Geert Poels

Ghent University | UGhent · Department of Management Information and Operations Management

Big Data analytics is a form of advanced analytics that encompasses computer algorithms, techniques, and supporting technologies that enable businesses and organisations to harness the power of Big Data. While Big Data analytics has created significant opportunities, it has also unintentionally increased the risks of data misuse. To avoid this, the...

Developing platform software is a challenging and multidisciplinary task that requires significant time and relies heavily on effective human interaction and teamwork. To enhance communication and expedite the development of a customized and satisfactory Minimum Viable Product (MVP), a method for ontology-driven MVP development in the digital platf...

Digital Transformations (DT) play an increasingly important role in academia and business, yet their significant Environmental Footprint (EF) is often overlooked, sidelining their potential for Environmental Sustainability (ES). This paper bridges this gap by integrating ES into the discourse of DT, proposing Green Enterprise Architecture (GREAN) a...

This study investigates how capability maps, an Enterprise Architecture artifact, can support digital transformation and for what purposes. Despite their potential, there is currently a lack of literature on the topic. The study uses the technique of a semi-structured interview in a case study to explore the role of capability mapping in planning a...

Capability-based management is an approach for strategy formulation and implementation that is rooted within the enterprise architecture discipline and founded on managerial theories. The main instrument of capability-based management is the capability map, which provides a structured and hierarchical overview of an organization’s capabilities. At...

This book trailblazes co-evolution approaches which have been prototyped and tried out by the authors, with global academic and practitioner backgrounds. It was devised to help humanity, people, perceived as complex adaptive systems, to self-organize, co-create, and manage complexity, by showcasing with own example, as individuals and open networks...

Since its burst in early 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic has deeply affected every aspect of daily life, from international trade and travelling to restrictions on an individual level, becoming a complex multi-level and highly multi-faceted problem. Due to its overarching influence and deep impact, it can be seen as one of the most disruptive Grand Cha...

Inspired by EUvsVirus, this chapter focuses on the Academia Diffusion Experiment (ADE) with more than 40 scholars and practitioners around the globe, who transform practice into science through co-creating, co-evolving, and co-dreaming. The chapter first introduces EUvsVirus as the context of the ADE and then uncovers the Denica 2.0 managerial meth...

Circular economy (CE) aims to create a sustainable economy while keeping economic growth intact, by internalizing negative externalities, such as waste. Research on this subject has come far on the macro level (e.g., legislative recommendations) and the meso level (e.g., life cycle engineering (LCE), circular supply chain (CSC), and circular value...

Middle managers are often operating in complex and fast-moving environments, resulting in having to deal with enormous challenges in a short span of time, maneuvering diverse and numerous “givens” and aiming to achieve specific goals. These challenges are very diverse and require support tailored to the needs and characteristics of middle managemen...

A Big Data Analytics (BDA) environment is a complex ecosystem that includes users, powerful infrastructure, services and applications that store, retrieve and process large amounts of data from widely dispersed sources. While BDA has improved efficiency and created business value, leading to growing interest from businesses and organisations in inv...

Applying principles and practices from the general concept of Architecture, based on ISo 42010, to integrate business process maps into the Enterprise Architecture artifacts of a company.

Big Data Analytics enables today's businesses and organisations to process and utilise the raw data that is generated on a daily basis. While Big Data Analytics has improved efficiency and created many opportunities, it has also increased the risk of personal data being compromised or breached. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) mandates...

Information security and privacy are matters of concern in every industry. The healthcare sector has lagged in terms of implementing cybersecurity measures. Therefore, hospitals are more exposed to cyber events due to the criticality of patient data. Currently, little is known about state-of-the-art research on information security and privacy in h...

A sharing platform is a digital platform that facilitates access to underutilized goods by renting or lending them to others. Users become less dependent on ownership which improves efficiency, sustainability, and the sense of community. The Sharing Economy (SE) is considered a complex domain because value co-creation can occur between multiple typ...

Deviations and variations are the norm rather than the exception in medical diagnosis and treatment processes. Physicians must leverage their knowledge and experience to choose an appropriate variation for each patient. However, this knowledge and experience is often tacit. Process modeling offers a way to convert tacit to explicit knowledge. Many...

Context Ambiguity in user stories is a problem that has received little research attention. Due to the absence of review studies, it is not known how and to what extent this problem, which impacts the effectiveness of user stories in supporting systems development, has been solved. Objectives We review the studies that investigate or develop solut...

User stories are a widely used artifact in Agile software development. Currently, only a limited number of secondary studies have reviewed the research on the user story technique. These research reviews focused on specific research topics related to ambiguity of requirements, effort estimation, and the application of Natural Language Processing. T...

In this paper a method is proposed for agile digital platform prototype development based on organization-specific ontologies. The resulting prototypes act as minimum viable product of the digital platform that is described by the ontologies. Our method combines the strengths of agile practices, to speed up the development process in a user-oriente...

