Business-Driven IT-Wide Agile (Scrum) and Kanban (Lean) Implementation: An Action Guide for Business and IT Leaders explains how to increase IT delivery capabilities through the use of Agile and Kanban. Factoring in constant change, communication, a sense of urgency, clear and measurable goals, political realities, and infrastructure needs, it covers all the ingredients required for success. Using real-world examples, this practical guide illustrates how to implement Agile and Kanban in software project management and development across the entire IT department. To make things easier for busy IT leaders and executives, the text includes two case studies along with numerous templates to facilitate understanding and kick-start implementation. Explaining how IT and business management can work together to determine business goals that drive this IT-wide undertaking, the book arms you with actionable solutions that can be put to use immediately in any IT department, regardless of size.

This volume constitutes the proceedings of the 5th International Conference on E-Technologies, MCETECH 2011, held in Les Diablerets, Switzerland, January 23-26, 2011. Originally 10 papers were selected from a total of 32 submissions. Seven additional papers were included following a second round of reviewing and improvement.The papers in this volume cover topics such as process modeling, organizational transformation, e-Business, e-Government, e-Education, and e-Health.

By some estimates, we will spend over 100,000 hours at work during our lifetime. With more than half of our waking hours revolving around work, our means of producing a paycheck has become one of the most dominant dimensions of our lives, absorbing a huge commitment of our life energies.Unfortunately for so many, our work is not what we relish but rather a major source of pain. Wouldn't it be wonderful to be able to say at the end of our lives, "My work was worth it--the challenges, the hardships, and the rewards. I invested those years well. I made a difference"? How can we learn to work this way?In Run With the Bulls Without Getting Trampled, veteran corporate psychologist Tim Irwin presents the distilled essence of what makes some succeed and others derail in the workplace. Using compelling real-life stories to launch each chapter, not only is Irwin transparent with the lessons he has learned from his own experiences, but he also shares the invaluable insights and principles he has gathered from thousands of interviews with senior executives.Featuring Irwin's seven critical success factors as well as six common career derailers, this hard-hitting but entertaining book is your guide to finding lasting fulfillment in your career. After all, you are investing so much into your job. Shouldn't it also be investing in you?

This book contains the thoroughly refereed and revised best papers from the 7th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies, WEBIST 2011, held in Nordwijkerhout, The Netherlands, in May 2011, organized by the Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Control and Communication (INSTICC), in collaboration with ACM SIGMIS and co-sponsored by the Workflow Management Coalition (WFMC). The 12 papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 156 submissions. The papers are grouped into tow parts on "Internet Technology" and "Web Interfaces and Applications". In addition, the three invited presentations are also included.

This book includes 23 papers dealing with the impact of modern information and communication technologies that support a wide variety of communities: local communities, virtual communities, and communities of practice, such as knowledge communities and scientific communities. The volume is the result of the second multidisciplinary "Communities and Technologies Conference," a major event in this emerging research field. The various chapters discuss how communities are affected by technologies, and how understanding of the way that communities function can be used in improving information systems design. This state of the art overview will be of interest to computer and information scientists, social scientists and practitioners alike.

Enterprise IT infrastructure is getting increasingly complex. With the increase in complexity has arisen the need to manage it. Management in general can be seen as the process of assuring that a managed entity meets its expectations in a controlled and predictable manner. Examples of managed entities are not only components, entire systems, processes, but also people such as employees, developers, or operators, and entire organizations. Traditional management has addressed some of these issues in varied manner. The emergence of Web services has added a new complexity to the management problem and poses a new set of problems. But it also adds to the mix a set of technologies that will make the task of management simpler. Management of Web services will be critical as businesses come to rely on them as a substantial source of their revenue. The book tries to cover the broad area of web services, the concepts, implications for the enterprise, issues involved in their management and how they are being used for management themselves. The book is intended as a reference for current practice and future directions for web services and their management. The book is directed at: * Computing professionals, academicians and students to learn about the important concepts behind the web services paradigm and how it impacts the enterprise in general and how it affects traditional application, network and system management.

