Swedish Institute for Systems Development

Institute Name: Swedish Institute for Systems Development(SISU)

Description: The Swedish Institute for Systems Development (SISU) was founded in 1984 and started its operation in January 1985. It is jointly supported by the Swedish National Board for Industrial and Technical Developments (NUTEK), and the Association of Supporters of Information Systems Development in Sweden (ISVI). Currently more than 40 members of ISVI, represent government departments, public and private industries, specifically the computing industry, banking and insurance (e.g. Telia, Sweden Post, Swedish Defence, Material Administration, ERICSSON, ASEA-BROWN-BOWERI, DIGITAL, SAAB-SCANIA, SKANDIA (insurance), SKF, the Swedish State Power Board and VOLVO.

The purpose of SISU is to act as a bridge between research institutions, such as universities and institutes of higher learning, and the world of industry, business, and administration. Hence, its primary goal is the development of a high level of competence for information systems development throughout the public and private sectors of the Swedish national economy. In more concrete terms, work at SISU concerns methodologies, computer support and technology for developing, administering and maintaining computerized information systems in a very broad sense, but with a specific orientation towards increased quality in decision-making and action within companies and other organizations.

for information in a visual environment, SISU employs about 30 researchers and its annual budget is approximately 3 MECU. Researchers are organized into teams dealing with Information systems engineering (incl. business analysis ) and interaction as well communication (incl. Usability) and pursue research within specific projects. Several different projects are run within and across these areas. The projects are run in close cooperation with SISU:s affiliated enterprises so as to ensure the best possible exploitation of results. Within its research program, Effective IT, the institute is currently carrying out research projects dealing with issues such as:

integrated product and process development with an emphasis on concurrent engineering as applied to integrated system development and involving quality assurance, component-based system development and software process assessment and improvement.
methods, strategies and reference cases for legacy systems migration and re-engineering, and key and comparative figures for making cost comparisons between renovation and new development of old information systems.
new architectures for information systems, document and message handling, new database technology for information handling, the quality and value of information and receiver-controlled provision of information, the development of EDI in Swedish companies
computer-supported methods and procedures for business development, conceptual modelling and decision support.
the connection between IT and business development and the evaluation of spending and assets in the form of information and IT Within the EU research programs Telematics, ESPRIT and AIM, SISU is currently participating in five projects. Four of those concern technology for decentralized multimedia databases and user interfaces for these.

In general, SISU's personnel have, during the last decade, made research contributions concering e.g. conceptual modeling languages, the temporal dimension in conceptual modeling, conceptual schema integration and restructuring, conceptual schema diagnosis (consistency, design quality), conceptual models of system development methods, reverse conceptual modeling, generation of conceptual schemata from examples and form descriptions, object-oriented language design and architectures of object oriented system development environments, interoperabilty issues in federated information systems, database design tools and knowledge based and natural language interfaces to databases. Many results have been published in international journals and conferences such as VLDB, SIGMOD, IFIP Congress, IFIP Working Conferences, etc.. Several prototype systems and tools resulting from various SISU projects are currentlly in use, including graphics oriented tools supporting the capture of business information and knowledge, end-user tools accessing multimedia information sources(SQL-databases, CASE-shell RAMATIC, SISU Business Modeler tool, SISU Hybris tool). Also, the SISU spin-off company Xanthus is developing and marketing tools based on SISU technology for the world-wide NextStep market.

At SISU we have established a "competence network in RE and Business Modelling". The network contains a number of, mostly industry, people interested in RE and/or BM. The group meets about once a month and communicates via a Virtual Workspace (WWW-based) acting as an "INTRA-NET" for the group. The language used is Swedish so there is no point in adding non-swedish users to the intra-net. The group, of course, gets all the current information about RENOIR and the intra-net includes a URL-link to Renoir at UCL.

Researchers associated with the project:
Dr. William Song, Mats Roger Gustafson

Contact Details:

Principal Investigator: Prof. Janis Bubenko jr

Address: Department of Computer and Systems Science, Royal Institute of Technology and Stockholm University, Electrum 230, S-16440, Kista, Sweden

Telephone number: +46-8-161615

Telefax number: +46-8-7039025

EMail: janis@dsv.su.se

List of Members

Last up-date: 30 July 1998