortening production schedule. Whether the subsidiary in China is directly supervised by the parent company in Taiwan will affect the level of support by the MIS department in Taiwan. In addition, the subsidiary members¡¦ values and commitment will affect cross-strait IT architecture. In the area of risk management, the perception of information security risk differs between Taiwan headquarter and China subsidiary because of different needs and business models. Distrusting China subsidiary members is still an issue to develop cross-strait IT security systems. Keyword: IT architecture, IT risk management

The improvement and change of IT is one of the reasons which result in globalization. Taiwan has a small market scale; Taiwan¡¦s enterprises must face to global competition and challenge. In this study, we conduct the case study and use a hypercube model to analyze the innovation in technological component, business model, and dynamic capability aspects used in domestic enterprises verse global ones in the chemical industry in Taiwan. The results indicate that the innovation from domestic to globalization is radical in both of business model and technological component. A set of critical dynamic capabilities in technological component and business model for this innovation is then identified. The study offers great insights for practitioners to improve their understanding of innovation in business model and technological component aspects and provide guidelines to help practitioners adapt from domestic to globalization innovation.

Abstract While many enterprises nowadays building their customer relationship management (CRM) actively, it is still indistinct how to bring the advanced IT into current system and convert it to a feasible solution. Especially, the application of CRM system in the manufacturing industry is in the preliminary stage. So far in Taiwan and Pan-Asia, the implemented CRM cases are laid particular stress on telecom and financial industry. Due to very few reference cases in the manufacturing industry, the development of CRM system is in a predicament. This research use the Qualitative Research method to study the cases in Taiwan manufacturing industry which have planned and implemented its CRM IT Architecture successfully. By contextualism theory, this research study enterprise¡¦s actual operations and questions within the factors of industry characteristics, enterprise demands, enterprise culture and organization changes. And then, based on Capability-based architecture (CBA), this research analyzed the enterprise CRM IT architecture. The CBA not only help to create tight-knit relationship between IT architecture and business capability, but also support enterprise to find out its required IT components by the mechanism of direction and support in the layered architecture. Additionally CBA facilitate enterprise to obtain the required IT components when business capability changed. This research found out several implications which provide the references for manufacturing industry and follow-up research.

Raw material resources in Taiwan are limited; moreover, Taiwan has a small market scale, so Taiwan¡¦s enterprises must develop toward globalization. This research regards passive component industry of Taiwan as research object and examines how the requirements of the global supply chain are when the local industries transform into the global ones through the secondary data. This research also utilizes an innovation model to analyze the change in business model and the core component of IT architecture. What information technology and core capability should the enterprises possess to overcome the challenges of globalization? This research has found that the enterprise has significant changes both in core capability of the IT architecture and business model while it transforms the local business into the global business. Globalization for the Corporation is a radical innovation. This research finally concludes that the passive component industry for global supply chain has to possess 5 capabilities of business model management and 5 IT abilities to promote the competitiveness of globalization.

IT Risk management is becoming increasingly important for CIOs and their executive counterparts. Educators and managers have materials they can use to discuss specific IT risks in project management, security and other risk-related topics, but they have few resources they can use to have a holistic discussion of enterprise-level IT risk management. This case is intended to address the gap. It describes the IT risks facing a large financial services firm, PFPC, as a result of rapid growth, a large merger and distributed management of the IT function. The firm’s first enterprise-wide CIO, Martin Deere used risk management as a key pillar in a major revamp of the firm's applications and IT capabilities. The case is rich in detail on the firm's IT risks, the new risk management process, including examples of the firm's risk management tools. It also describes early lessons and outcomes in the implementation of risk management capabilities. The case has enough richness and potential controversy to engage students from the undergraduate through executive levels in an informative and interesting discussion of IT risk management.