E-commerce has passed through a number of stages in the minds of most readers of the daily press. Initially it was the province of the specialist and considered almost irrelevant to the needs and activities of everyday life - companies looking for venture capital in this area had little if any chance of obtaining sufficient funds from the rather conservative investors who provided the only source of start-up capital. Then came the dot. com boom -and suddenly e-commerce was the most exciting topic possible Venture capital was available from every possible source and almost any company with a . com in its name could be assured of instant funding on request. This boom was, inevitably, followed by the dot. com bust and the press wamed that the days of e-commerce were gone, perhaps never to return. This apparently confusing 'stages of growth' model is in reality nothing ofthe sort. E-commerce is simply the logical outcome of combining computers with tele communications networks. The astonishing changes which a global economy has brought with it are reflected in the changes to the way we do business which are increasingly synonymous with e-commerce. Indeed, the term e-commerce itself is coming to mean only the transaction-based component of e-business-'any process that a business organisation conducts over a computer-mediated network' as Thomas Mesenbourg ofthe U. S. Census Bureau said in 1999."

Information security concerns the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information processed by a computer system. With an emphasis on prevention, traditional information security research has focused little on the ability to survive successful attacks, which can seriously impair the integrity and availability of a system. Trusted Recovery And Defensive Information Warfare uses database trusted recovery, as an example, to illustrate the principles of trusted recovery in defensive information warfare. Traditional database recovery mechanisms do not address trusted recovery, except for complete rollbacks, which undo the work of benign transactions as well as malicious ones, and compensating transactions, whose utility depends on application semantics. Database trusted recovery faces a set of unique challenges. In particular, trusted database recovery is complicated mainly by (a) the presence of benign transactions that depend, directly or indirectly on malicious transactions; and (b) the requirement by many mission-critical database applications that trusted recovery should be done on-the-fly without blocking the execution of new user transactions. Trusted Recovery And Defensive Information Warfare proposes a new model and a set of innovative algorithms for database trusted recovery. Both read-write dependency based and semantics based trusted recovery algorithms are proposed. Both static and dynamic database trusted recovery algorithms are proposed. These algorithms can typically save a lot of work by innocent users and can satisfy a variety of attack recovery requirements of real world database applications. Trusted Recovery And Defensive Information Warfare is suitable as a secondary text for a graduate level course in computer science, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in information security.

One of the fast growing elements of the Internet is electronic commerce, which refers to the use of electronic means to conduct business transactions within or across business entities. Nearly 80 percent of all Fortune 500 companies have been doing their core business through the Internet. Many issues, and societal implications of electronic commerce, are the subjects of recent research. A supply chain consists of all the entities and activities that enable the production, distribution, and delivery of products and services to consumers. Research in designing and managing supply chains has rapidly expanded during the last decade. In addition, increased and accessible computing power and modeling capabilities have spurred this growth, enabling researchers to simultaneously consider the many interrelated variables and decisions of a supply chain in a single tractable model.

Mobility is perhaps the most important market and technological trend within information and communication technology. With the advent of new mobile infrastructures providing higher bandwidth and constant connection to the network from virtually everywhere, the way people use information resources is predicted to be radically transformed. Over the last years, a new breed of information systems, referred to as mCommerce systems or mobile information systems, has appeared to address this emerging situation. In 2000, the IFIP 8.1 WG decided to look into establishing a task group to look closer at this area, and the idea was adopted and extended by IFIP TC8 the following year. After the arrangement of several workshop, this task group has been the driving force behind the arrangement of MOBIS (IFIP TC 8 Working Conference on Mobile Information systems) held in Oslo, Norway, 15-17 September 2004. The objective of the working conference was to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners interested in planning, analysis, design, construction, modification, implementation, utilization, evaluation, and management of mobile information systems to meet, and exchange research ideas and results. Specifically, we tried to use the working conference to * Clarify differences and similarities between the development of mobile vs. more traditional information systems * Investigate organizational impact of mobile information systems * Investigate mobile commerce applications combined with the advantages of mobile communications technologies X Mobile Information Systems * Evaluate existing and newly developed approaches for analysis, design, implementation, and evolution of mobile information systems.

