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Decision-making in complex production environments is challenging as the information and knowledge requirements must be constantly observed since the ecosystems they operate in are continuously changing. Artificial intelligence (AI) can tackle complexity in decision-making by making machines more intelligent. But reacting to changing or new problems and related decision processes to facilitate the understanding of the involved humans is an equally important problem. Therefore, decision support systems are required to assist complex decisions and enable flexibility to support the decision-makers. Within this scope, we will introduce the Democratic AI-based Decision Support System (DAI-DSS), which is designed and implemented within the EU-funded FAIRWork project, considering both human and machine actors during decision-making. The FAIRWork project proposes a model-based approach to both express high-level decision scenarios and formally describe the decision processes, which are then used as input for configuring the decision support system to meet concrete decision problems.

The 38th issue of CSIMQ comprises four articles selected by guest issue editors on topics related to novel decision support methods or model-based frameworks for evolving or evaluating information systems. Design-oriented research is the dominant approach in these works, balancing technical design decisions insights with empirical evaluation cases. Three of the selected articles contribute with decision-support methods or frameworks – for ESG (Environment-Social-Governance) accounting, for democratized decision services, and for information security management. The fourth article revisits UML-based model-driven software development from a new perspective.

The changing business landscapes urge organizations to collaborate and combine their expertise to stay competitive. Organizations establish partnerships and collaborate via the Internet, which often happens dynamically and at fast pace resulting in formation of Digital Business Ecosystems (DBEs). DBEs are complex and their management requires having explicit and up-to-date information about them. Modeling enables thorough visual analysis and facilitates the understanding and formation of DBEs. It also allows viewing DBEs through multiple perspectives, as well as exploring alternatives in the course of DBE formation or management. This systematic review aims to synthesize existing studies pertaining to Conceptual Modeling for analysis, design, and management of DBEs. A total of 94 studies were included in the review. The findings suggest that there is a scarcity of existing Conceptual Modeling methods and tools supporting DBEs. Additionally, the extensive emphasis on DBEs’ actors in modeling leads to an urgent need for the methods to be extended to support the establishment of holistic views for integrating multiple perspectives of DBEs. Future research should focus on these areas to facilitate the transformation of how organization’s collaborations are viewed – from a single-organization to a multitude of viewpoints on organizational networks of collaboration, coexistence, and competition. Such models also need to support the key features of DBEs, such as resilience and automation.

New blockchain-based projects do appear every day. The technology has indeed been popularized by cryptocurrencies but is now gaining interest in various domains and new types of applications are evaluated constantly. Understanding the impact of blockchain adoption on the organization and the internals of blockchain-related behavior nevertheless remains a challenge for managers but also for IT professionals. This article studies how two existing organizational and software modeling languages can be fit to document a blockchain development project in Supply Chain Management (SCM) at its earliest stages. These two frameworks are i* on the one side and the Unified Modeling Language (UML) use case and sequence diagrams on the other side. The real life project used as a case study in this application is ‘Farm-to-Fork’ where a blockchain solution for the Supply Chain (SC) of farm animals is developed. The application of the frameworks is intended to identify their strengths and weaknesses. An extension of i* is proposed to deal with blockchain privacy issues as well as laws and norms. We finally point to the complementarity of i* and UML use case and sequence diagrams in a Blockchain-Oriented Software Engineering (BOSE) context. The i* framework indeed supports early requirements to understand the impact of the project on stakeholders while UML use case and sequence diagrams support the late requirements and the design by depicting the use of blockchain and some of its behavioral mechanisms.

In my projects, devoted to the implementation of management systems, it is necessary to take into account several social and technical features and link and merge social and technical environments. To bridge the gap between these environments, maps and mapping are a useful support. In this article these topics are presented through a cluster of projects I developed in large sized companies, where exploring the context is difficult and time consuming and the relationships are structured as a complex network. I focus on the maps that describe relationships between organizational structures and IT technologies; and describe in detail two cases: a success and a failure of my socio-technical approach. The lessons learned are presented and proposed as a reflection on the socio-technical perspective.

