Information visualization can be valuable in a wide range of applications, it deals with abstract, non-spatial data and with the representation of data elements in a meaningful form irrespective of the size of the data, because sometimes visualization itself focuses on the certain key aspects of the data in the representation and thus it helps by providing ease for the goal oriented interpretation. Information visualization focuses on providing a spontaneous and deeper level of the understanding of the data.

Research collaboration enhances sharing knowledge and also enhances an individual’s talent. New ideas are generated when knowledge is shared and transferred among each other. According to (He et al, 2009) Research collaboration has been considered as a phenomenon of growing importance for the researchers, also it should be encouraged and is considered to be a “good thing” among the researchers.

The main purpose of this thesis work is to prepare a model for the competence profile visualization purpose. For this purpose the study of different visualization techniques that exist in the field of information visualization are discussed in this thesis work. The study and discussion about the visualization techniques motivates in selecting appropriate visualization techniques for the visualization of Ontology-based competence profiles for research collaboration purpose. A proof of concept is developed which shows how these visualization techniques are applied to visualize several components of competence profile.

Information systems (IS) are nowadays extensively used to support all kinds of activities in healthcare organisations. Enterprise modelling can help to make the use of IS in healthcare more effective by providing process and domain models reflecting a particular healthcare unit. This paper proposes a model of the ward round process in a healthcare unit. The proposed model identifies the roles of medical professionals, tasks that can be performed according to the personnel’s competences, and activities that are carried out as part of the tasks to achieve goals of the ward round process. A formal approach has been used to implement the modelling results in the form of an ontology. Such formal ontologies can support improvement and development of IS in healthcare. We learned that modelling workshops are important for development of models that can be formalized in a machine-readable form.

Synen på mjukvaruutveckling har förändrats under det senaste decenniet; Vattenfalls- eller traditionella kommando- och styrmetoder har ersatts av Agila metoder. Agila utvecklingsmetoder kom som en "lösning" till nackdelarna med vattenfalls metodiken, men användning av Agila metoder har sina egna utmaningar. På grund av Agila metoders attraktiva egenskaper såsom flexibilitet och kort tid till marknaden, har denna typ av utveckling blivit alltmer populärt och antalet organisationer som har börjat flytta till Agila metoder växer varje dag. Att genomföra nya metoder i en organisation är alltid en stor utmaning. Särskilt för stora organisationer på grund av deras komplexitet, med tanke på många olika samverkande gränssnitt, stark organisationskultur, etc.

Karaktären på dessa utmaningar och hinder ändras från olika perspektiv inom en organisation, och vart och ett av dessa perspektiv behöver studeras och undersökas för att säkerställa en framgångsrik övergång från traditionella metoder till Agila metoder. I denna avhandling fokuserar vi på projektledare och projektförvaltningsperspektiv. Vi strävar efter att definiera framgångs- och misslyckande faktorer som spelar en nyckelroll i att flytta från traditionella metoder till Agila metoder i storskaliga organisationer.

För att möta dessa utmaningar genomfört vi dessutom en litteraturstudie av den senaste forskningen om införande av Agila metoder. För att samla våra data vi använt en kombination av kvalitativa och kvantitativa forskningsmetoder. Vi utforskade både projektledare för IT och chefs-projektledare sidor av organisationer genom intervjuer och enkäter i vår forskning.

Resultaten visar den kritiska roll produktägare utgör i Agila projekt. Det är en utmaning att tillsätta en korrekt produktägaren som har Agile kunskap och är expert i projektet domänen. Specialiserad utbildning och coaching för produktägare nämns som en av de möjliga lösningar som finns för denna utmaning. "distribuerade team", "brist på fokus på affärssidan" och "Svag coachning och support" är några av de andra viktiga områden som har lagts fram av deltagarna i intervjuerna och undersökning i denna studie.

Den viktigaste slutsatsen är att för att få en lyckad övergång till Agila metoder bör Agilt tänkande tillämpas i alla delar i en organisations, inte bara utvecklingssidan, utan alla måste förstå "varför" Agila metoder är fördelaktigt. Även överföring av lärdomar och återkoppling bör vara stark och effektiv för att undvika återkommande samma misstag. Dessutom, specialiserad utbildning och coaching för olika roller och inom den tidsfrist för utvecklingen är nödvändig för att säkerställa ett framgångsrikt antagande av Agila arbetsmetoder.

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 business and IS designs consisting of goals, key performance indicators, capabilities, context and capability delivery patterns, is being proposed. The use of themeta-model is validated in three industrial case studies as part of an ongoing collaboration project, whereas one case is presented in the paper. Issues related to the use of the CDD approach, namely, CDD methodology and tool support are also discussed.