Studies on requirements engineering with Agile methods for software development have shown difficulties in managing the quality of the requirements and communicating with users. Some of these studies have proposed conceptual modeling as a solution to these problems. However, the effort that is required to create conceptual models conflicts with Agi...

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the use of reference conceptual models to capture information about complex and sensitive business domains (e.g., finance, healthcare, space). These models play a fundamental role in different types of critical semantic interoperability tasks. Therefore, domain experts must be able to understand...

The Digital Transformation of our society requires IT infrastructures to be more agile, more adaptive, and more connected than ever. At the same time, the owners of such infrastructures are confronted with an increase in regulatory pressure (e.g., the GDPR). These developments put a lot of stress on IT management and governance. To enable IT manage...

Phishing is an online scam where criminals trick users with various strategies, with the goal of obtaining sensitive information or compromising accounts, systems, and/or other personal or organisational Information Technology resources. Multiple studies have shown that human factors influence the success of phishing attempts. However, these studie...

In the domain of the platform economy we identified two gaps in the current literature. First the lack of a shared conceptualization of digital platform types. We solve this issue with a taxonomy giving an overview of digital platform attributes, with attribute values expressing the possible variations between platforms depending on their type. The...

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), adopted in 2018, profoundly impacts information processing organizations as they must comply with this regulation. In this research, we consider GDPR-compliance as a high-level goal in software development that should be addressed at the outset of software development, meaning during requirements engin...

Prior studies have shown that the behaviours and attitudes of Internet users influence the likelihood of being victimised by phishing attacks. Many scammers design a step-by-step approach to phishing in order to gain the potential victim’s trust and convince them to take the desired actions. It is important to understand which behaviours and attitu...

ContextBig Data Analytics is a rapidly emerging IT practice whose applications offer benefits for a wide variety of business areas across an organisation. Given the wide scope of applications, the many types of processing involved, including those for purposes not yet foreseen, and the inherent privacy concerns resulting from collecting and storing...

Through the adoption of smart contracts as a permission management database for electronic health records (EHRs), blockchain technology has introduced several advantages such as traceability, transparency and enhanced security. Despite that the permissions to a patient's record are being managed in a more secure and decentralized manner, these reco...

Organizations active in today's digitally transforming world require sound IT governance (ITG). Besides processes and relational mechanisms, organizational structures (e.g. IT steering committee) are a key component of ITG. In the context of improving ITG, most of the (limited) existing research however has focused on the process component. The goa...

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the use of reference conceptual models to capture information about complex and sensitive business domains (e.g., finance, healthcare, space). These models play a fundamental role in different types of critical semantic interoperability tasks. Therefore, it is essential that domain experts are a...

Digital platforms can be categorized into different types including ‘multi-sided platform’, ‘digital marketplace’, ‘crowdfunding platform’, ‘sharing economy platform’ and ‘on-demand platform’. As there is a lack of knowledge regarding the requirements and design of these digital platform types, we developed a method to design a digital platform ref...

Adopting healthcare information systems and electronic health records (EHRs) result in various benefits for the healthcare sector such as real-time decision support and availability of critical medical information. Despite the many benefits that are associated with adopting EHRs, the transition to digitally stored and shared records hold various ch...

The importance of modeling the essence of enterprises on a level that abstracts from operational details is increasingly recognized. Two established enterprise modeling approaches are value modeling and business ontology. Business ontology provides abstract descriptions of enterprises in their business context, focusing on what is needed to create...

Recently the sharing economy has emerged as a viable alternative to fulfilling a variety of consumer needs. As there is no consensus on the definition of ‘sharing economy’ we use the term ‘marketplace’ to refer more specifically to Internet/software-based sharing economy platforms connecting two different market segments. In the field of sharing ec...

Many Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) projects end prematurely without reaping benefits. Previous research has indicated a lack of sustainable business cases for many Blockchain projects. A successful project has a disruptive impact on the business ecosystem. The paper investigates how e³value modeling can contribute to identifying the potential...

While Agile methodologies are used in software development, researchers have identified many issues related to requirements engineering in Agile approaches. Some of these issues relate to ambiguity in user stories, which is a widely-used requirements specification mechanism in Agile methodologies. This research proposes the use of conceptual models...

In organisations, conceptual models are used for understanding domain concepts. Learning the domain from models is crucial for the analysis and design of information systems that are intended to support the domain. Past research has proposed theories to structure conceptual models in order to improve learning. It has, however, never been investigat...

We present a mapping of a previously designed Business Process Architecture (BPA) meta-model onto ArchiMate, i.e., the de facto standard Enterprise Architecture (EA) modelling language. This construct mapping allows developing process maps, i.e., descriptions of (views of) the business process architecture of an organization. We demonstrate the dev...

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in modeling value in the context of Enterprise Architecture, which has been driven by a need to align the vision and strategic goals of an enterprise with its business architecture. Nevertheless, the current literature shows that the concept of value is conceptually complex and still causes a lot o...

Business Process Management can be applied to improve the efficiency, efficacy and transparency of its processes. This paper focusses on processes that can be characterized as loosely framed and knowledge-intensive (e.g. diagnosis and treatment of a patient in a hospital). Declarative process modeling languages that incorporate decision logic are w...

