Janis Grabis

Riga Technical University | RTU · Institute of Information Technology

Information Systems (IS) of modern organizations and enterprises often rely on a network of partners’ IS to deliver the services. The resilience of this network is the necessary condition for the operation of such ISs. The Digital Business Ecosystem (DBE) theory has emerged as an approach to ensure functioning and resilience in dynamic and open net...

Modern information systems rely on data analytics and use various data sources to steer information processing and process execution activities. Capability-driven development is a method for the design and delivery of this kind of information systems. This chapter elaborates a method extension for capability-based modeling of data ecosystems for th...

Traditional Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are geared towards processing organizations’ internal information. However, business processes supported by these ERP systems increasing rely on external data. In order to understand these data dependencies, it is proposed to use data ecosystem models instead of traditional ERP implementation r...

Modern cloud-based information technology (IT) infrastructure monitoring context and data are gathered from various systems. Typical monitoring systems provide a set of metrics characterizing the performance and health of a variety of infrastructure components. To understand the dependencies and relations among these measurements, the infrastructur...

Nowadays, many projects and product managers, industry, and portfolio leads understand that data from the project or portfolio can be valuable for increasing their activities. There are many different types of project and portfolio lifecycle processes of managers daily duties: pre-sales and sales, mobilization, delivery, and closure phases. Definit...

Capability Driven Development (CDD) is a capability-based method for developing context-aware and adaptive systems. This paper proposes to extend CDD to address security and resilience concerns in organizational networks. A method extension defining modeling concepts and development procedure is elaborated. It includes development of a data-driven...

Business process redesign is increasingly motivated by analytical requirements, and data intensive activities such as image processing, prediction and classification are increasingly incorporated into business processes. Resulting business processes are referred as to data-intensive business processes. Such processes require data of various types a...

Agile development methods promote involvement of team members in development effort estimation using expert methods. However, valuable information might be missed out during the consensus seeking procedure and some of judgments are not properly accounted for. This paper proposes a simulation based effort estimation method. The method evaluates a ri...

One of the important aspects of providing the high level of the enterprises IT-readiness at machine-building enterprises is using the data science approach. By using data analysis, we mean the ability of the enterprises’ experts to increase using data by the most effective appliance of modern data science algorithms. In our research, the analysis h...

Digital enterprises and their networks increasingly rely on advanced decision-making capabilities, however, development of decision-making models requires significant effort and is often performed independently of other digitalization activities. Additionally, dynamic nature of many decision-making problems requires rapid ramp-up of decision-making...

Open Data (OD) is data available in a machine-readable format and without restrictions on the permissions for using or distributing it. OD may include textual artifacts, images, maps, video content, and other. The data can be published and maintained by different entities, both public and private. Despite its power to distribute knowledge freely an...

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Perspectives in Business Informatics Research, BIR 2018, held in Stockholm, Sweden, in September 2018. This year’s conference theme was “Business Resilience – Organizational and Information System Resilience in Congruence”. The 17 papers presented in this volume were care...

The fit-gap analysis of enterprise applications allows to identify their customization needs during implementation at a company. The enterprise applications provide a set of customization tools and customization flexibility is affected by a deployment mode. The on-premise deployment requires effort to install the application and its updates while t...

This book constitutes the proceedings papers of the 13th IFIP Working Conference on the Practice of Enterprise Modeling, held in Riga, Latvia, in November 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the conference took place virtually. The 19 full papers presented together with 7 short and 2 invited papers in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected...

Majority of the IT companies realized that ability to analyse and use data, could be one of the key factors for increasing of number of successful projects, portfolios, programs. Key performance indicators based on data analysis helps organizations be more prosperous in a long term perspective. Also, statistical data are very useful for monitoring...

One of the important aspects of providing the high level of the enterprises competitiveness on the market is existence of the necessary level of IT-readiness. By using the term “IT-readiness” we mean the ability of the enterprise to reach the mission by the most effective use of modern information technologies. There are contradictions between the...

Data-driven applications are adapted according to their execution context, and a variety of live data is available to evaluate this contextual information. The BaSeCaaS platform described in this demo paper provides data streaming and adaptation services to the data driven applications. The main features of the platform are separation of informatio...

Capabilities are developed and delivered in various modes. In line with the Capability as a Service (CaaS) paradigm, the capability development and delivery is also supported in the cloud environment. The cloud-based approach allows offering capabilities possessed by the service provider to a large number of potential consumers, supports quick depl...

