This book is based on the work of the YEEES Research Centre, an international network of scientists from partner universities in Germany, Mozambique, Namibia and South Africa. It presents inter- and transdisciplinary research that explores different ways of understanding resilience, an essential characteristic for systems, organizations and people – providing them with strength in the face of attacks and challenges, and both enabling and fostering constant adaptation and improvement.

Building resilience to face today’s ever-changing societal and environmental realities requires unbiased research activities that transcend the borders of countries and academic disciplines alike. The research addressed in this book, thus, is multidisciplinary and includes contributions to areas such as sustainable agriculture, entrepreneurial ecosystems, and smart communities, as well as groundbreaking work on skills development and ICT education. Highlighting the variety of research activities and their outcomes, this book offers a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners in the fields of sustainable resilience development.

The highly dynamic world of information technology service management stresses the benefits of the quick and correct implementation of IT services. A disciplined approach relies on a separate set of assumptions and principles as an agile approach, both of which have complicated implementation processes as well as copious benefits. Combining these two approaches to enhance the effectiveness of each, while difficult, can yield exceptional dividends.

Balancing Agile and Disciplined Engineering and Management Approaches for IT Services and Software Products is an essential publication that focuses on clarifying theoretical foundations of balanced design methods with conceptual frameworks and empirical cases. Highlighting a broad range of topics including business trends, IT service, and software development, this book is ideally designed for software engineers, software developers, programmers, information technology professionals, researchers, academicians, and students.

This edited volume covers essential and recent development in the engineering and management of data centers.  Data centers are complex systems requiring ongoing support, and their high value for keeping business continuity operations is crucial. The book presents core topics on the planning, design, implementation, operation and control, and sustainability of a data center from a didactical and practitioner viewpoint.

This book bridges the gap between academia and the industry, offering essential reading for practitioners in data centers, researchers in the area, and faculty teaching related courses on data centers. The book can be used as a complementary text for traditional courses on Computer Networks, as well as  innovative courses on IT Architecture, IT Service Management, IT Operations, and Data Centers.

This book presents new concepts as well as practical applications and experiences in the field of information technology for environmental engineering. The book has three main focus areas: firstly, it shows how information technologies can be employed to support natural resource management and conservation, environmental engineering, scientific simulation and integrated assessment studies. Secondly, it demonstrates the application of computing in the everyday practices of environmental engineers, natural scientists, economists and social scientists. And thirdly, it demonstrates how the complexity of natural phenomena can be approached using interdisciplinary methods, where computer science offers the infrastructure needed for environmental data collection and management, scientific simulations, decision support documentation and reporting.
The book collects selected papers presented at the 7th International Symposium on Environmental Engineering, held in Port Elizabeth, South Africa in July 2015. It discusses recent success stories in eco-informatics, promising ideas and new challenges from the interdisciplinary viewpoints of computer scientists, environmental engineers, economists and social scientists, demonstrating new paradigms for problem-solving and decision-making.

The EnviroInfo 2014 is the 28th edition of the long standing and established international and interdisciplinary conference series on leading environmental information and communication technologies. Combining and shaping international activities in the field of applied informatics and environmental informatics in making the world a better place for living, the EnviroInfo conference series aims at presenting and discussing the latest state-of-the-art development on ICT and environmental related fields. Under the supervision of the Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg, the 28th EnviroInfo conference discusses the special topics of ICT for energy efficiency as main conference theme as well as the whole range of cross-cutting topics in ICT and environmental sciences. As the EnviroInfo conference series strengthens the interdisciplinary activities in the fields of sustainable development, participants from industry, higher education and research institutes have been invited to exchange ideas and solutions for current and future problems.

Renewable energies, for example wind energy, are regarded as sustainable energies. A conference at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (Institute for Advanced Study, HWK) in June, 2012, raised the question whether this is really the case: “Sustainable Material Life Cycles – Is Wind Energy Really Sustainable?”. The conference addressed all materials involved throughout a full life cycle of a wind turbine.

Sessions on the most relevant issues structured the event:

• Material Flows and Sustainability
• International Developments
• Lifecycle Approach
• Logistics and Rotor Blades

Stimulating presentations and lively discussions characterized all sessions. With wind energy being a very young field, a lot of research still needs to be done, especially on all aspects of sustainability. Two areas were identified as especially relevant: offshore wind park maintenance and material efficiency. With this volume, we hope to stimulate more interdisciplinary discussions and related research.