Current trends of globalisation and increased competition require new forms of organisation and work support. Especially in small and medium sized enterprises (SME), the competitiveness and future market position of an enterprise is closely related to the ability of cooperating with partners in SME networks or virtual supplier organisations. In complex work processes with a number of distributed partners, high requirements with respect to competence and a lot of rules and guidelines to be obeyed; detecting and sharing knowledge among different members of networked organizations is an important issue. Based on an empirical investigation regarding the demands of SME and illustrating this demand with industrial cases, this paper investigates two technical approaches supporting knowledge supply in networked organizations: enterprise modeling and self-organisation of flexible supply networks. These approaches are presented with related work and their limits and potentials.

The root is the primary lexical unit of Ontological terms, which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into small constituents. It is the key of ontological term structure. After the identification of root, we can easily get the meaning of terms. According to the meaning, it’s helpful to identify the other parts of terms, such as the relation, definition and so on. We have generated a general classification model to identify the roots of terms in this master thesis. There are four features defined in our classification model: the Token, the POS, the Length and the Position. Implementation is followed using Java and algorithm is followed using Naïve Bayes. We implemented and evaluated the classification model using Gene Ontology (GO). The evaluation results showed that our framework and model were effective.

This paper addresses collaborative research as an action research approach. Many times action research is described as embracing one research organisation and one business organisation. We are challenging this view by introducing the concept of collaborative practice. A collaborative practice can be seen as a cluster of local practices and researchers working together. In this way, a collaborative practice should enable joint learning between, and joint development efforts for, several business practices as well as contributing to general practice and the scientific body of knowledge. Based on a case study within efficient IT Service Management (ITSM), the concept of collaborative practice and its relation to other adjacent concepts (such as local practice, general practice and scientific body of knowledge) have been characterized. Our results should be viewed as preliminary since they are gathered from an ongoing project.

Recently, cloud computing has been gaining more and more popularity. Misunderstanding, misusing and underutilizing the cloud offerings, though, both from business and technical perspective still poses a threat to the success of cloud projects. On the technical side, one of the main reasons for success or failure is often the architectural design of the system – if a system is not architected the “cloud way”, using cloud’s special characteristics, the business benefits of such a system are often questionable at best. Software architecture through architectural patterns – reusable generic solutions to classes of problems – has for long been a good way to overcome the challenges of software architecture.

This paper focuses on establishing the grounds and highlighting the differences of the knowledge transfer regarding architectural patterns from building pre-cloud (“traditional”) software systems to building cloud-native systems.

The following 3 research questions drive this research:

RQ1.     How does the existing knowledge on architectural patterns relate to the cloud computing environment?

RQ2.     Which characteristics of architectural patterns make them suitable for the cloud environment?

RQ3.     How can architectural pattern evolution be documented effectively for usage in the practice?

In order to answer these 3 research questions and considering their focus is on utility i.e. creating a model which can be directly used in practice, the research uses design science research methodology (Peffers, et al., 2007-8). The emphasis in this methodology is iteratively building artefact(s) which can be improved and proven through practice that they actually help solving the problem at hand.

This research contributes with building 4 inter-connected artefacts:

• a cloud applicability taxonomy of architectural patterns (CATAP) showing how applicable to a cloud environment an architectural pattern is and why;
• a pattern-to-characteristics mapping showing how using an architectural pattern affects the resulting system in traditional and cloud environments;
• a pattern form documenting the architectural patterns and the findings about them in the previous two artefacts;
• a wiki site, APE Wiki, which makes the results available to the public for reference and discussion and improvement.

This research has a few interesting findings. First of all, the current architectural pattern knowledge seems to be very mature as no pattern has been found to have significantly evolved because of cloud – the architectural patterns are really generic and very flexible and only their effect on system characteristics has changed with the environment switch. On the other hand, a few new patterns were discovered and documented, which confirms the need for special attention to the new environment. Apart from that, the pattern-to-characteristics mapping provides interesting insights into which characteristics are most important for cloud and where there is a gap which may need to be filled.

This paper presents both the process and the results of the research as equally important as replicating and extending this research could help in maturing the results and the knowledge about architecting systems for cloud thus increasing the chances of success of cloud projects.

Approximate string matching consists in identifying strings as similar even ifthere is a number of mismatch between them. This technique is one of thesolutions to reduce the exact matching strictness in data comparison. In manycases it is useful to identify stream variation (e.g. audio) or word declension (e.g.prefix, suffix, plural).

Approximate string matching can be used to score terms in InformationRetrieval (IR) systems. The benefit is to return results even if query terms doesnot exactly match indexed terms. However, as approximate string matchingalgorithms only consider characters (nor context neither meaning), there is noguarantee that additional matches are relevant matches.

This paper presents the effects of some approximate string matchingalgorithms on search results in IR systems. An experimental research design hasbeen conducting to evaluate such effects from two perspectives. First, resultrelevance is analysed with precision and recall. Second, performance is measuredthanks to the execution time required to compute matches.

Six approximate string matching algorithms are studied. Levenshtein andDamerau-Levenshtein computes edit distance between two terms. Soundex andMetaphone index terms based on their pronunciation. Jaccard similarity calculatesthe overlap coefficient between two strings.