Like many other incipient technologies, Web services are still surrounded by a substantial level of noise. This noise results from the always dangerous combination of wishful thinking on the part of research and industry and of a lack of clear understanding of how Web services came to be. On the one hand, multiple contradictory interpretations are created by the many attempts to realign existing technology and strategies with Web services. On the other hand, the emphasis on what could be done with Web services in the future often makes us lose track of what can be really done with Web services today and in the short term. These factors make it extremely difficult to get a coherent picture of what Web services are, what they contribute, and where they will be applied.
Alonso and his co-authors deliberately take a step back. Based on their academic and industrial experience with middleware and enterprise application integration systems, they describe the fundamental concepts behind the notion of Web services and present them as the natural evolution of conventional middleware, necessary to meet the challenges of the Web and of B2B application integration.

Rather than providing a reference guide or a "how to write your first Web service" kind of book, they discuss the main objectives of Web services, the challenges that must be faced to achieve them, and the opportunities that this novel technology provides. Established, as well as recently proposed, standards and techniques (e.g., WSDL, UDDI, SOAP, WS-Coordination, WS-Transactions, and BPEL), are then examined in the context of this discussion in order to emphasize their scope, benefits, and shortcomings. Thus, the book is ideally suited both for professionals considering the development of application integration solutions and for research and students interesting in understanding and contributing to the evolution of enterprise application technologies.

2.1 E-Government: e-Governance and e-Democracy The term Electronic Government (e-Government), as an expression, was coined after the example of Electronic Commerce. In spite of being a relatively recent expression, e-Government designates a field of activity that has been with us for several decades and which has attained a high level of penetration in many countries2. What has been observed over the recent years is a shift on the broadness of the e-Government concept. The ideas inside e-Governance and e- Democracy are to some extent promising big changes in public administration. The demand now is not only simply delivering a service - line. It is to deliver complex and new services, which are all citizen-centric. Another important demand is related to the improvement of citizen's participation in governmental processes and decisions so that the governments' transparency and legitimacy are enforced. In order to fulfill these new demands, a lot of research has been done over the recent years (see Section 3) but many challenges are still to be faced, not only in the technological field, but also in the political and social aspects.

The internet and the electronic economy are a technological revolution whose secular importance is apparent. The internet eliminates the temporal and spatial constraints on the exchange of information. It changes deeply the world of production and of labour. It transforms the exchange relationships between producers and consumers as well as between the suppliers within the supply-chain. The electronic economy is able to generate more accurate con sumer profiles and, therefore, a more powerful and effective marketing di rected to the individual consumer. There is no industry that is not undergoing thorough changes caused by the internet. The volume at hand gives an analysis of the internet revolution. It covers questions reaching form the highly controversial thesis of the end of property rights in the internet caused by the non-rivalry of the "consumption" of in formation to questions regarding the repercussions of the internet on our understanding of the human person. Technological changes like the introduction of the electronic economy pose the question of how to handle it and how to manage reasonably its ethi cal problems and dilemmas. The ethical problems and the business ethics of the electronic economy in the fields of production and labour, of consump tion, and in handling trust and the abuse of trust are analysed by the contribu tions from applied ethics and business ethics."