Editors: Alexandra Pehlken, Andreas Solsbach, Wolfgang Stenzel
Can be ordered for 13,80€ at the BIS-Verlag der Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg
ISBN: 978-3-8142-2283-7
Contact: jurkea.morgenstern(at)uni-oldenburg.de

Intelligent Decision-Making Support Systems (i-DMSS) are specialized IT-based systems that support some or several phases of the individual, team, organizational or inter-organizational decision making process by deploying some or several intelligent mechanisms.

This book pursues the following academic aims: (i) generate a compendium of quality theoretical and applied contributions in Intelligent Decision-Making Support Systems (i-DMSS) for engineering and management IT-based service systems (ITSS); (ii) diffuse scarce knowledge about foundations, architectures and effective and efficient methods and strategies for successfully planning, designing, building, operating, and evaluating i-DMSS for ITSS, and (iii) create an awareness of, and a bridge between ITSS and i-DMSS academicians and practitioners in the current complex and dynamic engineering and management ITSS organizational.

The book presents a collection of 11 chapters referring to relevant topics for both IT service systems and i-DMSS including: problems of selection of IT service providers, optimization of supply chain systems, IT governance decisions, clinical decision support, dynamic user-interface adaptation, re-engineering of processes, and generic decision problems. Advanced IT technologies used in some chapters are: fuzzy multi-criteria mechanisms, semantic processing, data mining processing, and rough sets. Other chapters report traditional DSS mechanisms but used or suggested to be used in innovative mode for IT service engineering and management tasks.

Sustainability embraces many concepts. It requires in-depth cross disciplinary knowledge and the ability to think differently and creatively about current and future development challenges. A wide range of geographical and cultural perspectives inform the research papers presented in this text. From games to governance, technology to teaching, design to decisions the dimensions of sustainability are explored.

This publication showcases emerging research being conducted across the Dorich House Group of European member Universities and some of their partner institutions.

In recent years, the focus of environmental responsibility has shifted toward companies and a variety of highly specific, heterogeneous solutions for different environmental issues have been created. These solutions comprise a special category of information systems, termed Corporate Environmental Management Information Systems (CEMIS).

Corporate Environmental Management Information Systems: Advancements and Trends addresses the continuing need for companies to take a holistic and strategic approach towards material and energy efficiency, emission and waste reduction, recycling, stakeholder engagement, and legal compliance. As Corporate Environmental Management Information Systems that support only operational goals are becoming obsolete, the need for a reference redefining these systems to provide integrated solutions to environmental and economic problems is needed.

This volume presents the proceedings of the ICT Innovations conference 2009 held in Ohrid, Macedonia. The proceedings gather the reports of academics, professionals and practitioners about valuable experiences in developing solutions and systems in the industrial and business arena especially innovative commercial implementations, novel applications of technology, and experience in applying recent research advances to practical situations, in any ICT areas.

The topics focus on issues concerning a variety of ICT fields: multimedia information systems, artificial intelligence, pervasive and ubiquitous computing, eco and bio informatics, internet and web applications and services, wireless and mobile communications and services, computer networks, security and cryptography, distributed systems, GRID and cloud computing, and nanotechnology.

Information technologies have evolved to an enabling science for natural resource management and conservation, environmental engineering, scientific simulation and integrated assessment studies. Computing plays a significant role in every day practices of environmental engineers, natural scientists, economists, and social scientists. The complexity of natural phenomena requires interdisciplinary approaches, where computing science offers the infrastructure for environmental data collection and management, scientific simulations, decision support documentation and reporting. Ecology, environmental engineering and natural resource management comprise an excellent real-world testbed for IT system demonstration, while raising new challenges for computer science. Complexity, uncertainty and scaling issues of natural systems form a demanding application domain for sensor networks and earth observation systems; modelling, simulation and scientific workflows, data management and reporting, decision support and intelligent systems, distributed computing environments, geographical information systems, heterogeneous systems integration, software engineering, accounting systems and control systems.

