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Με αυτή την εργασία προτείνουμε και υποστηρίζουμε ένα νέο πρότυπο για τα συστήματα αρχείων νέας γενιάς. Σε αυτό το πρότυπο, η παραδοσιακή άποψη ενός αρχείου αντικαθίσταται από την έννοια της πληροφοριακής μονάδας (information unit) και η παραδοσιακή αντίληψη των ιεραρχικών συστημάτων αρχείων αντικαθίσταται από ένα συνεχώς εξελισσόμενο χώρο δυναμικά αλληλένδετων πληροφοριακών μονάδων. Ένα Οργανικό Σύστημα Αρχείων (OFS) ορίζεται ως ένα σύστημα το οποίο αναπτύσσεται φυσικά και δεν υπόκειται σε τεχνητούς κανόνες και προκαθορισμένους, στατικούς τρόπους προβολής προς τους χρήστες του. Στο επίκεντρο του OFS βρίσκονται νέες αφαιρέσεις που υποστηρίζουν ένα συνεχώς εξελισσόμενο σύνολο πληροφοριακών μονάδων, χαρακτηρισμών των χρηστών για αυτές, και σχέσεων που δημιουργούνται μεταξύ τους από την πρόσβαση των χρηστών σε αυτές. Οι αφαιρέσεις αυτές επιτρέπουν το ίδιο σύστημα και το περιεχόμενό του να είναι ορατό με διαφορετικό τρόπο από διαφορετικούς τύπους χρηστών, σύμφωνα με τις τρέχουσες πληροφοριακές τους ανάγκες. Το OFS είναι ανθρωποκεντρικό, καθώς απαιτείται ανθρώπινη συνεισφορά για το χαρακτηρισμό των πληροφοριακών μονάδων και για την ανακάλυψη και το σχολιασμό των μεταξύ τους σχέσεων. Δεδομένου αυτού, στην καρδιά του OFS βρίσκονται αλγόριθμοι για την αναζήτηση βάσει περιεχομένου στα αποθηκευμένα αρχεία. Στην εργασία αυτή εκθέτουμε τα αποτελέσματα της μέχρι τώρα έρευνάς μας, συμπεριλαμβανομένης μιας υλοποίησης σε επίπεδο πυρήνα του λειτουργικού συστήματος, των βασικών χαρακτηριστικών του OFS, καθώς και τις σχετικές μετρήσεις απόδοσης προς απόδειξη της βιωσιμότητας της προσέγγισής μας. Συζητάμε στη συνέχεια, τις προκλήσεις που παραμένουν και τον αντίκτυπο που μπορεί να έχει το OFS στις σχετικές προσπάθειες έρευνας και ανάπτυξης, επισημαίνοντας τη σχετική έρευνα από άλλους τομείς, όπως η Ανάκτηση Πληροφορίας, το Κοινωνικό Λογισμικό, οι Διεπαφές Χρηστών, και η Διαχείριση Δεδομένων. / We propose and advocate a new paradigm for the next-generation file systems. In it, the traditional view of a file is replaced by the notion of an information unit and the traditional notion of hierarchical filesystems is replaced by an ever-evolving space of dynamically inter-related information units. An Organic File System (OFS) is defined as a system, which develops naturally and which does not conform to artificial rules and predefined, static ways of being viewed by its users. At the core of OFS lie novel abstractions which support a continuously evolving set of information units, users' characterizations of them, and relationships established between them by users accessing them. The abstractional also facilitate the same system and its contents to be viewed differently by different types of users, based on the current information needs. OFS is human-centered, as human input is used to characterize information units and to discover and annotate relationships between units. Given this, at the heart of OFS lie algorithms for content-based search of stored files. We report our R&D efforts so far, including a kernel-level architecture and implementation of the basic features of OFS and relevant performance measures establishing the viability of our approach. We then discuss the large number of challenges that remain and the impact OFS can have in relevant R\&D efforts, highlighting relevant research from other fields, such as Information Retrieval, Social Software, User Interfaces, and Data Management.