Tests are performed through IR scenarios regarding to different context,information need and search query designed to query on a technicaldocumentation related to software development (man pages from Ubuntu). Apurposive sample is selected to assess document relevance to IR scenarios andcompute IR metrics (precision, recall, F-Measure).

Experiments reveal that all tested approximate matching methods increaserecall on average, but, except Metaphone, they also decrease precision. Soundexand Jaccard Similarity are not advised because they fail on too many IR scenarios.Highest recall is obtained by edit distance algorithms that are also the most timeconsuming. Because Levenshtein-Damerau has no significant improvementcompared to Levenshtein but costs much more time, the last one is recommendedfor use with a specialised documentation.

Finally some other related recommendations are given to practitioners toimplement IR systems on technical documentation.

The challenges in the global economy have forced companies to rethink the way they operate and their relations with both customers and subcontractors. To remain competitive, companies need to align their business processes with the firm’s strategy and make a strategic use of information technology. This paper addresses one of the important issues in business process management field as well as strategic alignment that is, how do we create and sustain alignment between business processes and strategy? A literature review has been performed by the authors in order to come up with the challenges and critical success factors in process management and business and IT alignment. The results of that investigation are the basis for developing the approach that is advocated in this paper.  Four case studies have been conducted in the area of Jönköping in order to test the validity of the approach in SMEs.  The results show that SMEs continuously put efforts to maintain alignment between their business processes and strategy by means of Information Technology. They usually consider people, management, IT/IS and organisational culture as most important in order to create alignment between strategy and business processes. Organisational structure and performance measurement tend to be less important.

Interoperability is a feature required by the Semantic Web. It is provided by the ontology matching methods and algorithms. But now ontologies are presented not only in English, but in other languages as well. It is important to use an automatic translation for obtaining correct matching pairs in multilingual ontology matching. The translation into many languages could be based on the Google Translate API, the Wiktionary database, etc. From the point of view of the balance of presence of many languages, of manually crafted translations, of a huge size of a dictionary, the most promising resource is the Wiktionary. It is a collaborative project working on the same principles as the Wikipedia. The parser of the Wiktionary was developed and the machine-readable dictionary was designed. The data of the machine-readable Wiktionary are stored in a relational database, but with the help of D2R server the database is presented as an RDF store. Thus, it is possible to get lexicographic information (definitions, translations, synonyms) from web service using SPARQL requests. In the case study, the problem entity is a task of multilingual ontology matching based on Wiktionary data accessible via SPARQL endpoint. Ontology matching results obtained using Wiktionary were compared with results based on Google Translate API.

In public and local administration contexts, the organizational structures depend on bureaucratic aspects. This often implies that people are engaged in offices and their allocation come from emergencies and political factors instead of rational motivations related to knowledge, competences and profiles. In most cases, such situations become gangrenous and generate dissatisfaction and low productivity. The objective of our work is applying competence management, skill gap analysis and a study of the existing organizational structures to point out the functional unit with the most critical situation in terms of allocated employees and to suggest a solution according to the complex laws, internal regulation for the staff management and trade-union influences. The proposed approach identifies the real gaps that create inefficiencies and suggests the people to engage in learning programs by focusing exactly on what the organizations need with respect to what the employees have. It happens by elaborating a priority scale on the base of existing hierarchies, relationships, logistic constraints and other aspects with the aim, above all, of enhancing the identified unit and the local administration itself.

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 ERP training by introducing an internationalization dimension in the standard curriculum. Both universities collaborated to develop an international ERP case study as an extension of the SAP ERP Global Bikes Incorporated case study. The training approach, study materials and appropriate technical environment have been developed. The international ERP case study is performed at both universities where students work collaboratively on running business processes in the SAP ERP system. Students’ teams at each university are responsible for business process activities assigned to them and they are jointly responsible for completing the process. The case study execution observations and students’ evaluations suggest that the international ERP provides a good insight on the real-life challenges associated in using the ERP systems in the international context.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are among the most widely used large-scale information systems. Industry and students in IT-related subjects expect that ERP training is part of the studies during university education. However, traditional teaching materials use somewhat simplified multi-role and cross-organizational processes which do not fully reflect reality in enterprises, for example with respect to role-based permissions or coordination challenges in international organizations. This paper reports on an attempt to extend the SAP ERP GBI case study towards an international dimension. For this purpose an international ERP case study was developed which is presented in the paper with its didactical approach, the technical way how to implement the case study in SAP, and the teaching environment. The work is a joint effort by University of Rostock and Riga Technical University which has a focus on enhancing introductory ERP training for study programs in information technology and business informatics. One of the key features of the international ERP case study is that students of both universities work collaboratively on running business processes in the SAP ERP system. Evaluations suggest that the students appreciate the case study as suitable means to get an insight in real-life challenges connected to ERP use in an international context.