There is a high rate of information system implementation failures attributed to the lack of alignment between business and information technology strategy. Although enterprise architecture (EA) is a means to correct alignment problems and executives highly rate the importance of EA, it is still not used in most organizations today. Current literature only gave anecdotal reasons why EA was not more widely adopted. This study explored the problem of EA underutilization by understanding how organizational executives value EA. This research used the grounded theory methodology to obtain the EA perspectives of organizational executives responsible for EA. Seventeen executives were selected using theoretical sampling and interviewed using a semi-structured interview approach. The interview data was recorded and coded, and interviewing continued until theoretical saturation was reached. The executives identified four distinct meanings of EA, i.e., business and IT alignment, a holistic representation of the enterprise, a planned vision of the future, and a process, methodology, or framework enhancing enterprise decision making. In addition, they identified 16 unique benefits that EA provided. Depending on the meaning of EA, it was possible to predict what benefits they expected. For example, if the meaning of EA was a holistic representation of the enterprise, then the benefits of increase operational effectiveness, planning, product selection, and speak a common language were expected. However, regardless of which of the four meanings of EA was selected, executives expected EA to facilitate the alignment of business and IT, the decision making process, and the simplification of system and architecture management. Based on the findings, an analytic story and a theoretical model were produced. The model depicted the influencers on what meaning an executive chose and, based on the meaning, the expected benefits of EA. The understanding of executives' perceptions of EA is critical because they are the most influential leaders within organizations. Without their understanding, it becomes less likely that EA initiatives would meet organizational expectations and have favorable outcomes. Furthermore, it is hoped that this study shapes future EA initiatives so that they become more aligned with the views of the executives who are responsible for them.

This thesis has been carried out at the Swedish Board of Agriculture. The client wants to orientate towards a development environment and architecture that allows for more frequent software deliveries than in the current situation, to increase the business benefits of the development work carried out. The purpose of this thesis is to develop a process to iteratively move towards an architecture and development environment that enable Continuous Delivery. Continuous delivery aims to a very high extent to treat a developer's code as part of a potential release candidate. This in turn causes high demands on being able to secure the reliability of both the infrastructure and the individual developers’ contributions. The work has been carried out in cooperation with developers, infrastructure engineers, architects and team leaders on The Swedish Board of Agriculture. Theories have been tested within the IT organization to ensure their reliability and applicability in the organization. A process has been developed with the limitation that it has not been tested in a production environment because of the limited timeframe available. However, it has been demonstrated that the process is feasible for the systems that acted as the main testing candidates during the thesis. / Detta examensarbete har utförts vid Statens Jordbruksverk. Uppdragsgivaren önskar att orientera sig mer mot en utvecklingsmiljö och arkitektur som möjliggör tätare leveranser än i dagsläget, för att öka verksamhetsnyttan av det utvecklingsarbete som genomförs. Syftet med detta examensarbete är att ta fram en process för att iterativt kunna gå mot en arkitektur som möjliggör för Continuous Delivery, eller kontinuerlig leverans. Kontinuerlig leverans syftar till att i mycket hög mån behandla en utvecklares kod som en del av en potentiell releasekandidat. Detta för i sin tur med sig höga krav på att kunna säkra tillförlitligheten av både infrastruktur samt den individuelle utvecklarens bidrag. Arbetet har utförts i samarbete med utvecklare, infrastrukturtekniker, arkitekter samt teamledare på Jordbruksverket. Teorier har testats inom IT-organisationen för att se dess tillförlitlighet samt tillämplighet på just Jordbruksverkets organisation. Arbetet påvisar att det är möjligt att dela upp monolitiska system och gå närmare något som liknar kontinuerlig leverans, utan att behöva genomföra stora förändringar inom organisationen. En process har tagits fram med begräsning att den inte testats i produktionsmiljö på grund av tidsbrist. Det har dock påvisats att processen är gångbar för det system som varit testkandidat genom arbetets gång.

The theme of this thesis are trends in retail banking and their impact on bank's IT architecture. The history teaches us that the ability to catch trends quickly and to use them can bring significant competitive advantage. At the same time some trends may pose a threat to the company and their (trends) early detection may prevent later problems. It is therefore important to monitor trends and evaluate their impact on bank's business. Roughly half of the overall bank costs consists of IT costs which are determined by IT architecture of the bank. Bank's IT is defined by IT architecture so it is useful to consider examining the impact of trends to the IT architecture. The aim of this thesis is to identify impact of trends in retail banking on bank's IT architecture. In the first part I analyze trends in retail banking in order to find out which are the key. In the next section I compare different reference IT architectures. Subsequently at the most appropriate architecture I identify impact of trends in retail banking on bank's IT architecture. Banks that perceive trends mentioned in this thesis as important and at the same time have similar architecture which I describe in this thesis may use my findings to gain competitive advantage or to take measures necessary to mitigate risks which are connected with coming trends which can have a negative impact on banks.