System thinking has become an effective strategy when dealing with complex systems. Such systems are characterized by mutual interactions, causality and inter-dependency between system components. A typical example is the cooperation between governmental organizations and stakeholder interaction. The complexity of developing an e-government system suggests a more fundamental approach, where the roles of domain expert and system analyst are clearly separated. The main focus of this article is (1) to propose a linguistically-based systematic approach to the construction of models for the dynamics of complex systems, and (2) to propose extended causal diagrams. Our research methodology is based on Design Science. We start from a conceptual language developed for the application domain at hand and use this to define the dynamic factors. Then, we show how the resulting extended causal diagram is transformed into a framework for System Dynamics. We have demonstrated this approach by using a basic form of an e-Government as a running example. Our intention is to use this approach as a basis for a systematic step-wise introduction of e-Government in Zanzibar. Besides, this method is useful for modeling any complex system, especially for the description and evaluation of intended policies.

This issue of the journal on Complex Systems Informatics and Modeling Quarterly contains publications that present extended papers from the workshops of the 18th International Conference on Perspectives in Business Informatics Research (BIR 2019), organised in Katowice, Poland, 23-25 September 2019. The theme of the conference was Responsibilities of Digitalisation – Responsible Designing and Shaping the Future of Technology for Digital Preservation, Global Data Storage and Cost-Effective Management. The BIR 2019 workshops captured important and novel topics on security analytics, managed complexity, and information logistics and digital transformation. In this issue we also include one paper from the main BIR conference.

This thematic issue of the Complex Systems Informatics and Modeling Quarterly journal is dedicated to using a socio-technical perspective in the Information Systems (IS) field. It contains a selection of extended papers presented at STPIS'18 – 4th International Workshop on Socio-Technical Perspective in IS Development held on June 12, 2018 in Tallinn, Estonia. The articles presented in this thematic issue contain at least 30% new material compared to the initial papers. After the extension, all articles went through two rounds of reviews to ensure the quality of the papers published in this issue. STPIS papers cover both theoretical and practical aspects of using a socio-technical perspective in IS, which is reflected in the current issue that contains both theoretically and practically oriented papers.

One criterion that has received little attention in Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) systems selection is what we call conceptual fit. The criterion assesses the fit between the conceptual structure of the user requirements and that of a candidate system. In this paper, we evaluate the fit in terms of the existing misfits. We formally define the notion of conceptual misfit and we present a method that determines the conceptual misfits between the user requirements and a set of candidate systems. The method consists of defining a superschema, expressing the user requirements and the implementation of the candidate systems on the basis of that superschema, and the automatic computation of the existing conceptual misfits. The method has been formalized in UML/OCL. We show how our method improves on existing conceptual fit analysis methods for COTS selection.

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) plays an important role in enterprises, public authorities, inter-organizational networks, company clusters and other kinds of distributed organizations. Business, value creation and supporting activities in organizations are dependent on complex, distributed software and service systems operating in dynamic and often changing environments. In order to produce and supply products and services efficiently, organizations must be able to effectively exchange information between internal stakeholder groups and with external collaborators and customers. A high level of agility and interoperability is required when it comes to meeting the changing requirements from market or technical environments. The demand for interoperability exists at technological, business process and knowledge levels. Methods, theories and tools that ease change and adaptation of business processes, organizations and their supporting IT-systems are needed. The content of this issue presents novel research results in business information systems. Most of the articles in the issue originate from the 15th International Conference on Perspectives in Business Informatics Research (BIR 2016) in Prague (Czech Republic) and the 9th International Workshop on Information Logistics and Applications of Semantic Technologies (ILOG), which was co-located with BIR 2016. The five accepted articles address different technical and methodic aspects of business information systems and various their application fields.

The 5th issue of the journal on Complex Systems Informatics and Modeling (CSIMQ) presents extended versions of five papers selected from the CAiSE Forum 2015. The forum was part of the 27th edition of international Conference on Advanced Information Systems engineering (CAiSE 2015), which took place in June 2015 in Stockholm, Sweden. Information systems engineering draws its foundation from various interrelated disciplines including, e.g., conceptual modeling, database systems, business process management, requirements engineering, human computer interaction, and enterprise computing to address various practical challenges in development and application of information systems. The guiding subjects of CAiSE 2015 were Creativity, Ability, and Integrity. The CAiSE Forum aimed at presenting and discussing new ideas and tools related to information systems Engineering.