The study of ontology design patterns (ODPs) is a fairly recent development. Such patterns simplify ontology development by codifying and reusing known best practices, thus lowering the barrier to entry of ontology engineering. However, while ODPs appear to be a promising addition to research and while such patterns are being presented and used, work on patterns as artifacts of their own, i.e. methods of developing, identifying and evaluating them, is still uncommon. Consequently, little is known about what ODP features or characteristics are beneficial or harmful in different ontology engineering situations. The presented PhD project aims to remedy this by studying ODP quality characteris- tics and what impact these characteristics have on the usability of ODPs themselves and on the suitability of the resulting ontologies.

Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs) show potential in enabling simpler, faster, and more correct Ontology Engineering by laymen and experts. For ODP adoption to take off, improved tool support for ODP use in Ontology Engineering is required. This paper studies and evaluates the effects of strategies for object property specialisation in ODPs, and suggests tool improvements based on those strategies. Results indicate the existence of three previously unstudied strategies for ODP specialisation, the uses of which affect reasoning performance and integration complexity of resulting ontologies.

Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs) are intended to guide non-experts in performing ontology engineering tasks successfully. While being the topic of significant research efforts, the uptake of these ideas outside the academic community is limited. This paper summarises some issues preventing broader adoption of Ontology Design Patterns among practitioners, suggests research directions that may help overcome these issues, and presents early results of work in these directions.

Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs) are intended to guide non-experts in performing ontology engineering tasks successfully. While being the topic of significant research efforts, the uptake of these ideas outside the academic community is limited. This paper summarises issues preventing broader adoption of Ontology Design Patterns among practitioners, with an emphasis on finding and composing such patterns, and presents early results of work aiming to overcome these issues.

Ontology Design Patterns show promise in enabling simpler, faster, more correct Ontology Engineering by laymen and experts alike. Evaluation of such patterns has typically been performed in experiments set up with artificial scenarios and measured by quantitative metrics and surveys. This paper presents an observational case study of content pattern usage in configuration of an event processing system. Results indicate that while structural characteristics of patterns are of some importance, greater emphasis needs to be put on pattern metadata and the development of pattern catalogue features.

The use of Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs) in ontology engineering has been shown to have beneficial effects on the quality of developed ontologies, and promises increased interoperability of those same ontologies. Unfortunately, the lack of user-friendly integrated ODP tooling has prevented the adoption of pattern use. This paper demonstrates an extension to the WebProt´eg´e ontology engineering environment supporting the finding, specialisation, and integration of ODPs. The extension combines existing approaches with new developments in ODP search, specialisation strategies, and alignment.

Ontologies are increasingly used in systems where performance is an important requirement. While there is a lot of work on reasoning performance-altering structures in ontologies, how these structures appear in Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs) is as of yet relatively unknown. This paper surveys existing literature on performance indicators in ontologies applicable to ODPs, and studies how those indicators are expressed in patterns published on two well known ODP portals. Based on this, it proposes recommendations and design principles for the development of new ODPs.

Semantic web ontologies have several advantages over other knowledge representation formats that make them appropriate for information logistics architectures and applications. However, the construction of ontologies is still time-consuming and error prone for practitioners. One recent development that aims to remedy this situation is the introduction of ontology design patterns, codifying best practices and promoting reuse. This paper presents a literature survey into the state of research on ontology patterns, and suggests the use of such patterns for modeling information demand and distribution.

The use of semantic technologies and Semantic Web ontologies in particular have enabled many recent developments in information integration, search engines, and reasoning over formalised knowledge. Ontology Design Patterns have been proposed to be useful in simplifying the development of Semantic Web ontologies by codifying and reusing modelling best practices.

This thesis investigates the quality of Ontology Design Patterns. The main contribution of the thesis is a theoretically grounded and partially empirically evaluated quality model for such patterns including a set of quality characteristics, indicators, measurement methods and recommendations. The quality model is based on established theory on information system quality, conceptual model quality, and ontology evaluation. It has been tested in a case study setting and in two experiments.

The main findings of this thesis are that the quality of Ontology Design Patterns can be identified, formalised and measured, and furthermore, that these qualities interact in such a way that ontology engineers using patterns need to make tradeoffs regarding which qualities they wish to prioritise. The developed model may aid them in making these choices.

This work has been supported by Jönköing University.

Podcast is a new audio media in Sweden and has become larger and increasingly more popular in the past few years. In line with this, companies have seen the opportunity to use this type of marketing in the new coveted media and have created a new marketing tool in the form of sponsorship. Previous studies in this field indicate that this is a very effective method to reach a broad audience, but it still is a relatively new area with very little research in existence today.

This study is an analysis of how receptive listeners are to marketing through podcasts and the ability companies have to create a sustainable and effective strategy for successful marketing through this type of medium.