This books offers a collection of papers presented at the 4th International Symposium on Environmental Engineering, held in May 2009, in Thessaloniki, Greece. Recent success stories in ecoinformatics, promising ideas and new challenges are discussed among computer scientists, environmental engineers, economists and social scientists, demonstrating new paradigms for problem solving and decision making.

Der Druck, eine leistungsfähige IT im Unternehmen einzurichten, steigt permanent. Trotzdem sprengen viele IT-Projekte in der Praxis Terminpläne und Budgets oder sie scheitern vollends. Jorge Marx Gómez, Horst Junker und Stefan Odebrecht vermitteln, wie sich IT-Projekte mit IT-Controlling zum Erfolg führen lassen:

• IT-Controlling und die Notwendigkeit einer IT-Strategie
• IT-Outsourcing: Chancen und Risiken, Alternativen zum Outsourcing
• Werkzeuge des IT-Controllings: Kennzahlensysteme, Portfoliomanagement, Benchmarking und mehr.

Das Buch mit zahlreichen Fallstudien unterstützt die Leser, mehr Transparenz und eine zuverlässige Kostenkontrolle bei ihren IT-Aufgaben in der Praxis zu erzielen.

Noch vor wenigen Jahren war das "Data Warehouse" ein sehr mächtiger Begriff. Doch stellte sich bald heraus, dass Technologie allein keinen Wettbewerbsvorteil bietet. Erst wenn sie korrekt angewendet wird, lassen sich Investitionen in die Informationstechnologie rechtfertigen. Daher spricht man nun von der Business Intelligence, dem effektiven und anwendergerechten Technologie- und Dateneinsatz zur unternehmensweiten Informationsbereitstellung.

Ein Softwarepaket zur Business Intelligence wird von der SAP in Form des SAP NetWeaver 7.0® bereitgestellt. Gerade dieses Release von SAP NetWeaver® eignet sich hervorragend für die Lehre in Business Intelligence, weil aktuelle Technologie praxisnah und anschaulich präsentiert werden kann. SAP NetWeaver® bietet die Verknüpfung von Data Warehouse Technologie mit dem SAP Business Information Warehouse®, der integrierten Planung und Portaltechnologie ein breites Spektrum an Themengebieten, so dass sich der Forschungsbereich BI aus verschiedenen Richtungen betrachten lässt.

Integrierte Fallstudien mit präzisen Anweisungen und anschaulichen Grafiken zeigen das Zusammenspiel der verschiedenen Disziplinen in SAP NetWeaver 7.0® und lassen den Anwender Business Intelligence praktisch erleben.

Corporate Social Responsibility: Wie gelingt es Ihnen, Nachhaltigkeit gegenüber den Stakeholdern Ihres Unternehmens zu kommunizieren? Ralf Isenmann, Jorge Marx Gómez und weitere Experten liefern Ihnen das notwendige praktische Know-how: Anforderungen und Perspektiven in der Nachhaltigkeitsberichterstattung, effizientes Informationsmanagement, aktuelle Technologien und Software-Werkzeuge etc. Mit diesem Buch schöpfen Sie das ganze Potenzial moderner IT für einen lebendigen und maßgeschneiderten Dialog mit den Stakeholdern aus. Stichwort Corporate Social Responsibility: Von Unternehmen wird zunehmend auch ökologisches und soziales Handeln erwartet. So genannte Nachhaltigkeitsberichte, die solches Engagement dokumentieren, fragt die Öffentlichkeit immer stärker nach. Wie es den Unternehmen gelingt, diese Informationen attraktiv und gleichzeitig effizient zu präsentieren, erläutern Ralf Isenmann, Jorge Marx Gómez und weitere Autoren in diesem Buch:

• Perspektiven der Nachhaltigkeitsberichterstattung
• Anforderungen an IT-gestützte Nachhaltigkeitskommunikation
• Aufbau eineseffizienten Informationsmanagements
• aktuelle Technologien, Software-Werkzeuge, Medien- Verknüpfung mit weiteren Steuerungsinstrumenten.

Das Buch unterstützt die Leser dabei, einen lebendigen und maßgeschneiderten Dialog mit den Stakeholdern zu gestalten und dafür das ganze Potential moderner IT zu nutzen.