There are numerous emerging companies creating interesting and often unique projects in the 21st century. These companies frequently operate in a new, rapidly changing sector. These companies may face an insufficient supply of standardized information software, capable of supporting the business. On the contrary, an individual application software (made from scratch) might not be an option for the companies due to lack of finance to fund its development. Moreover, such SW may not be suitable for companies, especially in a situation when the company starts business activities in a new field, where all the business processes, hence the software requirements, emerge after many test runs and trials. In theory, this thesis focuses on possible solutions to this problem and in practice examines one specific software solution using an example of a property management company Property Rentier s.r.o. (hereinafter PR) which offers complex management services for recreational homes and short-term rental properties, especially using an Airbnb platform. PR has currently been confronted with a decision to make, whether or not to restructure its software solution and its architecture or keep its own and merely keep expanding it. The main goal of this thesis is to analyze and summarize the current processes of the selected company, describe how it is being supported by IT/ICT and, based on these findings, evaluate and recommend further measures regarding restructuring of the companys IT systems. The thesis output is meant for the PR company as well as for any start-up companies as a supportive material which should help ease its struggle making decisions about software development or its purchase.

There are many machine learning techniques that cannot be performed on graph-data. Techniques such as graph embedding, i.e mapping a graph to a vector, can open up a variety of machine learning solutions. This thesis addresses to what extent static graph embedding techniques can capture important characteristics of an IT-architecture graph, with the purpose of embedding the graphs in a common euclidean vector space that can serve as the state space in a reinforcement learning setup. The metric used for evaluating the performance of the embedding is the security of the graph, i.e the time it would take for an unauthorized attacker to penetrate the IT-architecture graph. The algorithms evaluated in this work are the node embedding methods node2vec and gat2vec and the graph embedding method graph2vec. The predictive results of the embeddings are compared with two baseline methods. The results of each of the algorithms mostly display a significant predictive performance improvement compared to the baseline, where the F1 score in some cases is doubled. Indeed, the results indicate that static graph embedding methods can in fact capture some information about the security of an IT-architecture. However, no conclusion can be made whether a static graph embedding is actually the best contender for posing as the state space in a reinforcement learning framework. To make a certain conclusion other options has to be researched, such as dynamic graph embedding methods. / Det är många maskininlärningstekniker som inte kan appliceras på data i form av en graf. Tekniker som graph embedding, med andra ord att mappa en graf till ett vektorrum, can öppna upp för en större variation av maskininlärningslösningar. Det här examensarbetet evaluerar hur väl statiska graph embeddings kan fånga viktiga säkerhetsegenskaper hos en IT-arkitektur som är modellerad som en graf, med syftet att användas i en reinforcement learning algoritm. Dom egenskaper i grafen som används för att validera embedding metoderna är hur lång tid det skulle ta för en obehörig attackerare att penetrera IT-arkitekturen. Algorithmerna som implementeras är node embedding metoderna node2vec och gat2vec, samt graph embedding metoden graph2vec. Dom prediktiva resultaten är jämförda med två basmetoder. Resultaten av alla tre metoderna visar tydliga förbättringar relativt basmetoderna, där F1 värden i några fall uppvisar en fördubbling. Det går alltså att dra slutsatsen att att alla tre metoder kan fånga upp säkerhetsegenskaper i en IT-arkitektur. Dock går det inte att säga att statiska graph embeddings är den bästa lösningen till att representera en graf i en reinforcement learning algoritm, det finns andra komplikationer med statiska metoder, till exempel att embeddings från dessa metoder inte kan generaliseras till data som inte var använd till träning. För att kunna dra en absolut slutsats krävs mer undersökning, till exempel av dynamiska graph embedding metoder.