The notion of capability has gained growing attention over the last few years due to a number of factors, namely, it directs business investment focus, it can be used as a baseline for business planning, and it leads to service specification and design. It is however unexplored to what extent capability is considered in different modeling approache...

The starting point to run-time adaptation of capabilities and business services is the ability to discover changes in the delivery context. Indicators for relevant changes can be quite diverse depending on the business service and enterprise under consideration. Examples are performance measurements in systems management, specific events in workflo...

The Capability-Driven Development (CDD) methodology supports development, delivery, and management of organization and information system capabilities. This chapter presents an overview of the CDD methodology in terms of the capability meta-model; the overall capability life cycle consisting of capability design, deployment, and feedback cycles; as...

Capabilities are delivered in ever-changing contextual situations. To respond to this challenge, the purpose of capability delivery adjustments is to alter capability delivery in response to the changing context and delivery performance without the need for redesigning the capability and the capability delivery application (CDA). More specifically,...

Involvement of potential users in early stages of elaboration of development methods is needed for successful method adoption in practice. This paper reports on activities of introduction and assessment of the Capability Driven Development (CDD) methodology with a group of industry representatives. This was performed in an interactive workshop and...

Capabilities represent key abilities of an enterprise and they encompass knowledge and resources needed to realize these abilities. They are developed and delivered in various modes including in-house and as a service delivery. The as a service delivery mode is provided in the cloud environment. The cloud-based approach allows offering capabilities...

Software quality assurance to comply with user requirements enables software development companies to be competitive. Maintaining a high quality level requires continuous monitoring and development. If there are quality problems, the company’s reputation is suffering and its costs increase because of investing in time and eliminating the consequenc...

The field of Information Systems (IS) and Enterprise Modeling (EM) is continuously striving to address the challenges of the practice by developing new methods and tools. This paper presents experiences and lessons learned from the Method Engineering of the Capability Driven Development (CDD) methodology. The CDD methodology supports organizations...

The reuse of IT solutions plays an important role, as it enables organizations to develop services more quickly and at reduced cost, and promotes greater interoperability, standardization and cooperation. Organizations increasingly include the reuse principle in their Enterprise architecture (EA) development vision. However, they often lack methods...

Data analytics capabilities integrated with Customer Relationship Management Systems play an important role to enable customer-centric sales activities at financial institutions. This paper reports a case study on developing a data mining model to identify the Next Best Offer (NBO) for selling financial products to bank’s customers. The case study...

Capabilities characterize ability and capacity to provide business services in different circumstance in accordance to performance requirements. The Capability Driven Development methodology provides means for designing and evaluating such capabilities. This paper specifically focuses on the capacity aspect of capability design. It assumes that eve...

Rule based adaptive systems are growing in popularity and rules have been considered as an effective and elastic way to adapt systems. A rule based approach allows transparent monitoring of performed adaptation actions and gives an important advantage of easily modifiable adaptation process. The goal of this paper is to summarize literature review...

Vehicle routing deals with assigning a set of vehicles to service geographically distributed customers. Modern information technologies such as sensing and cloud computing technologies have significantly affected the way this problem is addressed. It is a computationally intensive and context-aware multi-objective decision-making problem. The Capab...

In many application areas, vendors offer to their clients combinations of software products and services, which can be considered as software-service bundles. The clients select a combination of software product and associated service best suited to their individual requirements and circumstances. The bundle usually has to be configured by the vend...

The notion of capability has been gaining a growing attention in the business and information system (IS) engineering community due to a number of reasons: it facilitates focus on business investments, it can be used as a baseline for business planning, and it directly leads to service specification and design. It is not however widely known to wha...

To avoid any voluntary decisions it is desirable to examine the possible consequences that can be done by simulation. Unfortunately there is no unified methodology and technology for simulators designing. Above mentioned problem when development of each simulator has to be started from the scratches makes elaboration expensive and cumbersome. The a...

Requirements articulating user needs and corresponding to enterprise business processes are a key to successful implementation of information system development projects. However, the parties involved in projects frequently are not able to agree on a common development vision and have difficulties expressing their needs. Several industry experts ha...

The usage of Web services has recently increased. Therefore, it is important to select right type of Web services at the project design stage. The most common implementations are based on SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and REST (Representational State Transfer Protocol) styles. Maintainability of REST and SOAP Web services has become an impor...

Project management (PM) capabilities define organizational abilities of delivering predictable project results in a changing environment. To increase maturity of the PM capabilities, they need to be formalized, aligned with standards and best practices, measured, controlled and improved. One of capabilities standardization and formalization approac...

