Business contracts play a central role in governing commercial interactions between organizations. It is increasingly recognized that business contract conditions need to be closely linked to internal and external business processes, both to reduce the risk of contract violations and to ensure...

Within the information systems field, the task of conceptual modeling involves building a representation of selected phenomena in some domain. High-quality conceptual-modeling work is important because it facilitates early detection and correction of system development errors. It also plays an...

Process modeling has gained prominence in the information systems modeling area due to its focus on business processes and its usefulness in such business improvement methodologies as Total Quality Management, Business Process Reengineering, and Workflow Management. However, process modeling...

Enterprise systems interoperability (ESI) is an important topic for business currently. This situation is evidenced, at least in part, by the number and extent of potential candidate protocols for such process interoperation, viz., ebXML, BPML, BPEL, and WSCI. Wide-ranging support for each of...

Much research has been devoted over the years to investigating and advancing the techniques and tools used by analysts when they model. As opposed to what academics, software providers and their resellers promote as should be happening, the aim of this research was to determine whether...

Local area networks (LANs) provide links between computing devices, such as workstations, file servers, and printers, over a relatively small geographic area (usually within a single building or organization). While computer networks have existed for almost thirty years, networking technology...

We investigate knowledge exchange among commercial organisations, the rationale behind it and its effects on the market. Knowledge exchange is known to be beneficial for industry, but in order to explain it, authors have used high level concepts like network effects, reputation and trust. We...

Building upon the balanced scorecard framework, this article addresses three central issues of human resource (HR) measurement: (1) Do HR practices impact business results? (2) How can HR practices add value to business performance? (3) What HR measures can drive business performance? Using...

Current business conditions mandate greater competitive advantage from HR agendas and processes. To add greater competitive advantage, HR must contribute strategic value against criteria from customer and capital markets. HR can add strategic value either reactively or proactively. In its...

Like any value-creating staff function, HR departments should operate as a business within a business. Others have focused on the strategy and direction of HR departments. This article examines the next evolution for how HR department organization structure can deliver value based on two...