Dans cette thèse, nous nous sommes intéressés à la gestion dynamique des processus métiers. L’objectif étant de permettre d’une part, une exécution robuste qui prend en compte la dynamicité des différents éléments de processus métiers. D'autre part l’objectif est aussi de gérer les processus en prenant en compte les compétences nécessaires à leurs exécutions. Ce travail de thèse s’appuie sur l’approche BPM et plus précisément à sa phase d’exécution. Dans un monde de travail turbulent et en constante évolution, on parle souvent de modèles adaptables ou adaptatifs, de modèles qui s’enrichissent à chaque exécution et ne suivent pas un modèle structuré et prédéfini tel que le cas du BPM (Business Process Management) classique. En effet, les outils d’automatisation des processus métiers actuels ont été conçus pour fournir un soutien aux acteurs impliqués pour répondre aux questions : Qu'est-ce qui doit être fait? Qui est en charge de le faire? Quand faut-il être effectué? La plupart du temps ces systèmes sont prescriptifs. Ainsi, les acteurs impliqués ne sont pas seulement supportés, ils sont forcés à effectuer les tâches dans des séquences spécifiées. De surcroit, un processus flexible c’est un processus capable de changer que les parties qui ont besoin d'être changées tout en gardant la stabilité de ses autres parties. Dans ce contexte, parmi les approche prometteuses, l’approche orientée services offre aux entreprises une modularité permettant de remplacer facilement un composant par un autre, de le réutiliser et d’étendre son objectif en lui ajoutant un autre composant. De ce fait, dans le but de supporter l’agilité des processus métiers, nous proposons une approche combinant les trois approches suivantes : l’approche BPM, la gestion des compétences et l'approche orientée service dans un environnement social supportant le travail collaboratif. / In the modern economy, creating agile business processes is one of the conditions to obtain/ maintain competitive advantage on the market. Efficient organizations need to ensure that their business processes are flexible so that these processes can easily accommodate changes in regulations and policies. Actually, the management of business processes is supported by the BPM (Business Process Management) approach. It addresses the management, transformation and improvement of organizational operations. Yet, actual BPM does not feature the means to have a continuous adaptation of their business processes and quick adjustment of their models and resources allocation to meet changing environmental conditions. In this thesis, we aim to support the agility of business processes to ensure a continuous adaptation to changes. The agility of business processes, combined with the agility of employees and that of information technology are prerequisites for achieving business agility. To support agility at IT level, we use the SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) approach. Indeed, the SOA can provide numerous benefits to the organization, enabling it to reduce complexity and increase flexibility through their reutilization and modularity features. Moreover, resources which are important assets in successful process’s implementation are widely supported with agile organization regarded as primordial factor for successful agility implementation. For this reason, we propose an approach that combines management of processes with the required skills to their execution and to better enhance the process flexibility we combine BPM with SOA in a social environment.

Les systèmes d'information d'entreprise actuels s'articulent autour d'applications centrales lourdes, qui ne fournissent pas l'agilité nécessaire pour survivre dans un environnement économique hautement concurrentiel. De nombreux acteurs (unités commerciales, individus, équipes et communautés) doivent introduire leurs propres applications pour pallier à ces limitations, avec pour résultat un système d'information fragmenté, incohérent et impossible à gouverner. Cette étude propose un paradigme d'architecture d'entreprise alternatif, qui s'appuie sur une décomposition plus fine du système d'information et une distribution différente des responsabilités. Il permet à tout acteur de contribuer au système d'information en introduisant des fragments, privés ou partagés avec d'autres acteurs, qui peuvent ensuite être composés pour former des applications dédiées à un profil. Les récents mécanismes de l'informatique sociale sont proposés pour gérer les volumes potentiels importants de fragments émergeant de la communauté d'employés. L'objectif des systèmes d'informations sociaux est à la fois d'améliorer la cohérence et la gouvernabilité du système d'information de l'entreprise et d'exploiter l'intelligence et l'énergie collective de l'entreprise à des fins d'agilité métier maximale. / Present enterprise information systems are centered on heavy corporate applications, which cannot and indeed do not provide the agility required to survive in todays' competitive business landscape. Actors (business units, individuals, teams and communities) must introduce their own applications to work around these limitations, resulting in a fragmented, inconsistent and ungovernable information system. This thesis proposes an alternative enterprise architecture paradigm based upon a finer-grained decomposition of information systems and a different distribution of responsibilities. It empowers all actors to contribute fragments to the information system, private or shared with other actors, which can then be composed to form profile-specific applications. Consumer-space social mechanisms are proposed to manage the potentially huge resulting numbers of fragments emerging from the employee community. The aim of social information systems is both to improve the overall consistency and governability of the enterprise information system and to leverage the collective intelligence and energy of the corporation towards maximum business agility.

