The focus of this dissertation is on audits on Information Technology (IT). The significance of information and IT is all around us in every aspect of business and public life. The need to drive more value from IT investments and manage an increasing array of IT-related risks has never been higher. According to Hardy, business executives and managers realise that IT does not exist on its own; it is an integral and key part of business change and business process. As sponsors and users, they are taking ownership and making organisational changes to create a more effective structure for overseeing and monitoring ITrelated goals and issues.

In this paper, we introduce the term “enterprise operating system” as the essential component of enterprise which supports its viability. We further explain its notion, and investigate its relevance for the enterprise. We consider enterprise to be a viable system, therefore, enterprise operating system should correspond with the viable system model.

We analyzed the two existing implementations of DEMO transaction pattern (“Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations”), because of the difficulties we found while trying to implement that pattern in a software artifact. We found that those implementations don’t fully comply with the requirements of the DEMO transaction pattern, also due to implementation difficulties. In this work we present two solutions for this problem. The first one is a state machine that uses a shared-memory model, like the existing implementations, but that fully complies with DEMO transactions theory. The second solutions is a message-based protocol, called Tell & Agree, that addresses currently existing limitations in this pattern, like the number of participants being limited to two, the role/act constraints for the initiator/executor and the requisite of full details for the transaction provided in the request. This second solution uses two-phase commits, is based on state charts and splits the current DEMO transaction into it’s three constitutive phases: ordering, execution and result. This solution increases DEMO flexibility and modeling power. We believe that these adaptations move DEMO transactions closer to Habermas “ideal speech situation”.

Component-Based Software Development is a promise that was made in 1968 during the NATO symposium, where “software engineering” term is said to have originated. Since then, the ideal state of software development as an engineering discipline is “assembling instead of programming”. However, even today, we seem to be quite far from this ideal. The EE theories deal with function and construction of an enterprise in an implementation-independent way. Our hypothesis is that the theories may be successfully applied for the software engineering domain to improve component-based design.

Organizations still struggle to maintain and develop their software patrimony, the tool that usually makes the difference in the organization’s activity among its market competitors towards survival and consequent desired contribution to the society, something which nowadays is particularly important for those which activities’ heavily rely on information. The information systems that support the tasks that it’s collaborators need to carry out in order to attain the desired products to satisfy its customer’s needs, will usually and preferably be Interactive Information Systems (IISs) that provide high performance tools by means of sophisticated Interaction Spaces (IS) that properly raise the meaning of tasks (efficiency) towards its completeness (effectiveness) and improve the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the organizational production process, and therefore, raise the overall organizational welfare. Goals is an approach that aims at bridging the managing Enterprise Engineering (EE) and the supporting Software Engineering (SE) domains of an organization by means of a conceptual structure that allows an increased awareness of each Software Implementation Decision (SID) implication over the IIS’s architecture (Interaction Spaces (ISs), Business Rules (BRs) and Data Entities (DEs)), to enable the study of related Software Development Effort (SDE) following Business Process Improvements (BPIs) (i.e. Business Process (BP) and/or User Tasks (UT) improvements) by focusing on obtaining increased Return of the Investment (ROI) in each iteration, as a way to attain the objective of producing a reliable Software Effort Estimation (SEE) method that fits the industry. Ultimately, we believe that a change of paradigm in the way that IISs are managed and understood within organizations can result in more feasible and adequate software projects according to the organization’s capabilities, to eventually raise project success (from a precarious 30%) or at least avoid financially catastrophic situations.