The use of the internet for commerce has spawned a variety of auctions, marketplaces, and exchanges for trading everything from bandwidth to books. Mechanisms for bidding agents, dynamic pricing, and combinatorial bids are being implemented in support of internet-based auctions, giving rise to new versions of optimization and resource allocation models. This volume, a collection of papers from an IMA "Hot Topics" workshop in internet auctions, includes descriptions of real and proposed auctions, complete with mathematical model formulations, theoretical results, solution approaches, and computational studies.
This volume also provides a mathematical programming perspective on open questions in auction theory, and provides a glimpse of the growing area of dynamic pricing.

Mobile Information Systems II provides a collection of research on the planning, analysis, design, construction, modification, implementation, utilization, evaluation, and management of mobile information systems. The articles focus on the implications of this research in the world of commerce, and address technical issues and constraints on mobile information systems functionalities and design.

Knowledge-Based Information Retrieval and Filtering from the Web contains fifteen chapters, contributed by leading international researchers, addressing the matter of information retrieval, filtering and management of the information on the Internet. The research presented deals with the need to find proper solutions for the description of the information found on the Internet, the description of the information consumers need, the algorithms for retrieving documents (and indirectly, the information embedded in them), and the presentation of the information found. The chapters include:
-Ontological representation of knowledge on the WWW;
-Information extraction;
-Information retrieval and administration of distributed documents;
-Hard and soft modeling based knowledge capture;
-Summarization of texts found on the WWW;
-User profiles and personalization for web-based information retrieval system;
-Information retrieval under constricted bandwidth;
-Multilingual WWW;
-Generic hierarchical classification using the single-link clustering;
-Clustering of documents on the basis of text fuzzy similarity;
-Intelligent agents for document categorization and adaptive filtering;
-Multimedia retrieval and data mining for E-commerce and E-business;
-A Web-based approach to competitive intelligence;
-Learning ontologies for domain-specific information retrieval;
-An open, decentralized architecture for searching for, and publishing information in distributed systems.

Electronic payment is the economic backbone of all e-commerce transactions. This book covers the major subjects related to e-payment such as, for example, public key infrastructure, smart cards, payment agents, digital cash, SET protocols, and micro-payment. Its first part covers the infrastructure for secure e-payment over the Internet, whereas in the second part a variety of e-payment methods and systems are described.

This edited volume offers a well-written and sound technical overview of the state of the art in e-payment for e-business developers, graduate students, and consultants. It is also ideally suited for classes and training courses in e-commerce or e-payment.

This book contains the best papers of the First International Conference on e-Business and Telecommunication Networks held in 2004. The book presents recent research on e-business and telecommunication networks. It includes analyses aspects of global communication information systems and services, and describes security and reliability problems and solutions in information systems and networks.

"Content Delivery Networks" enables the readers to understand the basics, to identify the underlying technology, to summarize their knowledge on concepts, ideas, principles and various paradigms which span on broad CDNs areas. Therefore, aspects of CDNs in terms of basics, design process, practice, techniques, performances, platforms, applications, and experimental results have been presented in a proper order. Fundamental methods, initiatives, significant research results, as well as references for further study have also been provided. Comparison of different design and development approaches are described at the appropriate places so that new researchers as well as advanced practitioners can use the CDNs evaluation as a research roadmap. All the contributions have been reviewed, edited, processed, and placed in the appropriate order to maintain consistency so that any reader irrespective of their level of knowledge and technological skills in CDNs would get the most out of it. The book is organized into three parts, namely, Part I: CDN Fundamentals; Part II: CDN Modeling and Performance; and Part III: Advanced CDN Platforms and Applications. The organization ensures the smooth flow of material as successive chapters build on prior ones.

Designing and Evaluating E-Managemnet Decision Tools presents the most relevant concepts for designing intelligent decision tools in an Internet-based multimedia environment and assessing the tools using concepts of statistical design of experiments. The design principle is based on the visual interactive decision modeling (VIDEMO) paradigm. Several case studies are discussed in detail, referring to online preference elicitation, collaborative decision making, negotiation and conflict resolution, and marketing decision optimization.

