Administrative Placement of the Information Systems Discipline in Universities - A SWOT Analysis of Queensland University of Technology

In some Queensland universities, Information Systems academics have moved out of Business Faculties. This study uses a pilot SWOT analysis to examine the ramifications of Information Systems academics being located within or outside of the Business Faculty. The analysis provides a useful basis for decision makers in the School studied, to exploit opportunities and minimise external threats. For Information Systems academics contemplating administrative relocation of their group, the study also offers useful insights. The study presages a series of further SWOT analyses to provide a range of perspectives on the relative merits of having Information Systems academics administratively located inside versus outside Business faculties.

Contemplating Open Source Enterprise Systems

Until recently, integration of enterprise systems has been supported largely by monolithic architectures. From a technical perspective, this approach has been challenged by the suggestion of component-based enterprise systems. Lately, the nature of software as proprietary item has been questioned through the increased use of open source software in business computing in general. This suggests the potential for altered technological and commercial constellations for the design of enterprise systems, which are presented in four scenarios. © Springer-Verlag 2004.

Capabilities : describing what services can do

The ability of agents and services to automatically locate and interact with unknown partners is a goal for both the semantic web and web services. This, \serendipitous interoperability", is hindered by the lack of an explicit means of describing what services (or agents) are able to do, that is, their capabilities. At present, informal descriptions of what services can do are found in \documentation" elements; or they are somehow encoded in operation names and signatures. We show, by ref- erence to existing service examples, how ambiguous and imprecise capa- bility descriptions hamper the attainment of automated interoperability goals in the open, global web environment. In this paper we propose a structured, machine readable description of capabilities, which may help to increase the recall and precision of service discovery mechanisms. Our capability description draws on previous work in capability and process modeling and allows the incorporation of external classi¯cation schemes. The capability description is presented as a conceptual meta model. The model supports conceptual queries and can be used as an extension to the DAML-S Service Pro¯le.