Small and medium enterprises cannot avoid the global economy and its demand for innovative business as a precondition for competitiveness. Given their small size and related pool of professionals, small and medium enterprises need to work very hard on their staff’s innovativeness and related personal traits. Making a small and medium enterprise successful must be considered as an inventioninnov...

Peer-to-peer applications (P2P) are no longer limited to home users, and start being accepted in academic and corporate environments. While file sharing and instant messaging applications are the most traditional examples, they are no longer the only ones benefiting from the potential advantages of P2P networks. For example, network file storage, data transmission, distributed computing, and co...

Mobile enterprise initiatives are evolving from small projects focused on productivity improvements and cost savings to large-scale enterprise-wide strategic implementations that enable companies to gain and sustain competitive advantages. Despite its many potential benefits, however, widespread enterprise adoption of mobile solutions has not been as extensive as anticipated. This article explo...

The market for enterprise systems (ES), continues to grow in the post millennium era as businesses become increasingly global, highly competitive, and severely challenged. Although the large enterprise space for ES implementation is quite stagnated, now all of the ES vendors are focusing on the small to medium-sized enterprise (SME) sector for implementations. This study looks at the current ES...

Companies need to respond to ever-changing and increasing customer demands in order to maintain a stable market position. In this scenario, collaboration among companies is one of the most promising strategies for enhancing global competitiveness. New business models as well as new theories about governance, operations, strategies and management have been in the process of being developed in la...

The Virtual Enterprise paradigm is being strongly driven by the global economic environment and facilitated by the recent advancements in the information and communication technologies. A cooperative virtual enterprise approach targeting the manufacturing resource sharing among small and medium enterprises has been proposed and developed in this research. With intelligent agents and Web Service...

Agile Crosses the Chasm to the Enterprise The benefits of Agile methods are becoming more obvious and compelling. While the most popular practices were developed and proven in small team environments, the interest and need for using Agile in the enterprise is growing rapidly. That’s largely because Agile provides quantifiable, “step-change” improvements in the “big three” software development m...

In spite of rapid advances in multimedia and interactive technologies, enterprise users prefer to battle with email spam and overload rather than lose the benefits of communicating, collaborating and solving business tasks over email. Many aspects of email have significantly improved over time, but its overall integration with the enterprise environment remained practically the same. In this pa...

The use of patterns and pattern languages in enterprise architecture (EA) is a relatively novel concept. Although both the concepts of patterns and EA are over 30 years old, the notion of design patterns is hardly applied to EA. There is a lack of pattern collections specifically devoted to EA: only a small number of patterns and pattern collections specifically aimed at enterprise architecture...

International competition and varying customer needs commonly cause small and medium furniture manufacturing enterprises to join dynamically-formed, ‘smart’ enterprise networks, established and operating using digital information technologies. In this paper, we propose a technological approach to support such enterprise networks which is primarily based on the use of software agents. First we o...