Leading market analysts such as Gartner, Forrester Research and IDC expect again for 2012 an increase of global information technology (IT) spending between 3.7% and 6.9% compared to 2011. This trend emphasises the fact that ensuring the effectiveness and efficiency of IT or IT evaluation is a substantial task of strategic IT management. Weighing costs and benefits is already a real challenge f...

Corn is physiologically mature when kernels reach maximum dry weight and are safe from frost. All milky fluid disappears from the kernel, and the black layer, a dark layer of cells, forms near the tip of mature kernels. Most hybrids adapted to Wisconsin reach this stage when kernel moisture decreases to 30–32%, but it may not occur until moisture content decreases to 28% for some early hybrids....

As a “System of Systems” (SoS), Air Traffic Management (ATM) in Europe will be improved by simultaneous and coordinated evolutions of its constituting systems. The SESAR Program aims at reaching an ambitious performance target (for 2020) by developing a large collection of “Operational Improvement Steps” (OIs). This development is achieved by more than 300 projects, themselves involving a numbe...

Two studies using commercially fed cattle were conducted to determine the relationship of the USDA bone ossification-based maturity system to one based on the number of permanent incisors present at slaughter. These studies showed that 91.5 to 100% of cattle with zero permanent incisors (< 23.8 mo of age), 89.1 to 97.5% of cattle with two permanent incisors (23.8 to 30.4 mo of age), 75 to 82.2%...

Software product line engineering is an inter-disciplinary concept. It spans the dimensions of business, architecture, process, and the organization. Similarly, Education System engineering is also an inter-disciplinary concept, which spans the dimensions of academic, infrastructure, facilities, administration etc. Some of the potential benefits of this approach include continuous improvements ...

Since the Software Engineering Institute has launched the Capability Maturity Model almost twenty years ago, hundreds of maturity models have been proposed by researchers and practitioners across multiple application domains. With process orientation being a central paradigm of organizational design and continuous process improvement taking top positions on CIO agendas, maturity models are also...

in this research, health, safety, and environmental risks were studied for the final compost products in iran. municipal solid waste (msw) is the major feedstock for composting plants and the main users are farmers. according to the objective of this research program three factors including heavy metal concentrations, foreign matter content, and maturity degree were identified as important para...

Existing interoperability maturity models are fragmented and only cover some interoperability aspects. This paper tentatively proposes a maturity model for enterprise interoperability which is elaborated on the basis of existing ones. It is also consistent to the Enterprise Interoperability Framework currently under the standardization process. After a brief introduction, the paper reviews exis...

Product lifecycle management (PLM) adoption includes very extensive changes in intraand inter-organizational practices and requires new types of skills and capabilities. A controlled PLM implementation can therefore be very challenging in practice. PLM maturity models, often at least partly based on the thinking of CMM (Capability maturity modeling) can be used to make the implementation of PLM...