Portsmouth Business School

Profile

Adrian Benfell

Adrian is a Senior Lecturer at the Business School and lectures in the area of Business Information Systems.  He covers a range of subjects including Enterprise Resource Planning, Customer Relationship Management, IT Applications Development within business contexts and Service Oriented Architecture with a focus on Web Services.

Before joining the University of Portsmouth, Adrian worked as a Visiting Tutor in Hungary (University of Obuda) where he taught C# Programming and Information System Development.  Adrian also worked as a Visiting Tutor at the University of Reading (UK) in the Informatics Research Centre, Henley Business School, where he taught Customer Relationship Management.

Adrian’s research specifically relates to capturing user requirements from business perspectives utilising a range a techniques for Information System deployment.   Example techniques are drawn from semiotic theory, sociological paradigms and contemporary software development practices.  He followed this particular line of interest throughout his MPhil and PhD.  He has recently published a number of research papers in this area of research.

Adrian has been involved in a number of knowledge transfer activities.  For example, he devised and implemented bespoke training courses in software development using the Unified Modelling Language and has worked on projects involving Customer Relationship Management and Enterprise Resource Planning.  All of his knowledge transfer and research activities have successfully been used to inform his teaching. 

Previous employment

University of Obuda (Hungary) – Visiting Tutor (teaching C# and Information Systems Development).

University of Reading (UK) – Visiting Tutor (teaching Customer Relationship Management).

PhD supervision

Adrian is interested in hearing from potential PhD research students whom are interested in topics allied with his research interests namely, Semiotics, Web services/Service Oriented Architecture, Requirements Engineering (Business and Software), and Business alignment of IT with a focus upon Enterprise Resource Planning and Customer Relationship Management.

Knowledge transfer

Customer Relationship Management projects.

Enterprise Resource Planning.

Unified Modelling Language (development and implementation of bespoke training courses).

Teaching areas

Management and development of Information Systems.

Unified Modelling Language.

Customer Relationship Management/Enterprise Resource Planning.

Computer programming (VB/C# .NET).

IT Service Management (ITIL).

Publications

Kecheng Liu and Adrian Benfell (2011). Pragmatic Web Services: A Semiotic Viewpoint, Software and Data Technologies, Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2011, Volume 50, Part 1, 18-32, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-20116-5_2.

Adrian Benfell and Kecheng Liu (2011). Pragmatic Web Service Description, 13th International Conference on Informatics and Semiotics in Organisations, Problems and Possibilities of Computational Humanities, 4-6 July. Pages 175 – 184. ISBN 978-94-90719-00-5.

Adrian Benfell and Kecheng Liu (2011). Extending a Multi-Responsive Communication Architecture for Web Service Description, I-SEMANTICS 2011, 7th Int. Conf. on Semantic Systems, Sept. 7-9, Graz, Austria. ACM 978-1-4503-0621-8.

Adrian Benfell and Kecheng Liu (2010). A Semiotic Approach to Web Service Description, Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Informatics and Semiotics in Organisations, Reading, U.K., July 19-21, SciTePress, ISBN 978-989-8425-26-3, pp 68-76.

Adrian Benfell (2010). A multi-responsive communication architecture for web service description and discovery, I-SEMANTICS '10 Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Semantic Systems, ACM New York, ISBN: 978-1-4503-0014-8 doi>10.1145/1839707.1839749.

Adrian Benfell and Kecheng Liu (2009). Defining a Pragmatic Based Web-service Discovery Mechanism, I-SEMANTICS Special Track: 4th AIS SigPrag, International Pragmatic Web Conference.Graz,Austria. ISBN 978-3-85125-060-2 (pp 763 -  774).

Kecheng Liu and Adrian Benfell (2009). Pragmatic Web - Incorporating Semiotics into Web Services, Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Software and Data Technologies, Volume 1, Sofia, Bulgaria, July 26-29, 2009. ISBN 978-989-674-009-2 (pp 11 -18).

Adrian Benfell and Kecheng Liu (2009). A Preliminary Definition of a Pragmatic and Semiotic Based Web-service Discovery Mechanism using Norm-based Computational Agent Behaviour within a SOA Context.   Information Systems in the Changing Era: Theory and Practice, Proc. of the 11th Conf. on Organisational Semiotics, Aussino Academic Publishing House, X. Feng, K. Liu, G. Jiang (eds) ISBN 978-0-9806057-2-3.

Adrian Benfell and Kecheng Liu (2007). Specifying a Pragmatic Web-browser for the Automated Discovery of Web Services in a Service Oriented Architecture Context, Complexity in Organisational and Technological Systems, Proc. of the 10th International Conf. on Organisational Semiotics, Sheffield, UK, K. Liu, J. Connolly, S. O’Neill (2007) (eds.) ISBN:187412152/978187412156.

Adrian Benfell, Nik Bessis and Michael Niblett (2006). Teaching and Assessing Generalist Masters Students Using A Multi and Inter-disciplinary Approach, 4^th International Workshop on Teaching Learning and Assessment of Databases, 17th July 2006, Queen's University Belfast. UK. ISBN: 0-9552005-4-7.

Adrian Benfell and Tim French (2005). A Survey of Information Systems Development Practices within Small Firms: How to Evolve a Pragmatic Solution?  Information Systems Unplugged: Developing Relevant Research, UKAIS 2005: 10th International Conference in Information Systems, 22-24^th March,Newcastle.UK. ISBN: 1-86135-331-6.

Adrian Benfell and Olive Hopker (1996). Refining a Framework to inform the adoption Object Oriented Methods by SMEs, In: Proceedings of the fourth Conference of the BCS ISM Specialist Group, 6th-8th Sept, Edited by Nimal Jayaratna and Brian Fitzgerald, ISBN 0901865 87 7.

Adrian Benfell and Olive Hopker (1995). A Shift to Object Oriented Methods for Developing Information Systems - The Way Forward for Small to Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs), In: Proceedings of the third Conference of the British Computer Society Information Systems Methodologies Specialist Group, 6th-8th Sept, Edited by: Nimal Jayaratna, Ray Miles, Yasmin Merali and Steve Probert. ISBN 0901865 81 8.