Using management objectives to specify management information systems : a contribution to MIS success

Data warehouse projects, today, are in an ambivalent situation. On the one hand, data warehouses are critical for a company’s success and various methodological and technological tools are sophisticatedly developed to implement them. On the other hand, a significant amount of data warehouse projects fails due to non-technical reasons such as insufficient management support or in-corporative employees. But management support and user participation can be increased dramatically with specification methods that are understandable to these user groups. This paper aims at overcoming possible non-technical failure reasons by introducing a user-adequate specification approach within the field of management information systems.

Management and Control of Water Supply Systems

The fast increase in the energy’s price has brought a growing concern about the highly expensive task of transporting water. By creating an hydraulic model of the Water Supply System’s (WSS) network and predicting its behaviour, it is possible to take advantage of the energy’s tariffs, reducing the total cost on pumping activities. This thesis was developed, in association with a technology transfer project called the E-Pumping. It focuses on finding a flexible supervision and control strategy, adaptable to any existent Water Supply System (WSS), as well as forecasting the water demand on a time period chosen by the end user, so that the pumping actions could be planned to an optimum schedule, that minimizes the total operational cost. The OPC protocol, associated to a MySQL database were used to develop a flexible tool of supervision and control, due to their adaptability to function with equipments from various manufacturers, being another integrated modular part of the E-Pumping project. Furthermore, in this thesis, through the study and performance tests of several statistical models based on time series, specifically applied to this problem, a forecasting tool adaptable to any station, and whose model parameters are automatically refreshed at runtime, was developed and added to the project as another module. Both the aforementioned modules were later integrated with an Graphical User Interface (GUI) and installed in a pilot application at the ADDP’s network. The implementation of this software on WSSs across the country will reduce the water supply companies’ running costs, improving their market competition and, ultimately, lowering the water price to the end costumer.

Integrated management of urban wastewater systems: a model-based approach

The main objective pursued in this thesis targets the development and systematization of a methodology that allows addressing management problems in the dynamic operation of Urban Wastewater Systems. The proposed methodology will suggest operational strategies that can improve the overall performance of the system under certain problematic situations through a model-based approach. The proposed methodology has three main steps: The first step includes the characterization and modeling of the case-study, the definition of scenarios, the evaluation criteria and the operational settings that can be manipulated to improve the system’s performance. In the second step, Monte Carlo simulations are launched to evaluate how the system performs for a wide range of operational settings combinations, and a global sensitivity analysis is conducted to rank the most influential operational settings. Finally, the third step consists on a screening methodology applying a multi-criteria analysis to select the best combinations of operational settings.

Management of cardiovascular diseases with micro systems and nanotechnology

Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death and morbidity in industrialized nations and are becoming an urgent health problem for all nations due to the unstoppable trend of an ageing and obese population. Due to the rapid development of micro total analysis systems (μTAS) and nanotechnology in recent years, they will play an important role in the diagnosis, management, and therapy of cardiovascular diseases. It is envisaged that the micro and nanotechnologies developed for treating other diseases shall be explored for cardiovascular applications to reduce the research effort required for commercializing the devices and drugs to meet the increasing demand of the cardiovascular patients.

An integrated management systems approach to corporate sustainability

Purpose – This paper seeks to describe an integrated management systems (IMS) approach for the integration of corporate sustainability into business processes.
Design/methodology/approach – An extensive review of published literature was conducted. Building on existing research, the paper presents an original framework for structuring the integration of corporate sustainability with existing business infrastructure. The framework is supported by a detailed set of diagnostic questions to help guide the process. Both the framework and the diagnostic questions are based on the “Plan-Do-Check-Act” cycle of continuous improvement.
Findings – The paper highlights the need for a systematic means to integrate sustainability into business processes. Building on that point, the paper illustrates how an IMS approach can be used to structure the entire process of managing, measuring, and assessing progress towards corporate sustainability.
Practical implications – The paper should be of interest to both practitioners and researchers. The framework and diagnostic questions will help guide decision makers through the process of building sustainability into their core business infrastructure. Since the framework and diagnostic questions provide the flexibility to accommodate specific organizational contexts, it is anticipated that they will have wide applicability.
Originality/value – The paper makes several contributions. The framework provides a systematic approach to corporate sustainability that has not been elaborated on in previous publications. The unique set of diagnostic questions provides a means to evaluate the extent to which corporate sustainability has been integrated into an organization.

A logical approach to the management of object identifiers in non-conventional database management systems

Non-conventional database management systems are used to achieve a better performance when dealing with complex data. One fundamental concept of these systems is object identity (OID), because each object in the database has a unique identifier that is used to access and reference it in relationships to other objects. Two approaches can be used for the implementation of OIDs: physical or logical OIDs. In order to manage complex data, was proposed the Multimedia Data Manager Kernel (NuGeM) that uses a logical technique, named Indirect Mapping. This paper proposes an improvement to the technique used by NuGeM, whose original contribution is management of OIDs with a fewer number of disc accesses and less processing, thus reducing management time from the pages and eliminating the problem with exhaustion of OIDs. Also, the technique presented here can be applied to others OODBMSs. © 2011 IEEE.

Automated management information systems for mental health agencies : a planning and acquisition guide /

Mode of access: Internet.

Management information systems manual.

Cover title.

Methods for conflict resolution in policy-based management systems

While developments in distributed object computing environments, such as the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) [17] and the Telecommunication Intelligent Network Architecture (TINA) [16], have enabled interoperability between domains in large open distributed systems, managing the resources within such systems has become an increasingly complex task. This challenge has been considered for several years within the distributed systems management research community and policy-based management has recently emerged as a promising solution. Large evolving enterprises present a significant challenge for policy-based management partly due to the requirement to support both mutual transparency and individual autonomy between domains [2], but also because the fluidity and complexity of interactions occurring within such environments requires an ability to cope with the coexistence of multiple, potentially inconsistent policies. This paper discusses the need of providing both dynamic (run-time) and static (compile-time) conflict detection and resolution for policies in such systems and builds on our earlier conflict detection work [7, 8] to introduce the methods for conflict resolution in large open distributed systems.

Business information systems:technology, development and management in the E-business

This major text assumes no prior knowledge of IS or IT and builds both business and Information systems knowledge to enable the reader to choose the right systems, to develop them and to manage them effectively. The three-part structure to the book covers: Introduction to business information systems Business information systems development Business information systems management Suitable for any IS, BIS or MIS course from UG to MBA level within a Business or Computer Science Department.

Controlled flexibility and lifecycle management of business processes through extensibility

Vendors provide reference process models as consolidated, off-the-shelf solutions to capture best practices in a given industry domain. Customers can then adapt these models to suit their specific requirements. Traditional process flexibility approaches facilitate this operation, but do not fully address it as they do not sufficiently take controlled change guided by vendors' reference models into account. This tension between the customer's freedom of adapting reference models, and the ability to incorporate with relatively low effort vendor-initiated reference model changes, thus needs to be carefully balanced. This paper introduces process extensibility as a new paradigm for customizing reference processes and managing their evolution over time. Process extensibility mandates a clear recognition of the different responsibilities and interests of reference model vendors and consumers, and is concerned with keeping the effort of customer-side reference model adaptations low while allowing sufficient room for model change.