The area of business process management in general and and especially business process design has only recently discovered potential applications of social software to facilitate and support collaboration [Scheer and Klueckmann, 2009]. This development is also fueled by the practical insight that organizations have experienced top-down approaches in the design and implementation of business processes to be not effective. In fact, many process management initiatives failed due to a lack of acceptance of chosen methods and tools. As a consequence in many organizations so called [Klückmann and Scheer, 2009] "Guerilla approaches" have been followed where individual organizational units introduced their own business process management philosophy and as well techniques and tools that fit their specific needs. However, Klückmann and Scheer [2009] stress the fact that although distributed business process management initiatives should generally not be hindered, it is important to channel and integrate these initiatives towards a more consistent and efficient process management in the large. Business process modeling in this context serves several purposes in the process management cycle. One purpose is the analysis of business processes to uncover potential performance weaknesses and provide a basis for improvements. Another purpose is the unambiguous documentation of business processes as a resource for knowledge transfer, organizational learning and governance. An increasingly important purpose is the use of process models to support the design and engineering of respective enterprise information systems [Davies et al., 2006]. Hence, the complex and abstract nature of process models and the closedness of process modeling environments has prevented them to be broadly accepted and used by non-experts [Nolte et al., 2011] viz the process community in a wider sense. Consequently, process documentation and models in organizations frequently is outdated, incomplete and inconsistent. This model-reality divide in turn leads to even more reluctance towards the adoption of process modeling environments and use of process models. Bridging this model-reality divide by fostering open and fluent col- laboration through adequate features inspired by social software has gained growing attention by academia and industry [Mathiesen et al., 2012]. Although both industry and academia have addressed the need for collaboration support in process modeling only limited insight exists regarding the specific requirements for software-support in collaborative process modeling. This work refers to existing research (e.g. [Mendling et al., 2012; Riemer et al., 2011]) on requirements for software-support in collaborative process modeling and wiki-based process modeling (e.g. [Ghidini et al., 2010; Dengler and Vrandecic, 2011]). and pursues the following goals: (1) gain an understanding of the nature and requirements of collaborative process modeling in practice, (2) investigate how these requirements can be addressed through the design of a wiki-based collaborative process modeling environment, and (3) gain insight how a wiki-based collaborative process modeling environment supports process design activities in practice. To address these goals a design science approach has been followed. Through a systematic literature review and qualitative expert interviews a preliminary understanding of the problem domain and specification of requirements has been achieved. Through the extension and adaption of a well-proven collaboration platform (a wiki engine) for process modeling support several of the previously identified design issues have been addressed. In particular, issues regarding the flexible integration of a visual process modeling interface component into a collaboration environment and issues regarding concurrent scenarios in process modeling have been discussed in detail and realized partly on a technical level. Two major software components have been developed for the support of collaborative process modeling. First, a light-weight and easily integratable user-interface component for process model creation has been developed and integrated into the collaboration environment (a wiki engine). Second, the identification and handling of concurrent situations when multiple modelers access and modify a process model page has been implemented on an element level which allows for the interactive resolution and semi-automatic merging of conflicting revisions of a process model. Case-studies in an industrial and an academic setting provided valuable insights in the practice of collaborative process modeling and gave feedback on the applicability of a wiki-based approach. The first case-study of a process re-design in the recruiting department of an office supply manufacturing company in Hungary describes the insights gained during a long-term collaboration within a small group. Findings were especially valuable for further enhancements of the software and an understanding of practical requirements in iterative model creation and validation. The second case-study in the context of two bachelor and master courses in information system design has lead to insights regarding the requirements in highly dynamic collaboration scenarios in small groups and large groups but as well regarding the efficiency and effectiveness of wiki-based process modeling in collaborative learning processes. (author's abstract)

Ausgehend von einer Betrachtung des Identitätsbegriffes unter Darstellung der Konzepte von Erik H. Erikson und Heiner Keupp wird untersucht, welchen Einfluss SocialWare auf die Identität der Benutzer haben kann. Nach Einführung des Begriffes virtuelle Identität werden Ansätze und Modelle aufgegriffen, die die Auswirkungen der Internetnutzung im Allgemeinen beschreiben und ihre Anwendbarkeit auf den Bereich der SocialWare geprüft. Dazu zählen die Selbstmaskierungs- und die Selbsterkundungsthese sowie die Problematik des Eskapismus. Des Weiteren werden eigene empirische Ergebnisse zur Selbstdarstellung in Form von stichpunktartigen Profilen beschrieben und die Verwendung von Begriffen wie Freundschaft kritisch hinterfragt.

