This is an experience report on Twin Training which arose out of a unique situation that occurred in a small research department in Thessaloniki, Greece when all the programmers left the firm. The new programmers in the department were a recent graduate and an intern unfamiliar with the required technologies to complete the unfinished European Union funded projects. This paper outlines how, without a mentor, they devised a mutually supportive training technique which enabled them to acquire both knowledge and practical skills quickly. Twin Training helped them break personal barriers and provided a supportive grounding to progress to pair programming on the projects.
The concept of a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to flexibly address business needs with the use of Information Technology (IT) is increasingly being recognized as important for a company's agility and responsiveness to change. A SOA approach can also help to design more agile web portals, in order to enable companies to increase their responsiveness and adaptability with regards to addressing a business opportunity as a collaborative Virtual Organization (VO). Value can be added to the operations of such a VO with the use of Intelligent Agents to automate the processes of finding collaboration partners and negotiating the creation of VOs based on user-defined business rules. This paper discusses these concepts and their benefits for Virtual Organizations based on the work of a European Union (EU) co-funded Information Society Technologies (IST) project examining these issues for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in the European Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) industry.
Businesses are aware of the popular demand for careful waste management as a high priority environmental issue. Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) face greater pressure when coping with waste products, because they often lack necessary resources or expertise. E-business could offer unique opportunities both for SMEs wanting to dispose of their waste or find waste management services and for SMEs who deal with specific aspects of waste disposal itself. This chapter proposes an approach for locating actors involved in the transportation, disposal, recycling and reuse of waste created by SMEs. Our approach incorporates the notion of Request Based Virtual Organizations (RBVOs) using a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and an ontology for the definition of waste management requirements. The populated ontology is utilized by a Multi-Agent System which performs negotiations and forms RBVOs. This approach enables SMEs to find appropriate partners, handle waste management and gain competitive advantage in the marketplace.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.