Ideas on Enterprise Information Systems Development

This blog is devoted to ideas on Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) development. It focuses on Lean Thinking, Agile Methods, and Free/Open Source Software, as means of improving EIS development and evolution, under a more practical than academical view. You may find here a lot of "thinking aloud" material, sometimes without scientific treatment... don't worry, this is a blog!
Every post is marked with at least one of Product or Process labels, meaning that they are related to execution techniques (programming and testing) or management techniques (planning and monitoring), respectively.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Free/Open Source ERP (FOS-ERP) - Part I

In 2007 I wrote a book chapter on the differences between FOS-ERP and proprietary ERP (P-ERP), published as part of the Handbook on Research in Enterprise Systems in 2008. I will start now a series of posts that will revisit this paper.

This first part will quickly introduce the Generalized Enterprise Reference Architecture and Methodology (GERAM) as a framework for comparing FOS and P-ERP.

GERAM defines seven life-cycle phases for any enterprise entity and can be used as a template life cycle to analyze FOS-ERP selection, deployment, and evolution. These phases, represented on Figure 1, can be summarized as follows:
a)Identification: identifies the particular enterprise entity in terms of its domain and environment.
b)Concept: conceptualizes an entity’s mission, vision, values, strategies, and objectives.
c)Requirements: comprise a set of human, process, and technology oriented aspects and activities needed to describe the operational requirements of the enterprise.
d)Design: models the enterprise entity and helps to understand the system functionalities.
e)Implementation: the design is transformed into real components. After tested and approved the system is released into operation.
f)Operation: is the actual use of the system, and includes user feedback that can drive to a new entity life cycle.
g)Decommission: represents the disposal of parts of the whole entity, after its successful use.
 
 
Figure 1. GERAM Life Cycle Phases


Except for decommission and identification, which are not (directly) influenced by licensing models, these phases can be used to better understand how FOS-ERP differs from P-ERP, as next posts will explain.

1 comment:


  1. Thank you for the info. It sounds pretty user friendly. I guess I’ll pick one up for fun. thank u

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