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This single case study explores the adoption of a wiki knowledge management system at a mid-sized IT retailer and consultancy. In exploring what factors affect how and if employees interact with the wiki six key areas are identified as crucial to enabling successful knowledge transfers with such a system: 1. Clearly linking the knowledge management to tangible business value 2. Clarifying for users the purpose and usage of the wiki 3. Aligning desired wiki use with the pre-existing corporate culture 4. Verifying that employee incentives are aligned with desired behavior 5. Making sure knowledge management is a part of existing processes 6. Effectively using technology to aid the users Additionally the study includes a comparison with previously conducted studies on implementations of traditional non-collaborative knowledge management systems and finds a high degree of similarity with the issues that have previously been faced within the field. This thesis therefore argues that the new technology present in a wiki type system does not solve the pre-existing problems facing knowledge management practitioners. Instead, the same issues facing the implementation of any such system need to be resolved before the potential of a wiki knowledge management system can be realized.

Dem Web 2.0 werden - nicht selten mit euphorischem Unterton - hinsichtlich Interaktion, Selbstorganisation und Nutzbarmachung kollektiver Intelligenz enorme Nutzenpotentiale nachgesagt. Ansätze mit Bezug zum Unternehmenskontext werden unter dem Stichwort Enterprise 2.0 behandelt und beschäftigen sich vorrangig mit der Unterstützung des betrieblichen Wissensmanagements. Speziell für die zunehmend durch Komplexität sowie intensive Interaktionsprozesse geprägte Fabrikplanung lassen sich durch einen zielgerichteten Einsatz von Web 2.0-Werkzeugen positive Effekte erwarten. Zielstellung dieser Arbeit ist die Entwicklung einer Methode zum Einsatz von Web 2.0-Werkzeugen in der Fabrikplanung. Hierfür erfolgt zunächst eine Bestandsaufnahme relevanter Ansätze und Begriffe in diesen Bereichen. Anschließend wird auf Grundlage system-, handlungs- und tätigkeitstheoretischer Überlegungen ein situativer Forschungsansatz begründet. Die Methodenentwicklung erfolgt als problemspezifische Ausgestaltung des Fall-basierten Schließens. Sie ist in ein entsprechend angepasstes Vorgehen der morphologisch-typologischen Theorieentwicklung eingebettet und basiert auf einer umfassenden Analyse hierfür relevanter Theorien, Modelle und Ansätze. Die Methode beruht auf einer kontinuierlichen Erfassung und Wiederverwendung von Erfahrungswissen. Sie wird abschließend evaluiert, wobei u.a. ein Prototyp entwickelt wird, der den praktischen Einsatz der entwickelten Methode unterstützt. / The Web 2.0 is supposed to have huge potential for the support of interaction, selforganization and the utilization of collective intelligence. Approaches related to an enterprise context are discussed with the keyword Enterprise 2.0 and mainly deal with potentials to support the operational knowledge management. A systematic approach for the use of web-based collaborative tools is expected to generate positive effects on modern factory planning, which faces increasing complexity and dynamic interactions. The objective of this work is to develop a methodical approach for the use of web-based collaborative tools in factory planning. Therefore, in the first part of this thesis an overview of relevant approaches and terms in the areas of Web 2.0 and factory planning is being worked out. In a second step, a situational approach is identified as an appropriate view after due consideration and contextual discussion of system, action and activity theory. The development of the methodical approach is based on a problem-specific adaptation of case-based reasoning. It is embedded into an elaborated procedure of morphologic-typological theory building and bases on a comprehensive analysis of relevant theories, models and approaches. The evolved method relies on continuous collection and reutilisation of experiential knowledge. It is evaluated through different methods, inter alia by the construction of a prototype that supports its practical use.

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