In recent years, there has been a growth in the use of reference conceptual models to capture information about complex and critical domains. However, as the complexity of domain increases, so does the size and complexity of the models that represent them. Over the years, different techniques for complexity management in large conceptual models hav...

Data is omnipresent in the modern, digital world and a significant number of people need to make sense of data as part of their everyday social and professional life. Therefore, together with the rise of data, the design of graphical representations has gained importance and attention. Yet, although a large body of procedural knowledge about effect...

The realization of strategic fit within the business architecture is an important challenge for organizations. Research in the field of enterprise modeling has resulted in the development of a wide range of modeling techniques that provide visual representations to improve the understanding and communication about the business architecture. As thes...

Process maps provide a high-level overview of an organization’s business processes. While used for many years in different shapes and forms, there is little shared understanding of the concept and its relationship to business process architecture. In this paper, we position the concept of process map within the domain of architecture description. B...

We report upon a study performed on 65 cases of digital innovation where graduate business students applied enterprise modelling to analyze and demonstrate the impact and value of implementing digital technologies. As students could freely choose which enterprise modelling techniques to apply, these cases provide insight into which enterprise model...

Process maps provide a high-level overview of an organisation's business processes. While used for many years in different shapes and forms, there is little shared understanding of the concept and its relationship to enterprise architecture. In this report we position the concept of business process map within the domain of enterprise architecture....

Complex, dynamically changing business environments impose great need for adaptability, where the enterprise modelling discipline ought to provide relevant support. To investigate how capability-oriented methodologies, aimed to integrate contextual enterprise modelling with system design and run-time adjustments facilitate enterprise adaptability i...

The Value Delivery Modeling Language (VDML) is an Object Management Group (OMG) standard for the analysis and design of value creation and value capture in enterprise operations. Although the VDML 1.0 specification was published in October 2015, little is known about the application of value modeling with VDML. We report in this paper (an earlier,...

Flexible, human-centric and knowledge-intensive processes occur in many service industries and are prominent in the health-care sector. Knowledge workers (e.g., doctors or other health-care personnel) are given the flexibility to address each process instance (i.e., episode of care) in the way that they deem most suitable. As a result, the knowledg...

Strategic sourcing, as a critical area of strategic management, is centered on decision-making towards achieving value-driven targets. Many companies face challenges in obtaining the benefits associated with effective strategic sourcing decision-making. Enterprise modeling can contribute to strategic sourcing decision-making by helping in the conce...

We are triggered to incorporate adaptability in information system designs and methodologies corresponding to complex and unpredictable environment of today and tomorrow and to complex adaptive systems they are aimed for. Adaptability as non-functional requirement is being portrayed and investigated from broad multidisciplinary perspective that inf...

Nowadays, many people are losing considerable wealth due to online scams. Phishing is one of the means that a scammer can use to deceitfully obtain the victim’s personal identification, bank account information, or any other sensitive data. There are a number of anti-phishing techniques and tools in place, but unfortunately phishing still works. On...

Currently, procurement is approached as a tactical process focused on spend management. The aim of this process is the identification of cost savings. A new paradigm of procurement is emerging that recognizes procurement as a value creation practice. This paradigm, referred to as value-driven strategic sourcing, lacks instruments for implementation...

Modeling loosely framed and knowledge-intensive business processes with the currently available process modeling languages is very challenging. Some lack the flexibility to model this type of processes, while others are missing one or more perspectives needed to add the necessary level of detail to the models. In this paper we have composed a list...

This paper investigates the effect of construct redundancy on readers' understanding of conceptual models. Conceptual models play a crucial role in understanding the domain related to information system development. The clarity of such models can be compromised if they are constructed using a conceptual modelling grammar exhibiting construct redund...

Simulation techniques offer a cost-effective solution to support the experimental analysis of possible business process improvements. However, the performance indicators that are used for this analysis exclusively focus on operational aspects. Consequently, the impact of process changes on the overall business performance is not taken into account....

Maturity models have become important aids to support process improvement. However, researchers have frequently criticized the many business process maturity models (BPMMs) for differing in quality, which creates a demand for comparing and evaluating these models. This paper describes a well-founded, ranked, and weighted set of critical criteria fo...

In their effort to control and manage processes, organizations often create process models. The quality of such models is not always optimal, because it is challenging for a modeler to translate her mental image of the process into a formal process description. In order to support this complex human processing task, we are developing a smart proces...

More and more organizations turn to the construction of process models to support strategical and operational tasks. At the same time, reports indicate quality issues for a considerable part of these models, caused by modeling errors. Therefore, the research described in this paper investigates the development of a practical method to determine and...

This volume constitutes the proceedings of the 10th IFIP WG 8.1 Conference on the Practice of Enterprise Modeling held in November 2017 in Leuven, Belgium. The conference was created by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 8.1 to offer a forum for knowledge transfer and experience sharing between the academic...