This presentation will describe the use of Case Research for investigating the performance of Object Database Management Systems (ODBMSs). The presenter will describe his reasons for choosing this approach and some of the advantages and disadvantages that he experienced first-hand. He will also present some results from his research into ODBMS performance benchmarking and suggest areas for future work.

Presenter Biography:
Akmal B. Chaudhri has been undertaking research into ODBMS performance benchmarking for a number of years. He has worked closely with industry to discover how this technology is being used in practice and how better performance benchmarks can be developed as a result. He has been a regular tutorial presenter at several international conferences, including Object World, Object Technology and OOPSLA. He has also served on the program committees for several Object World conferences and has co-edited the book "Object Databases in Practice", published by Prentice-Hall. He holds a BSc in Computing & Information Systems, MSc in Business Systems Analysis & Design and a PhD in Computer Science. He is currently a Technical Architect with Computer Associates, working with ODBMSs, Java and XML.
 
 

Over the last 30 years, the developed world has invested heavily in software systems. Today, we refer to many of these systems as legacy systems. Legacy systems are often associated with high maintenance costs, and in many cases, they are business-critical. This presents organisations which operate them a dilemma: the systems are essential to the continued operation of their business, but the costs of keeping them cannot be justified.

There are many reasons why legacy systems are difficult to change, which we will introduce in this talk. One reason, however, is that change is an inherent property of system systems. Many years of change degrade a system's structure and make it more difficult to understand and modify again. The software engineering community has addressed the property of change, to some extent, by developing a body of tools and techniques. For example, reverse engineering, which is concerned with the process of understanding existing software, has attracted a lot of interest recently. However, the overall process of managing change has largely been ignored. Renaissance tackles this deficiency.

Renaissance aims to recover control over existing legacy systems, and attempts to ensure that the legacy problem does not recur. During the talk, we will introduce the Renaissance approach, which covers long-term strategic planning for a system, based on technical, business, and organisational factors, and issues which are unique to evolution projects. In addition to planning, Renaissance provides practical advice in the areas of architectural modelling and migration from centralised to modern architectures. We will convey the essence of  both of these areas before presenting the results of initial evaluation.
 
 

This seminar will present the problem of time compression of the product development process for large projects  which involves a web of firms . (Chrysler estimated the effort for the Cherokee Jeep to involve 100,000 firms and 5 million people. Their CEO, Thomas Stallkamp, referred to this 'system' as 'the Chrysler extended enterprise'.) The case for 'structured engagement' is presented. This requires a 3-dimensional view of concurrent engineering , in which the 3rd dimension is that of the chain of competencies that make up the extended enterprise engaging in the large product development process. Traditional concurrent engineering (in 2 dimensions) recognised false system boundaries, alluded to by the 'over the wall' syndrome. Many firms testify to dramatic reductions in costs and lead times in product development, as a result of simultaneous consideration of product structure and process structure. Further reduction, for product development in the large, is only possible by recognising that project effort is distributed through a market value chain, i.e. the extended enterprise.

This seminar presents a framework, for use by key decision-makers in large product development projects, that will enable them to perform concurrent design of the architectures for the product, the processes, and the chain that delivers the required competencies (skills and technologies). Two key elements of this framework are: a soft systems methodology for agent-centred process capture; and, a management flight simulation approach to focus on process integration across the extended enterprise. The seminar will describe these elements in outline showing how they are being used on a current research project with Rolls-Royce and some of their suppliers.
 

The resulting landscapes will be evaluated against such criteria as ease of navigation and patterns of information discovered, in order to determine their usefulness and usability. We will also introduce related work in use of spatial audio and aural data abstraction in virtual environments.
 
 

Andrew McGrath is a research Designer at BT Advanced Communications Technology Centre, Martlesham. He has been involved in the design and implementation of many virtual environments over the last 6 years. In particular he was content manager of The Mirror, a collaboration between BT, Sony, the BBC and Illuminations exploring the area of Inhabited TV. Andrew's main area of work at the moment is the development and user testing of the Forum.
 
 

The second part of the talk will deal with issues surrounding IS from a Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) perspective. COTS-Based Systems (CBS) development focuses on building large software systems by integrating
previously-existing software components. CBS success depends on successful evaluation and selection of COTS software components to fit customer requirements. Literature shows that successful selection of off-the-shelf
systems to fit customer requirements remains problematic. The project is based on developing a method of applying social-technical approach for COTS software selection(STACE). This method recommends participation of customers in the COTS software evaluation and use of a social-technical evaluation criteria. Following fieldwork in Zambia, we hope to present some preliminary results regarding evaluation of the STACE framework