Many traditional process improvement techniques focus on process design optimization without accounting for interactions between the process structure and operational policies used in during the process execution. This paper elaborates a mathematical programming model for simultaneous optimization of the process structure and process execution poli...

Capabilities are designed for ensuring that business services can be delivered to satisfy business performance objectives in different circumstances. Run-time adjustments are used to adapt capability delivery to these specific circumstances. The paper elaborates the concept of the capability delivery adjustments on the basis of capability meta-mode...

Software-service bundles are combinations of software products and services offered by their vendors to clients. The clients select a combination of software product and associated service best suited to their specific circumstances. The paper proposes an information sharing based method helping clients to select the most appropriate combination or...

The overall objective of the CaaS project is to create an integrated approach consisting of methods, tools and reusable best practices that allow digital enterprises to take advantage of changes in business context and technologies. This deliverable primarily contributes to CaaS Objective 1, namely, “to elaborate a methodology and supporting method...

Enterprise applications are used for managing operational data and are aimed at improving business efficiency. Many enterprise applications have been developed over the past three decades and are often referred to as legacy systems. Usually they are monolith, inflexible, poorly documented and hard to maintain. These issues can be addressed by impro...

Enterprise applications, advanced planning systems, and enterprise application integration technologies provide a well-established way of providing information technology support for supply chain management. Despite enormous gains in flexibility of these technologies their general characteristics remain corresponding to the lean and flexible supply...

The hi-tech electronics industry produces a wide range of products. The best known examples are in consumer electronics, but around half of the produce goes to other types of end-products and B2B customers in diverse industries. While the consumer electronics sector is dominated by large OEMs, electronic parts are produced by a large number of smal...

The previous two chapters highlight the magnitude of the supply chain configuration problem. Before starting with the description of models and tools available for solving the identified problems, a systematic approach for dealing with the configuration problem is laid out in this chapter. A systematic approach defined by a methodology would facili...

Supply chain management and information technology are tightly coupled. Implementation of supply chain strategies would be very difficult without the support of information technology. At the same time, many developments in information technology have arisen from requirements set by enterprises seeking collaboration with their partners in the suppl...

As firms position themselves to stay competitive, they face the challenge of transforming their operations from a static to a dynamic business environment. An obvious choice for transformation is supply chain operations because of their potential impact on almost every aspect of the business encompassing the extended enterprise. This is a complex u...

In Chap. 2, we argue that supply chain configuration is one of the principal supply chain management decisions and that it has a profound impact on other subsequent managerial decisions. As described therein, the supply chain configuration problem is a complex problem, which is composed of several sub-problems. It is also emphasized that the soluti...

The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) industry is a diverse industry of major economic importance. Computer hardware is an important part of this industry. Sales of the computer hardware were around 700 billion in 2014, and the market continuous to grow rapidly. It is strongly affected by the trend of computing consumerization which pu...

The importance of supply chain management is increasing because companies face the necessity to improve customer service, which is not possible by considering just separate organizations. This need has been driven by increasing customer expectations, growing global competition, and technological developments, which have jointly contributed to great...

The US health care industry accounted for 17.1 % of the US economic output in 2013 according to the World Health Organization, whereas EU averages 8 %. Various studies of this industry point to lack or failure of basic quality-control procedures, and misalignment among consumer needs, payers, and provider services, as primary causes for building wa...

Mathematical programming models are described in Chap. 8 as the primary type of models used in supply chain configuration. However, these models have several limitations. Therefore, the integrated supply chain reconfiguration framework and the supply chain configuration methodology consider simulation modeling as an approach to address decision-mak...

Mathematical programming is one of the most important techniques available for quantitative decision-making. The general purpose of mathematical programming is finding an optimal solution for allocation of limited resources to perform competing activities. The optimality is defined with respect to important performance evaluation criteria, such as...

Modern organizations operate in a continuously changing environment influenced by economic, political, social, and technological developments. These dynamics of change have presented business enterprises with unprecedented opportunities and challenges in their quest for finding new ways to compete. Firms are beginning to move from operating on a re...

The models presented in the previous chapters use knowledge of supply chain structure to represent the supply chain. Additionally, the parameters of the models were assumed as given and limited attention was devoted to estimation of these parameters. Data driven and statistical methods on the other hand can be used to uncover unknown structural rel...