The collection of data for this study consists of two different qualitative interviews, the first one with listeners that were chosen, and the second with the sponsor company for two of the largest podcasts in Sweden. The essay´s empirical evidence shows how receptive listeners are to marketing via podcasts, what their podcast habits look like, what form of approach in marketing they prefer, and how often they take part in different offers. From the interviews with listeners and sponsoring companies in the study, it is concluded that the best and most effective strategy for marketing through podcasts is to weave advertising in the conversation and therefore increase the credibility and disturb the listener as little as possible. This also effects how receptive listeners are and it has been shown that they listen less carefully when advertisement is placed within commercial breaks. How receptive listeners are to advertising also depends on some other factors such as noise, how engaged they are, and how the large amount of advertising around us effects our assessment of advertising. To strengthen this, and to get a larger foundation for the study, a collection of data such as documents has been analyzed. Public documents in this area are interesting because in recent years a lot of articles have been written about the podcast culture. At the same time, it is still a relatively new medium which allows for much of the existing research to be built on and renewed.

A recommendation for companies that want to promote themselves in the podcast media is to carefully plan a sustainable strategy that is right for their particular brand. Other aspects to keep in mind are to always pursue the most current avenues or advertising, to avoid radio advertising in the form of commercial breaks, and to instead focus more on talking about the brand during the program to make it more natural and interesting. This increases brand awareness and makes it possible for the brand to become the listener’s top-of-mind choice.

Today, many enterprises use information systems to support their activities but as a rule these systems are heterogeneous and incompatible. When enterprises need to cooperate with each other, they have to overcome this heterogeneity and establish interaction between their information systems. Based on a case study from international business development, this paper analyzes principles and conditions for creating interaction between autonomous systems. Furthermore, an approach to interaction between heterogeneous information systems in the case study is presented, which is based on a service-oriented architecture and Web services. In this context, a business process model describes how the distributed autonomous systems should be used by companies in different countries to support establishment of business relationships. These systems have different data models, and use different industrial classifications. Our main contribution to research in the field of interaction between autonomous systems are (1) a proposal for principles to be taken into account when federating autonomous systems and (2) an experience report when putting these principles into practice in the case study presented.

The more enhanced and reliable healthcare facilities, depend partly on accumulated organizational knowledge. Ontology and semantic web are the key factors in long-term sustainability towards the improvement of patient treatment process. Generally, researchers have the common consensus that knowledge is hard to capture due to its implicit nature, making it hard to manage. Medical professionals spend more time on getting the right information at the right moment, which is already available on intranet/internet.

Evaluating the literature is controversial but interesting debates on ontology and semantic web encouraged us to propose a method and 4-Tier Architecture for retrieving context-based document according to user’s information in healthcare organization.

Medical professionals are facing problems to access relevant information and documents for performing different tasks in the patient-treatment process. We have focused to provide context-based retrieval of documents for medical professionals by developing a semantic web solution. We also developed different OWL ontology models, which are mainly used for semantic tagging in web pages and generating context to retrieve the relevant web page documents. In addition, we developed a prototype to testify our findings in health care sector with the goal of retrieving relevant documents in a practical manner.

Efficiency as a term in software testing is, in the research community, a term that is not so well defined. In the industry, and specifically the test tool industry, it has become a sales pitch without meaning.

GUI testing in its manual form is a time consuming task, which can be thought of as repetitive and tedious by testers. Using human testers to perform a task, where focus is hard to keep, often ends in defects going unnoticed.

The purpose of this thesis is to collect knowledge on the area efficiency in software testing, but focusing more on efficiency in GUI testing in order to keep the scope focused. Part of the purpose is also to test the hypothesis that automated GUI testing is more efficient than traditional, manual GUI testing.

In order to reach the purpose, the choice fell to use case study research as the main research method. Through the case study, a theoretical study was performed to gain knowledge on the subject. To gain data used for an analysis in the case study, the choice fell on using a semi-experimental research approach where one automated GUI testing technique called Capture & Replay was tested against a more traditional approach towards GUI testing.

The results obtained throughout the case study gives a definition on efficiency in software testing, as well as three measurements on efficiency, those being defect detection, repeatability of test cases, and time spent with human interaction. The result also includes the findings from the semi-experimental research approach where the testing tools Squish, and TestComplete, where used beside a manual testing approach.

The main conclusion deducted in this work is that an automated approach towards GUI testing can become more efficient than a manual approach, in the long run. This is when efficiency is determined on the points of defect detection, repeatability, and time.

Efficient support of business needs, processes and strategies by information technology is a key for successful enterprise functioning. The challenge of Business and IT Alignment (BITA) has been acknowledged and actively discussed by academics and practitioners during more than two decades. On one hand, in order to achieve BITA it is required to analyse various focal areas of an enterprise, which motivates the benefits of Enterprise Architecture (EA) in this respect. On the other hand, it is also required to deal with multiple interests of involved stakeholders and create a shared understanding between them, which motivates the benefit of using Enterprise Modeling (EM). Therefore, this paper describes the idea of investigating the role of an integrated practice Enterprise Architecture Modeling in the context of BITA.

