Objective
The environment of enterprises is changing in terms of changing markets products and technology. One of the reactions is transformation of hierarchical organisations into flat hierarchies and lean organisations into interrelated, distributed, autonomous units. This brings higher complexity and interdependency for co-operative business processes. Time becomes a key factor in seeking competitive advance. The periods for decision making are reduced and hence sustaining leadership in the market becomes even more difficult.
Therefore decisions are often made on incomplete, uncertain and conflicting information. Today's information systems can't support the wide variety of people performing distributed business processes efficiently or reliably as long as they can't manage incomplete and uncertain information.
To improve the competitiveness of European Industry, the objective of IBIS is to develop a new, highly innovative tool allowing for a higher degree of automation and integration as well as redesigning of business processes, including the management of incomplete information.
To increase the degree of automation and the flexibility of business processes simultaneously, it is necessary to have an explicit representation of the semantics of the exchanged information and the capability to automate its processing. Since quantitative information plays an important role in all major business processes, the project focuses on quantitative and related information. The related tool has the capability to store, retrieve and process quantitative data, i.e. numerical data associated with a meaning, despite the fact that they might be incomplete, uncertain and conflicting. This capability is combined with methods for supporting the co-ordination of the information exchange between agents in a work group performing distributed business processes in a heterogeneous environment.
The development of IBIS takes an interdisciplinary approach, whereby the following topics are covered:
- Representation and processing of semantic quantitative information
- Modelling of business processes
- Computer Supported Co-operative Work (CSCW)
- Integration with existing distributed, heterogeneous information systems.
The project is based on an existing powerful prototype from one of the consortium partners. The prototype is a result of long term research within the area of storage, processing and exchange of quantitative data in a hierarchical distributed and heterogeneous environment. It is built on advanced object orientated techniques and contains all the capabilities mentioned above. In order to transform the prototype into an integrated business tool, a link to distributed, heterogeneous relational databases and a harmonised user interface ("an intelligent spreadsheet") will be implemented. This tool allows a flexible integration of existing heterogeneous information sources and allows the redesign of business processes given the flexible, efficient exchange of quantitative information within work groups. To support the transformation of the business processes, the integration and adaptation of the tool in the enterprise is done by one of the partners with the aid of their own advanced Business Reengineering tool, "Bonapart". This partner is a specialist in the field of applying Computer Supported Co-operative Working (CSCW) and Business Process Re engineering (BPR).
All the consortium partners recognise European industry's need for IBIS in relation to 1) research and testing of the above-mentioned prototype, 2) delivery of a user-driven quantitative information application to an enterprise, 3) consultancy in Business Process Re engineering (BPR) and finally 4) the involved users' real business problem.
In order to test and consider end-user aspects during system development, two end-user aspects were selected to be included in the project. The end-users involved set requirements and demonstrate results. Furthermore, the partners are in contact with potential end-users and are aware of their needs through their daily work. Naturally, the partners will take advantage of the opportunity to have informal discussions with these enterprises.
Fields of science
Topic(s)
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
2605 Broendby
Denmark