As in the case of any open and adaptive system, the structure of supply chain has evolved progressively over time from a sequential supply chain, to a global supply chain, a supply network, and alliance networks, respectively. This evolution has reflected the change in business environment from static to dynamic. In Chaps. 1 and 2, we discuss such...

This book discusses the models and tools available for solving configuration problems, emphasizes the value of model integration to obtain comprehensive and robust configuration decisions, proposes solutions for supply chain configuration in the presence of stochastic and dynamic factors, and illustrates application of the techniques discussed in a...

An understanding of information flows and processing functions is essential for any decision-modeling effort. Traditionally, these information flows are described in terms that are specific to particular decision- modeling techniques. However, in the heterogeneous supply chain environment, that results in largely diverse and often incompatible data...

Many legacy enterprise applications are large, monolithic and tightly coupled. Their maintenance is expensive and these systems are inflexible in fast changing environments. Modularization can improve the maintainability and increase the efficiency of legacy enterprise applications. This paper describes a source code driven decomposition of a large...

The 5th issue of the journal on Complex Systems Informatics and Modeling (CSIMQ) presents extended versions of five papers selected from the CAiSE Forum 2015. The forum was part of the 27th edition of international Conference on Advanced Information Systems engineering (CAiSE 2015), which took place in June 2015 in Stockholm, Sweden. Information sy...

The overall objective of the CaaS project is to create an integrated approach consisting of methods, tools and reusable best practices that allow digital enterprises to take advantage of changes in business context and technologies. This deliverable contributes to CaaS Objective 1, namely, “to elaborate a methodology and supporting methods for Capa...

The information system (IS) change management and governance, according to the best practices, are defined and described in several international methodologies, standards, and frameworks (ITIL, COBIT, ValIT etc.). These methodologies describe IS change management aspects from the viewpoint of their particular enterprise resource management area. Th...

The information technology industry cannot be imagined without large- or small-scale projects. They are implemented to develop systems enabling key business processes and improving performance and enterprise resource management. However, projects often experience various difficulties during their execution. These problems are usually related to the...

Enterprise applications are aimed at managing enterprise operational data and improving business efficiency. Many enterprise applications have been developed over the past three decades, therefore, known as legacy systems. Usually, they are monolith, inflexible, poorly documented and hard to maintain. The purpose of this paper is to describe best p...

The user adaptive enterprise application is a software system, which adapts its behavior to an individual user on the basis of nontrivial inferences from information about the user. The objective of this paper is to elaborate a conceptual model of the user adaptive enterprise applications. In order to conceptualize the user adaptive enterprise appl...

Competitiveness and growth on an international market is for many businesses tightly coupled to their ability of quickly implementing new company strategies, business services and products or market entries. Capability management is among the approaches proposed to tackle these challenges. A feature is capturing the context of capability delivery a...

Business process execution is affected by various contextual factors. Context-aware business processes consider the contextual factors during process design and execution. There is a large variety of possible context situations and their impact on the business process is difficult to know in advance. To this end an advanced context processing to ad...

Process improvement involves analysis of different process redesign variants. Evaluation of all these variants might result in a large complicated process model or maintenance of several similar models. The paper proposes a process improvement scenario design and simulation approach aimed at simplifying the analysis of such interrelated models. The...

ERP systems are characterized by a high degree of complexity what is challenging to replicate in the classroom environment. However, there is a strong industry demand for students having ERP training during their studies at universities. This paper reports a joint effort of University of Rostock and Riga Technical University to enhance introductory...

The need for organizations to operate in changing environments is addressed by proposing an approach that integrates organizational development with information system (IS) development taking into account changes in the application context of the solution. This is referred to as Capability Driven Development (CDD). A meta-model representing busines...

The main goal of the CaaS project is to facilitate a shift from the service-oriented paradigm to a capability delivery paradigm. This report is a result of WP5, task 5.1, and summarizes the state-of-the-art in methodology areas relevant for CDD. These areas include capability composition from patterns, capability assessment, identification of new b...

Context aware workflows are adapted to changing circumstances to meet their execution performance requirements. Adaptation can be performed reactively or proactively. Predictive or runtime simulation can be used to adapt workflows proactively. This paper proposes an approach for using the predictive simulation in improving efficiency of customer se...

Many enterprise applications have been developed over the last three decades therefore known as legacy systems. Usually they are monolith, inflexible, poorly documented and hard to maintain, however they are important to enterprises. The evolution of these systems depends on their decomposability. The purpose of this paper is to summarize existing...