The key for successful enterprise functioning lies in information technology that supports business needs, processes and strategies. The problem of Business and IT Alignment (BITA) has been acknowledged and actively discussed by academics and practitioners during the last two decades. Among practices that are used for BITA it is worth mentioning Enterprise Modeling (EM), which is considered as a powerful practice and catalyzing mechanism for capturing, visualizing and improving different aspects of an enterprise. The contribution of EM in BITA is to a large extent dependent on the intention behind the EM effort. This paper presents a conceptual illustration of the role of EM in the context of BITA. It is done via mapping Strategic Alignment Model and the hierarchy of possible EM intentions.

In order to solve a problem of Business and IT Alignment (BITA) it is important to consider various dimensions of it: strategic, structural, social and cultural. In the context of dealing with BITA, Enterprise Modeling (EM) is an acknowledged and widely used practice. On one hand, EM facilitates the creation of integrated models that capture and represent different focal areas of an enterprise, there-fore it allowing to obtain a multidimensional view on an enterprise and to inte-grate these multiple dimensions into a coherent structure. These capabilities make EM a powerful tool for dealing with the strategic and structural dimen-sions of BITA. On the other hand, solving a BITA problem requires dealing with the numerous points of view of the stakeholders and creating a shared under-standing between them, which refers to the social and cultural dimensions of BITA. In this regard EM is also able to provide support to the development of an understanding about the current multidimensional praxis and future vision and strategies. Thus, EM has a high potential for dealing with the strategic, structur-al, social and cultural dimensions of BITA. This licentiate thesis investigates the applicability of EM in the light of BITA and proposes a framework that allocates intentions of EM application within the frame of the Strategic Alignment Model. The framework positions EM conceptually in the context of BITA and identifies a number of EM challenges and recommendations to suggest how EM can be used to facilitate BITA.

The importance of using appropriate and effective IT means to facilitate business functions have been acknowledged and discussed by practitioners and scientists over the past two decades thus giving a rise to the Business and IT alignment (BITA) problem. In BITA, the issue of sharing and processing large amounts of information from distributed and heterogeneous sources is of significant importance. Ontologies have shown their usability for this type of tasks. However, they also bring new challenges. The paper proposes utilising of the Semantic Web technologies to assist in solving them. Namely, the paper describes application and adaptation of the ontology matching algorithm for the BITA problem. The algorithm integrates different matching models. Its operation is shown via an illustrative example.

Efficient support of business needs, processes and strategies by information technology is a key for successful enterprise functioning. The challenge of Business and IT Alignment (BITA) has been acknowledged and actively discussed by academics and practitioners during more than two decades. On one hand, in order to achieve BITA it is required to analyze an enterprise from multiple perspectives. On the other hand, it is also required to deal with multiple points of views of involved stakeholders and create a shared understanding between them. In relation to both of these needs EM is considered as a useful practice, as it allows representation of various focal areas of an enterprise and facilitates consensus-driven discussion between involved stakeholders. Various focal areas of an enterprise are linked to various domains that BITA include, for example, time and function focal areas from the Zachman Framework contribute to analysis of business domain of BITA. This and other interrelations are investigated in this study, which is done by conceptual positioning of Zachman’s focal areas on Information System strategy triangle and Generic Framework for Information Management.

The area of business and IT alignment (BITA) has received increased attention during the last decade. As a consequence of this the amount of literature has also been growing increasingly. Since the interest for the field has increased it has also become important to follow and monitor trends and dominant directions of ongoing research within the field. The purpose of this paper is therefore to make an inventory of what areas and constructs that have caught our attention in the literature. As a result of such an inventory we present a set of categories that shows the focus and diversification of the BITA field. In the findings we can observe that the area of the highest research interest is development of a new instrumental support (methods, frameworks, approaches, etc.) for BITA. One dimension that seems to be partly neglected in the literature is procedural guidance about HOW to conduct and achieve business and IT alignment. The existing instrumental support that are presented in the literature has a strong focus on WHAT to do and WHAT to deal with, but they are missing the HOW dimension to a large extent.

IT har idag en framträdande roll i många olika sammanhang i vårt samhälle. Vi blir mer och mer beroende och påverkade av olika former av IT-baserad infrastruktur i såväl vårt vardagsliv som i vår yrkesmässiga gärning. Många av de IT-baserade tjänster och möjligheter som finns idag betraktas mer och mer som en naturlig del av vårt leverne och de förutsätts mer eller minde oreflekterat som en del av en samhällelig infrastruktur. Ungefär på samma sätt som vi ser på vägnät, sophämtning, barnomsorg, utbildning etc. I takt med denna utveckling har också kommuner, landsting och myndigheter tagit konsekvenserna av de nya möjligheter och krav som ett mer IT-baserat samhälle innebär. Medborgare och enskilda tillhör alltmer en generation som är uppvuxna med IT som en naturlig del av livet och deras tröskel för att tillgodogöra sig ny teknik och ta till sig nya tillämpningar blir successivt lägre. Dagens samhälle med sina medborgare ställer krav på moderna kommuner, landsting och myndigheter och att dessa kan tillhandahålla e-tjänster av olika slag på ett sammanhållet sätt i olika värdekedjor där såväl kommuner, landsting och myndigheter utgör olika sammanlänkade delar i dessa värdekedjor. e-utveckling är därför ett område som vuxit fram som något som inte kan hanteras enskilt av kommuner, landsting och myndigheter. e-utveckling är något som för att möta framtidens krav bör göras i samverkan vilket också kommer ställa nya krav på sättet att tänka om e-utveckling, hur man organiserar sig, vad som är lämpliga affärsmodeller och hur e-utveckling skall genomföras, bara för att nämna några områden där man behöver tänka till och i vissa fall tänka helt nytt.

