Business organisations today are faced with the complex problem of dealing with evolution in their software information systems. This effectively concerns the accommodation and facilitation of change, in terms of both changing user requirements and changing technological requirements. An approach that uses the software development life-cycle as a vehicle to study the problem of evolution is adopted. This involves the stages of requirements analysis, system specification, design, implementation, and finally operation and maintenance. The problem of evolution is one requiring proactive as well as reactive solutions for any given application domain. Measuring evolvability in conceptual models and the specification of changing requirements are considered. However, even "best designs" are limited in dealing with unanticipated evolution, and require implementation phase paradigms that can facilitate an evolution correctly (semantic integrity), efficiently (minimal disruption of services) and consistently (all affected parts are consistent following the change). These are also discussed / Computing / M. Sc. (Information Systems)

The aim of the Diploma thesis is to evaluate the selected object-oriented (OO) methodology as it was defined by its author, on the basis of defined criteria, whether it is applicable in practice when designing an information system, with a main focus on analysis of the new core banking system supporting key processes of payment institution and Forex broker. Diploma thesis describes selected OO methodologies and notations used in the analysis and design of information systems. Further, it focuses on the evaluation of the real usage of selected method (Unified Process) in the environment of payment institution. It confronts the theoretical definition of a selected OO methodology with its application during the analysis of IS through practical demonstrations created within the case study.

The master’s thesis deals with the design of a management information system, which is represented by a set of dashboards and reports. The main purpose of the system is to provide technological and information support to the management of company in terms of managing strategic goals and business performance. The information obtained by analyzing the company and its surroundings are subsequently used for draft creation. The thesis draft contains a project plan for the design and implementation of the system, the design of the system itself - its content and technical aspects, furthermore, we also deal with the implementation of the system and the management of this change.

An ontology describing the constructs and their inter-relationships for business models has recently been built and evaluated: the Business Model Ontology (BMO). This ontology has been used to conceptually power a popular practitioner visual design tool: the Business Model Canvas (BMC). However, implicitly these works assume that designers of business models all have a singular normative goal: the creation of businesses that are financially profitable. These works perpetuate beliefs and businesses that do not create outcomes aligned with current natural and social science knowledge about long term individual human, societal and ecological flourishing, i.e. outcomes are not strongly sustainable. This limits the applicability and utility of these works. This exploratory research starts to overcome these limitations: creating knowledge of what is required of businesses for strongly sustainable outcomes to emerge and helping business model designers efficiently create high quality (reliable, consistent, effective) strongly sustainable business models. Based on criticism and review, this research project extends the BMO artefact to enable the description all the constructs and their inter-relationships related to a strongly sustainable business model. This results in the Strongly Sustainable Business Model Ontology (SSBMO). To help evaluate the SSBMO a practitioner visual design tool is also developed: the Strongly Sustainable Business Model Canvas (SSBMC). Ontological engineering (from Artificial Intelligence), Design Science and Systems Thinking methodological approaches were combined in a novel manner to create the Systemic Design Science approach used to build and evaluate the SSBMO. Comparative analysis, interviews and case study techniques were used to evaluate the utility of the designed artefacts. Formal 3rd party evaluation with 7 experts and 2 case study companies resulted in validation of the overall approaches used and the utility of the SSBMO. A number of opportunities for improvement, as well as areas for future work, are identified. This thesis includes a number of supplementary graphics included in separate (electronic) files. See “List of Supplementary Materials” for details.