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Background: Business innovations are continuous strategic initiatives of doing work better and faster, creating thereby greater value for consumers of products and/or users of services. Digital transformation, digital technologies, and digital innovation, frame the change of an operating business model. In addition to the influence of everything “digital”, the occurrence of disruptions affects businesses suddenly and thrives for an urgent response, especially when disruptions have a global impact, like the Covid- 19 pandemic did. Objectives: This research aims to present a conceptual framework, that should help organizations of any size, when influenced by a disruption, to steer change or innovation endeavours to the most feasible option aiming at digital transformation. Methods/Approach: The proposed conceptual framework can be used as a basis for operationalization through already known models, concepts, and frameworks by focusing on success when dealing with disruptions and in striving for digital transformation, as a presented case study illustrates. Results: New framework allow organizations to assess their readiness and willingness to change, by guiding the organization’s management through the change options most feasible to their current state and desired future. The application is based on internal and external factors affecting the digital transformation process, aiming for maturity and process success. Conclusions: The framework application process is designed for assessing the readiness and willingness when initiating future digital transformation. The framework is supported by a demonstrative application on a case study and could be used to help management and CEO in the decision-making process that could lead an organization towards digital transformation.

In our previous research, we identified a list of factors that influence the digital platform selection by producers of agricultural products and a list of factors that influence customers’ digital platform selection. The next question that becomes a focus of our interest is related to the prioritization of those factors. The first results suggest that some factors have a higher impact on producers (or customers) than others when deciding on digital platform selection in agriculture. In this paper, we will present several approaches that can be used to prioritize factors. Those methods are: direct assessment method, reciprocal ranks, SWING, pairwise comparison, analytical hierarchy process, analytical network process, and SNAP method. Some of those methods are simpler, and some are complex. In general, simpler methods are less, and the complex methods are more precise in terms of prioritization. On the other side, simpler methods are more understandable to the average customers (or producers) in terms of application than the complex methods. We analyzed all prioritizations methods and suggested the most appropriate method having a mind on the complexity of the method (understanding by users) and their precisions.

Context: Application of component based software engineering methods to heterogeneous computing (HC) enables different software configurations to realize the same function with different non–functional properties (NFP). Finding the best software configuration with respect to multiple NFPs is a non–trivial task. Objective: We propose a Software Component Allocation Framework (SCAF) with the goal to acquire a (sub–) optimal software configuration with respect to multiple NFPs, thus providing performance prediction of a software configuration in its early design phase. We focus on the software configuration optimization for the average energy consumption and average execution time. Method: We validated SCAF through its instantiation on a real–world demonstrator and a simulation. Firstly, we verified the correctness of our model through comparing the performance prediction of six software configurations to the actual performance, obtained through extensive measurements with a confidence interval of 95%. Secondly, to demonstrate how SCAF scales up, we performed software configuration optimization on 55 generated use–cases (with solution spaces ranging from 1030 to 3070) and benchmark the results against best performing random configurations. Results: The performance of a configuration as predicted by our framework matched the configuration implemented and measured on a real–world platform. Furthermore, by applying the genetic algorithm and simulated annealing to the weight function given in SCAF, we obtain sub–optimal software configurations differing in performance at most 7% and 13% from the optimal configuration (respectfully). Conclusion: SCAF is capable of correctly describing a HC platform and reliably predict the performance of software configuration in the early design phase. Automated in the form of an Eclipse plugin, SCAF allows software architects to model architectural constraints and preferences, acting as a multi–criterion software architecture decision support system. In addition to said, we also point out several interesting research directions, to further investigate and improve our approach.

There are many ways to sell and buy products in all fields, using digital technologies. That is the case for the agriculture field as well. Among many possibilities and different ICT solutions in agriculture, selection of the appropriate solution that will result in the satisfaction of both - customers and producers - becomes an important issue, and it is the main research topic of this paper. In this paper, we present the factors that influence the digital platform selection and propose two models for decision making on digital platforms. Decision models can help customers and producers to decide if a specific platform can be useful for their business. The decision model is based on a multi-criteria decision-making method called Dex. Dex is selected because it is very intuitive and less complicated than other multi-criteria methods. On the other hand, Dex can aggregate all crucial factors and include the specifics and subjectivity (perception) of each user (customer or producer). The paper also contains a demonstration of the implementations of two models on the hypothetical cases. In future research, we plan to evaluate the model in practice (and possibly update it if needed) and present it to the scientific and professional community. That can help producers/customers to optimize their business processes but also give directions for the development of new platform functionalities for platform developers.