(See www.beroggi.net for more info on the book and Visual Interactive Decision Modeling)

Ontologies have been developed and investigated for some time in artificial intelligence to facilitate knowledge sharing and reuse. More recently, the notion of ontologies has attracted attention from fields such as databases, intelligent information integration, cooperative information systems, information retrieval, electronic commerce, enterprise application integration, and knowledge management. This broadened interest in ontologies is based on the feature that they provide a machine-processable semantics of information sources that can be communicated among agents as well as between software artifacts and humans. This feature makes ontologies the backbone technology of the next web generation, i.e., the Semantic Web. Ontologies are currently applied in areas such as knowledge management in large company-wide networks and call centers, and in B2C, B2G, and B2B electronic commerce. In a nutshell, ontologies enable effective and efficient access to heterogeneous and distributed information sources. Given the increasing amount of information available online, this kind of support is becoming more important day by day.

The author systematically introduces the notion of ontologies to the non-expert reader and demonstrates in detail how to apply this conceptual framework for improved intranet retrieval of corporate information and knowledge and for enhanced Internet-based electronic commerce. He also describes ontology languages (XML, RDF, and OWL) and ontology tools, and the application of ontologies.

In addition to structural improvements, the second edition covers recent developments relating to the Semantic Web, and emerging web-based standard languages.

___________

Collaborative Networks is a fast developing area, as shown by the already large number of diverse real-world implemented cases and the dynamism of its related involved research community. Being recognized as the most focused scientific and technical conference on Collaborative Networks, PRO-VE continues to offer the opportunity for presentation and discussion of both the latest research developments as well as the practical application case studies.

Home-Oriented Informatics and Telematics is an essential reference for both academic and professional researchers in the field of home informatics. The home is a key aspect of society and the widespread use of computers and other information appliances is transforming the way in which we live, work and communicate in the information age. This area of study has seen remarkable growth in the last few years as information technology has encroached into every corner of home and social spheres.

The papers selected here cover a growing range of topics, including assistive technology; smart homes; home technology; memory aids; home activity; appliance design; design methodology; time, space and virtual presence; social and ethical aspects; and home activities.

This state-of-the-art volume presents the proceedings of the Home-Oriented Informatics and Telematics conference held in York, U.K, April 13-15, 2005. This collection will be important not only for home informatics experts and researchers, but also for teachers, administrators, and anyone else seeking to keep up to date in this rapidly emerging field.

This edited book serves as a companion volume to the Seventh INFORMS Telecommunications Conference held in Boca Raton, Florida, March 7-10, 2004. The 18 papers in this book were carefully selected after a thorough re view process. The research presented within these articles focuses on the latest methodological developments in three key areas-pricing of telecommunica tions services, network design, and resource allocation-that are most relevant to current telecommunications planning. With the global deregulation of the telecommunications industry, effective pricing and revenue management, as well as an understanding of competi tive pressures are key factors that will improve revenue in telecommunica tions companies. Chapters 1-5 address these topics by focusing on pricing of telecommunications services. They present some novel ideas related to pricing (including auction-based pricing of network bandwidth) and modeling compe tition in the industry. The successful telecommunications companies of the future will likely be the ones that can minimize their costs while meeting customer expectations. In this context the optimal design/provisioning of telecommunication networks plays an important role. Chapters 6-12 address these topics by focusing on net work design for a wide range of technologies including SONET, SDH, WDM, and MPLS. They include the latest research developments related to the mod eling and solving of network design problems. Day-to-day management/control of telecommunications networks is depen dent upon the optimal allocation of resources. Chapters 13-18 provide insight ful solutions to several intriguing resource allocation problems."

This book goes beyond the discussion of global databases and presents a general Enterprise Resources Market model to facilitate the management and integration of enterprise information resources in a cooperating mode. It is the first book to analyze the problem from the perspective of information management and to present a solution for a key aspect of the cooperation problem on-demand information exchange.