Effect of Implementing Process Improvement Systems

The effect of implementing process improvement systems and the likelihood of improving business performance of small businesses



Abstract

The Protégé project has come a long way since Mark Musen first built the Protégé meta-tool for knowledge-based systems in 1987. The original tool was a small application, aimed at building knowledge-acquisition tools for a few specialized programs in medical planning. From this initial tool, the Protégé system has evolved into a durable, extensible platform for knowledge-based systems development and research. The current version, Protégé-2000, can be run on a variety of platforms, supports customized user-interface extensions, incorporates the Open Knowledge-Base Connectivity (OKBC) knowledge model, interacts with standard storage formats such as relational databases, XML, and RDF, and has been used by hundreds of individuals and research groups. In this paper, we follow the evolution of the Protégé project through three distinct re-implementations. We describe our overall methodology, our design decisions, and the lessons we have learned over the duration of the project. We believe that our success is one of infrastructure: Protégé is a flexible, well-supported, and robust development environment. Using Protégé, developers and domain experts can easily build effective knowledge-based systems, and researchers can explore ideas in a variety of knowledge-based domains.

The effect of implementing process improvement systems and the likelihood of improving business performance of small businesses

Chapter 1: Introduction

Outline

This research focuses on the various aspects of implementing process improvement systems and the likelihood of improving business performance of small businesses and comprises of the following chapters:

Introduction

Literature Review

Proposed Methodology

Aims and Objectives

Following are the aims and objectives of this study:

Objectives

To establish the extent to which there is a functional relationship between the implementation of process improvement systems and the likelihood of improved business performance of small businesses.



Aims:

1. Define a measurement system for process improvement

2. Identify a measurement system for business performance

3. Define a measurement system for measuring causality between process improvement and business performance

4. Apply causality measurement system across sample population (50 companies)

Research Questions

Is there a functional relationship between the implementation of defined process improvement systems (ISO and CMMI) and the likelihood of improved business performance of small businesses?

Hypothesis

For this research we have developed the following hypothesis:

Ho: There is a positive functional relationship between implementing a process improvement methodology and the likelihood of long term success of a small business.

H1: There is no positive functional relationship between implementing a process improvement methodology and long term likelihood success of a small business.

Chapter 2: Literature Review

The Protégé system is an environment for knowledge-based systems development that has been evolving for over a decade. Protégé began as a small application designed for a medical domain (protocol-based therapy planning), but has evolved into a much more general-purpose set of tools. More recently, Protégé has developed a world-wide community of users, who themselves are adding to Protégé's capabilities, and directing its further evolution.

The original goal of Protégé was to reduce the knowledge-acquisition bottleneck (Hayes-Roth et al., 1983) by minimizing the role of the knowledge engineer in constructing knowledge ...