Nowadays governmental and non-governmental organizations and private businesses offer a range of electronic services that, if used, directly or indirectly affect quality of life. The supply of electronic services is growing fast, and this growth is expected to continue in the near but also in the distant future. Current generation of digital natives will not know how to live without ICTs and services provided by these technologies. User attitudes towards electronic services and the relationship between their supply and demand are the focus of this paper. Data on demand for and user attitudes towards electronic services were collected on a representative sample of adult population from Northwest Croatia. Participants were interviewed using a measurement instrument created for this purpose. Survey covered usage of electronic services offered by various governmental and non-governmental organizations and private businesses, the nature of user attitudes and the extent to which electronic services are used for the purpose of education, communication, entertainment, employment, improvement of health services and culture. The results show that, on the one hand, participants' demand for electronic services is very poor, while on the other hand their motivation and attitudes towards these services are very positive. Consistently significant differences were found in usage and attitudes toward electronic services by age, level of education and English language fluency. On the other hand, gender, standard of living and urban / rural residence were generally not associated with differences in usage of or attitudes to electronic services.

Internet of Thing (IOT) is relatively new field that is on a rise. Teaching students IOT is a challenging task because of increasing dynamics of the field itself. We present a new course that is flexible, dynamic, and mobile. It is a university level course at University of Zagreb, Faculty of Organization and Informatics. Because of the ERASMUS programme it is possible to open the course to the foreign students. Further more, thanks to bilateral agreements the same course is physically carried out in Laval, France. Course is adaptive in both terms of duration and location. Regardless of each, it has to be carefully crafted to fit both criteria. Course is roaming, meaning that all of the preparations and equipment can and should be mobile and easy to setup on any location in the world. IOT involves certain embedded software development, meaning that teaching should be carried on an appropriate equipment: hardware development and prototyping boards. Experience in selecting such hardware for the course is presented. Furthermore, IOT includes various connectivity and technologies. Internet connectivity setup for the roaming equipment should be reliable and easy to apply on site. Relying on existing network is not recommended due to many reasons, one of which might be the use of captive portals, IOT micro-controllers do not bode well with captive portals. Teaching communication aspect of IOT can be quite challenging if connection is unreliable. Course is project based and designing project assignments or project guidelines, should consider local environment. Projects guided by the concept of service learning can have significant impact on a local community. Anyhow, goal of the project in this course should be students feeling accomplished. Having dynamic course it would be advisable to remain on certain technology, however evolution of the course has discarded such technologies that became obsolete. Instead of single LMS several different tools are used, this might be an overhead but those tools are already known to the students. Student perception of the course and increasing number of enrolment shows that it has positive impact and perspective future.

Cloud computing is nowadays becoming a popular paradigm for the provision of computing infrastructure that enables organizations to achieve financial savings. On the other hand, there are some known obstacles, among which vendor lock-in stands out. Furthermore, due to missing standards and heterogeneities of cloud storage systems, the migration of data to alternative cloud providers is expensive and time-consuming. We propose an approach based on Semantic Web services and AI planning to tackle cloud vendor data lock-in problem. To complete the mentioned task, data structures and data type mapping rules between different types of cloud storage systems are defined. The migration of data among different providers of platform as a service is presented in order to prove the practical applicability of the proposed approach. Additionally, this concept was also applied to software as a service model of cloud computing to perform one-shot data migration from Zoho CRM to Salesforce CRM.

Internet of things (IoT) is nowadays one of the fastest growing technologies for both private and business purposes. Due to a big number of IoT devices and their rapid introduction to the market, security of things and their services is often not at the expected level. Recently, machine learning algorithms, techniques, and methods are used in research papers to enhance IoT security. In this paper, we systematically review the state-of-the art to classify the research on machine learning for the IoT security. We analysed the primary studies, identify types of studies and publication fora. Next, we have extracted all machine learning algorithms and techniques described in primary studies, and identified the most used ones to tackle IoT security issues. We classify the research into three main categories (intrusion detection, authentication and other) and describe the primary studies in detail to analyse existing relevant works and propose topics for future research.