e-tjänster och e-utveckling har i många sammanhang blivit ett konkurrensmedel och en nationell trend. Detta ställer dock också krav på såväl organisation, infrastruktur, tjänster, verksamhetsprocesser och kompetens på olika sätt. Det är inte bara en utmaning i att ha fungerande e-tjänster och IS/IT infrastruktur. Verksamhets-processer behöver anpassas och kompetensen hos personal behöver utvecklas, såväl på tjänstemannasidan som politiker. Denna kompetensutveckling handlar dock inte bara om att lära sig teknik utan, kanske framför allt, att ta till sig och utveckla nya arbetssätt, principer för samverkan och ansvarsförhållanden i värdekedjor som innefattar betydligt fler aktörer än vad man tidigare varit van vid.

Det finns i dagsläget många olika initiativ på olika nivåer som på ett eller annat sätt kan betraktas som e-initiativ, se t ex ”Digitala vägen till morgondagens välfärd – handlingsplan för eSamhället 2013-2015” med en kategorisering av 32 olika e-initiativ som skall skapa ett enklare, öppnare och effektivare samhälle, se Figur 1 nedan. e-initiativ kan dessutom återfinnas på regional nivå inom och mellan kommuner, på regional nivå mellan kommuner och/eller regioner, på nationell nivå och även på EU-nivå, se t ex Digital agenda som idag finns för EU, Nationell nivå samt att den i flera fall även blivit beslutat på kommunal nivå. Till denna bild skall också tilläggas myndigheter och landsting som i olika konstellationer och på olika sätt är involverade i olika e-initiativ.

Uppdraget för denna rapport avser att inom ramen för ett VINNOVA-projekt bidra med forsknings- och utvecklingsinsatser för att uppnå målet att skapa en nationell ”Guide för effektiv regional e-utveckling” (e-utvecklingsrådet, 2013). Detta innebär att denna rapport också kommer att ingå med vissa omarbetade delar i den nationella guiden.

Uppdragets syfte är att kartlägga lämpliga former för samverkan inom avseende e-utveckling mellan kommuner. Resultatet av denna kartläggning, slutsatser och analyser presenteras i denna rapport och skall användas som referens till den nationella guiden.

Uppdraget till högskolan har inneburit att på en övergripande nivå att bidra till en nationell vägledning genom att beskriva svårigheter och förslag till lösningar för regional e-utveckling mellan kommuner, regioner, myndigheter, landsting och medborgare.

In order to achieve Business and IT Alignment (BITA) it is required to capture and analyze both business and IT dimensions of enterprises. In this regard Enterprise Modeling (EM) is acknowledged as one useful mean. One of the central roles during EM is EM practitioner who drives and coordinates the EM project. Conducting EM is a highly collaborative activity that requires considerable skills and experience since EM practitioner has to deal with various challenges throughout the project. Despite a quite wide range of research, EM challenges needs to be further investigated, in particular concerning practical recommendations related to creation and usage of enterprise models. This article presents a framework with challenges and recommendations for EM that is aimed on facilitating business and IT alignment. The empirical base for the study consists of interviews with EM practitioners that have significant experience in EM.

The need to reduce a gap between organizational context and technology within enterprise has been recognized and discussed by both researchers and practitioners. In order to solve this problem it is required to capture and analyze both business and IT dimensions of enterprise operation. In this regard, Enterprise Modeling is currently considered as widely used and powerful tool that enables and facilitates alignment of business with IT. The central role of EM process is EM practitioner - a person who facilitates and drives EM project towards successful achievement of its goals. Conducting EM is a highly collaborative and nontrivial process that requires considerable skills and experience since there are various challenges to manage and to deal with during the whole EM project. Despite quite wide range of related research, the question of EM challenges needs further investigation, in particular concerning the viewpoint of EM practitioners. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to identify challenges that EM practitioners usually face during their modeling efforts taking into consideration potential influence of these challenges on successful conduct of EM and on alignment of Business and IT thereafter.

