No abstract

No abstract

Over the past several years we have collaborated with a variety of industrial partners to carry out applied research and capstone design projects in cooperation with our students. Although the projects have varied widely, more often than not, success or failure lies within the students' ability to see beyond the technical challenges into the subtleties of the business and the meaning of value. Looking back at our traditional software engineering curriculum it is not so surprising that gaps in technical skills are not typically the source of problems. With a strong traditional focus on the construction of software, we have been producing graduates who can build relatively complex stand-alone systems. Unfortunately, in today's world, being able to build software is only a small, albeit necessary, skill for software engineers and it is miles away from being sufficient [1, 2]. The challenges inherent in providing a portfolio of innovative, integrated, and strategic IT services are well beyond any of the techniques or conceptual frameworks historically taught in many software engineering curriculums [3-5], including our own.To address these shortcomings we have recently begun experimenting with a new curriculum that presents software engineering in its larger context as a strategic business function. We are also beginning to stress the importance of using a set of analytic frameworks to guide the evolution and development of software systems starting with the business and its context, through the architecture and design stages, and finally into implementation and support. To create materials for this curriculum we have gone back to the original voice of the problem and are attempting to assemble learning materials from the projects that industry has championed for us in the past. Our goal is not merely to showcase the software that was built, but rather to expose the reasons behind their conception and the frameworks used to make critical decisions throughout the process.

No abstract

Knowledge intensive processes vary widely due to the variation in the specifics of the incoming request and uncertainty in handling and processing that request. Traditional management systems with pre-defined workflows are less effective for enabling these kinds of organizational workflows. Consequently, less structured tools for ad-hoc collaboration, such as Email or activity management systems [8,16] are used instead because of the flexibility they permit at execution time. However, these ad-hoc collaborative tools are not as capable of capturing best practice knowledge in a manner that is suitable for reuse in similar contexts and future executions of the workflow. We propose to mine knowledge-intensive workflow executions in order to capture and codify best practice knowledge that can be reused to assist and enhance decision making during future executions. We present a model of a dynamic system and a method for knowledge-intensive workflow enactment that captures ad-hoc applications of tacit knowledge as the work is carried out. Our framework is illustrated using a critical and commonly occurring process in industry called the Architecture Life-Cycle (ALC) management process. This process reviews technological changes made to the installed Information Technology (IT) architectures to meet the evolving requirements of the business. We illustrate how our framework allows participants to locally enhance the ALC, by enabling each individual to perform their work in the best way and recording their intentions explicitly using framework mechanisms that relate activities, work products, transitions, and constraints. We illustrate the axioms that filter out best practices that have been observed during executions and feed them back to the collaborators to guide and improve future executions.