Internet of things (IoT) is global network of interconnected entities aimed at automating our lives. However, a number of IoT devices and systems have been created in parallel and there is no universal coding language and communication protocol. For this reason, IoT interoperability is a complex research and practical problem. In this work, we review existing work about IoT interoperability and IoT ontologies. Next, we propose a framework for things as a service interoperability that includes composition of different sensors and actuators at service level, and their integration with existing cloud services. The proposed framework consists of four main layers: virtual sensor, service, semantic, and interoperability layer. We plan to use the proposed framework to achieve service-level interoperability of smart things that will be semantically annotated in order to describe their functional and non-functional properties (with special emphasis on security and privacy).

Ontologies can be used to describe common cloud functionalities and enable common terminology to assist in cloud interoperability. In this work, we have developed the ontology for resources and operations and the ontology of interoperability problems. The aim is to clearly describe and categorize the existing functionalities, features and specificities of commercial platform asaservice offers. The first ontology also provides data type mappings among different Paa Sstorages and cross-Paa Sdata types used in inputs and outputs of the remote APIoperations to provideacommon layer for information exchange and data migration among different Paa Sproviders. The ontologies were evaluated by tools and by human experts. Furthermore, the ontologies were used in cloud interoperability prototype to show their practical applicability.

Nature of visible light communication (VLC) in vehicle‐to‐vehicle (V2V) communication is such that it does involve certain aspects of asymmetry. This concept is known issue in wireless networking systems, and it is one of the reasons for the famous node deafness issue. It degrades network performance and it is addressed in various network layers and protocols, especially media access control protocol. This paper investigates effects of asymmetry on communication performance in V2V networks using VLC. Scientific community has recognized asymmetry as an issue that causes communication performance degradation, even in VLC communication. Furthermore, this paper defines different types of asymmetry in V2V communication networks using VLC technology. Finally, simulation experiment is conducted in a controlled environment, which tests the specific types of asymmetry (design) as a cause of network performance degradation. Data and results are analyzed and interpreted ; they show that asymmetry (design) is not a significant issue in vehicular communication using VLC. However, results are strictly referring to specific domain, ie, vehicular communication using VLC technology in dense urban environments.

This paper illustrates the results of an analysis of business sectors covered by ERP solutions. The authors answer questions in regards to business sectors supported by ERP solutions, while presenting a list of supported business sectors. Using a statistical analysis, an answer is given to the question of whether there are any business sectors that are supported by a large number of ERP solutions, and whether it is possible to classify business sectors based on the occurrence of the support. Finally, three classifications are described that stem from different statistical views of covering business sectors by ERP solutions, and a suggestion for a unique classification of business sectors is given.

The numerous heterogeneities among different providers make platform as a service interoperability an interesting and complex research and practical problem. For example, each provider offers its own remote application programming interfaces (APIs). The main aim of this paper is to identify and address service- level interoperability issues when using APIs from different commercial providers of platform as a service. First, we define use case to add current user information from one platform as a service offer to the application hosted on another offer. To address interoperability problems, the ontology driven data mediation will be used and tested in this use case. Remote vendors’ APIs are implemented as web services. Resulting web operations and their inputs/outputs are semantically annotated using cross-PaaS concepts from the developed platform as a service OWL ontology. Next, SAWSDL and XSLT are used to define service type mappings. Actual composition of platform as a service APIs is implemented by means of AI planner and developed Java web application. Testing and validation was performed on a case where current Salesforce’s user is added to data container in Vosao content management system deployed on Google App Engine. Novelty of the paper is a specific application domain (composition of operations defined in PaaS APIs) and new algorithm for identification of interoperability problems.

The main purpose of this chapter is to emphasize the problem of e-government project risks and to introduce a methodology for risk assessment and calculation of costs associated with risk occurrence in e-government projects based on Bayesian networks. The proposed methodology presents a new approach to the assessment of risks and costs related to e-government project risks. As such, it facilitates the holistic decision making procedure for project managers. The application of Bayesian networks in the context of risks and risk related costs reduces the level of uncertainty in e-government projects and provides a graphical structure of risks and corresponding costs. Finally, the sensitivity analysis has also been integrated into the methodology and its results can have a significant impact on the overall project management quality.