Today’s dynamic business environment presents enterprises that wishto stay competitive with a great challenge. This is further complicated by rapidlyadvancing IT capabilities and the crucial role that IT plays in most organizations -a backbone for realizing visions and goals. The problem of eliminating the gapbetween business and IT within enterprises, i.e. the problem of Business and ITAlignment (BITA), has been acknowledged as a contemporary challenge andactively elaborated by academics and practitioners. One practice that is used tofacilitate BITA is Enterprise Modeling (EM), which is considered as a catalyzingpractice for capturing, visualizing and analyzing different aspects of enterprises.This paper presents a framework that illustrates the role of EM in the context ofBITA and suggests recommendations to deal with EM challenges.

All organizations aim at making progress in their carrier. Therefore, they should have a clear image about the current (AS-IS) and the desired state (TO-BE); and based on that figure out the actions they should follow for moving from AS-IS to TO-BE state. Enterprise Modeling (EM) is a support for this purpose and requires applying the proper tool, i.e. an Enterprise Modeling Method (EMM). However, this application process requires to be efficient. This means the intended results (models) should be achieved, whilst the resources are used in a worthwhile way. This paper concentrates on how to conduct an efficient EMM application process. The foundational idea behind this research is that if behavior of an EMM (and its different parts) is foreseeable, the results will be closer to the stakeholders’ preferences and the resources will be used in a more worthwhile way.

Nowadays, there is a belief that organizations should keep improving different aspects of theirenterprise to remain competitive in their business segment. For this purpose, it is required to understand the current state of the enterprise, analyze and evaluate it to be able to figure out suitable change measures. To perform such a process in a systematic and structured way, receiving support from powerful tools is inevitable. Enterprise Modeling is a field that can support improvement processes by developing models to show different aspects of an enterprise. An Enterprise Modeling Method is an important support for the Enterprise Modeling. A method is comprised of different conceptual parts: Perspective, Framework,Method Component (which itself contains Procedure, Notation and Concepts), and Cooperation Principles. In an ideal modeling process, both the process and the results are of high quality. One dimension of quality which is in focus in this thesis is efficiency. The issue of efficiency evaluation in Enterprise Modeling still seems to be a rather unexploited research area.

The thesis investigates three aspects of Enterprise Modeling Methods: what is the meaning of efficiency in this context, how can efficiency be evaluated and in what phases of a modeling process could efficiency be evaluated. The contribution of the thesis is an approach for evaluation of efficiency in Enterprise Modeling Methods based also on several case studies. The evaluation approach is constituted by efficiency criteria that should be met by (different parts of) a method. While a subset of these criteria always need to be fulfilled in a congruent way, fulfillment of the rest of the criteria depends on the application case. To help the user in initial evaluation of a method, a structure of driving questions is presented.

All organisations have to keep improving different aspects of their business in order to survive in their businessarea. This improvement can be done in different ways, including as business and IT alignment. There existdifferent ways of performing business and IT alignment, such as applying EMMs. Enterprise Modelling (EM)is an area that has been built up with the intention of improving business practice and management. AnEnterprise Modelling Method (EMM) is a systematic way of building models that are to be used for planningimprovements. For this purpose, it is needed to make an evaluation of methods capabilities in supportingbusiness and IT alignment. According to all above, the results of this paper include a list of EMMs that areapplicable in business and IT alignment.

Each organization should make progress to remain competent in its business. Enterprise Modeling (EM) helps in understanding the current and planning the future states, followed by proposing improvement actions in an enterprise. To receive support from EM, we should start a process of using an Enterprise Modeling Method (EMM), that likewise any other process needs using resources. As resources are expensive, we prefer not only gaining results, rather using resources reasonably, i.e. performing an efficient process that supports the process quality. To realize if we have an efficient EMM, we should evaluate its efficiency. In this paper we present a method for efficiency evaluation of EMMs for general case of application. This method contains efficiency criteria and questions for evaluating their fulfillment. Then it is applied to the Enterprise Knowledge Development for appraising the evaluation method. The paper ends with a number of conclusions about the evaluation method.

The research presented in this paper has the objective to develop a process for transforming an enterprise model into an enterprise ontology. The focus is to preserve as much as possible of the semantics and the information content. A suitable approach to base the development of the transformation process on has been selected in a comparative study of three different approaches. The selected approach uses a meta-model to support the transformation process. The outcome of the research is both the improved transformation process based on the meta-model based transformation approach and a tool named EM2EO for processing the transformation. The tool reads an XML-file containing an enterprise model and produces an OWL-file containing the enterprise ontology.

Business–IT alignment calls for coordination between IT and business (non-IT) parts of an organization along different dimensions: strategic, structural, social, and cultural. The focus of this conceptual paper is on the social dimension of alignment – the mutual understanding of business and IT stakeholders on the business and IT objectives and activities. In the face of an increasingly complex strategic context, growing coordination needs must be matched with respective coordination capabilities. We argue that business–IT alignment at different organizational levels and for different stakeholders requires qualitatively different coordination capabilities, which pose distinct demands for the use of enterprise models. Using 4EM as an example, we investigate how enterprise models support these coordination capabilities as well as which intentions different IT and non-IT stakeholders have for enterprise modeling at different organizational levels.