Cloud computing is getting increasingly important part of IT strategies in modern organizations [5] and nowadays it is generally positioned in broad context of strategic planning of information systems [2] [3]. Since cloud services can appear in various flavors (software as a service, platform as service, etc.) there is no one common approach to their incorporation into certain business and organizational context. In many cases they are basically extending existing architectures making them integral part of broader information system based on service oriented architecture. These architectures are quite structurally complex [6] [8] [10] and should be carefully planned and implemented to achieve business benefits and competitive advantage.

Each organization should be aiming at higher efficiency. Government institutions should not make an exception.Business processes of today’s government institutions are extremely influenced by modern ICT and user acceptance plays a pivotal role in success of all ICT projects. As government tends to design and launch online services without actually measuring citizens’ needs, understanding citizens’ (taxpayers’) needs is becoming crucial for government institutions.In this paper, a range of earlier studies have been critically analyzed and comparedto provide anintegrated model that can identify factors which could influence adoption of e-government services. The goal of this article is to study citizens’ demand for different levels of electronic government service and to find factors which influence the adoption ofthese same services.This study integrates variables from technology acceptance model (TAM) and trustworthiness model.Analysis of the results indicates that there is a significant positive relationship between Trust in Internet, Perceived usefulness, Perceived ease of use andtheIntentionto use. Implications for further research are discussed.

Many benefits from implementation of e-business solutions are related to network effects which means that there are many interconnected parties utilizing the same or compatible technologies. The large-scale adoption of e-business practices in public sectors and in small and medium enterprises (SMEs)-prevailing economic environments will be successful if appropriate support in the form of education, adequate legislative, directions, and open source applications is provided. This case study describes the adoption of e-business in public sectors and SMEs by using an integrated open source approach called e-modules. E-module is a model which has process properties, data properties, and requirements on technology. Therefore e-module presents a holistic framework for deployment of e-business solutions and such e-module structure mandates an approach which requires reengineering of business processes and adoption of strong standardization that solves interoperability issues. E-module is based on principles of service-oriented architectures with guidelines for introduction into business processes and integration with ERP systems. Such an open source approach enables the spreading of compatible software solutions across any given country, thus, increasing e-business adoption. This paper presents a methodology for defining and building e-modules.

This paper presents the procedure for comparing costs of leasing IT resources in a commercial computing cloud against those incurred in using on-premise resources. The procedure starts with calculating the number of computers as depending on parameters that describe application's features and execution conditions. By measuring required execution time for different parameter values, we determined that this dependence is a second-order polynomial. Polynomial coefficients were calculated by processing the results of fractional factorial design. On that basis we calculated costs of computing and storage resources required for the application to run. The same calculation model can be applied to both a personal user and a cloud provider. The results will differ because of different hardware exploitation levels and the economy of scale effects. Such calculation enables cloud providers to determine marginal costs in their services' price, and allows users to calculate costs they would incur by executing the same application using their own resources. Leasing in cloud establishes a business relationship: buyer wants to reduce costs, and cloud provider wants to generate profit. This relationship will be realized if the buyer and the provider agree on a mutually acceptable fair price that can be determined by the symmetric mediation plan. All the steps in this procedure are integrated into CCCE method and represented as a process model.

The assessment of the acceptability and the value of IT projects in the public sector, especially when the projects feature the qualitative value along with the monetary one, is a complex problem. There are certain methodologies in the world though that help various organizations in decision-making process when projects are being chosen. The paper surveys the three IT projects public value assessing methodologies: the American Value Measuring Methodology, the French MAREVA, and the German WiBe. A comparison of the approaches to solving the problem of assessing public value of IT projects was thus made. The Analytic Hierarchy Process – a method of a multicriteria analysis of alternatives-was briefly presented. By the use of the Hierarchy Criteria Model in the way that respects all the basic characteristics that a methodology of the kind should feature in accordance with Gartner, a proposition of an IT project public value measurement methodology pattern was presented. The selection of projects with little value contribution if compared to the existing situation, the assessment of the acceptability of risk through the hierarchy structure of the value of a project and the aggregation of the value of separate PVIT dimensions is a contribution related to the methodology patterns that were surveyed.

Business process reengineering (BPR) projects bear high risk and present tremendous effort for organizations. That is why is important to evaluate possible scenarios before BPR project actually starts. Simulation modeling might be used to evaluate effects of large scale BPR projects. The article presents use of simulation modeling in public sector with special emphasis on relationship between simulation results of To-Be and As-Is models with conclusions which might be derived by interpreting simulation results. Obtained results present that organization can significantly benefit from BPR projects while simulation modeling might be used to monitor and verify project trajectory.

Sažetak: Web sustavi mogu imati vrlo različite intervale opterećenja zbog broja korisnika. S jedne strane potrebno je analizirati koji broj korisnika Web sustav može obrađivati a da i dalje osigurava očekivano vrijeme odgovora za pojedini zahjev korisnika. Korištenje stvarnih korisnika za takvu analizu nije praktično i ima vrlo ograničenu namjenu budući da nije jednostavno osigurati i koordinirati veći broj korisnika koji će ponavljati korištenje sustava prema određenom planu. Za tu namjenu mogu se koristiti razni programski alati kojima se može simulirati očekivani broj korisnika sustava, slijed poziva pojedinih dijelova sustava, ritam njihovog rada i razne druge mogućnosti. S druge strane potrebno je povezati analizu opterećenja i optimizaciju Web sustava kako bi se osigurala njegova veća propustnost. Potrebno je istražiti kritična mjesta u Web sustavu koja zahtjevaju najveći dio rada (procesor, web poslužitelj, baze podataka i sl.) te na njima provesti postupke optimizacije. Rad opisuje razne postupke mjerenja opterećenja sustava i mjesta na kojima se osobito isplati uložiti trud prilikom optimizacije Web sustava.

Different modern information and communication technologies are emerging in all segments of our lives. The simplicity of using these high-tech and high-performance components enables us to build a wide range of enhanced and fast-in-reaction telemedical systems with the purpose of improving the quality of living. While building these systems it is easy to overlook or underestimate the need for data security and privacy protection. Telemedicine and e-health laws, regulations and standards, along with other telemedicine infrastructure components in the USA, Europe and Croatia are compared and discussed in this paper. After the common model for integrated mobile telemedical system is proposed with the example of heart-work monitoring system, all possible vulnerable and weak points in its architecture are identified and recommendations on design and implementation of similar systems are also discussed and given.

Location-based services (LBSs) provided by mobile phone operators are being adopted at a much slower pace than expected, especially in Europe. LBS technology can be utilized for tracking services, as well as for location-sensitive information services, marketing based on customer location, location-based games and for other purposes. In this paper the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) was used to investigate the potential for the acceptance of such services. A set of LBSs that may be of interest to young adults was identified and a survey based on the UTAUT was designed. This survey was applied on college students of information systems who were mobile phone users and experienced in the use of computers and the Internet. This paper presents an empirically derived model of the adoption of LBSs developed from the results of the reported survey.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a set of principles for designing extensible, federated and interoperable services, and it represents a new evolutional spiral in the program-applications development and in the evolution of the information systems concept. SOA represents an extraordinary challenge at scientific, practical and economical level. That is a reason why SOA represents the topic of many different researches. Some researches have shown that implementation of SOA is often not successful (e.g. one of four SOA implementation have failed). One of the reasons for this is the fact that organizations have not adopted and fulfilled some basic SOA prerequisites. The SOA prerequisites are not clearly defined. They are some researches on this topic but they are mostly focused on technical aspects of SOA implementation. This article analyses necessary set of prerequisites which should be fulfil by organization attempting to implement SOA. Since SOA implementation requests significant organizational changes such set of prerequisites should comprise not only from technical prerequisites but should take into account data architecture, system integration and compatibility, security and legislative requirements, business requirements and organizational prerequisites. This set of prerequisites can be defined as a Service-Oriented Architecture Maturity Model and used to evaluate the possibility for successful utilization of SOA in specific organization.