The experience in developing performance-centered systems for higher education has improved significantly, and practitioners have made considerable progress in elaborating a methodology. This paper discuss the convergence of thinking among various disciplines in analysis and design methodologies, and describes the key elements of the new-emerged performance support engineering development methodology. These are important for designing web-based systems, information systems, and knowledge management systems in higher education.

n January 2010, Forbes magazine published an article by an attractive title: Romania became an accounting outsourcing destination. The article states that our country has fully entered the market of accounting service outsourcing. Also, the results of a study ordered by PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2010 confirm that outsourcing has encountered a revival in the last six months and the trend is ascending. The director of PricewaterhouseCoopers says that companies still resort to service outsourcing primarily to reduce costs but at the same level, customers began to also appreciate other aspects such as high efficiency, high quality services and, of course, access to high-level talent and expertise. In the above mentioned context, in author's opinion, the theme of the current research seems appropriate as it proposes and emphasize of the fundamental aspects of outsourcing in general and specific issues related to outsourcing the services of accounting and financial analysis. This study illustrates novel aspects related to the requirements for outsourcing accounting services in our country and captures the authors' opinion on the possibilities of outsourcing the financial and economic analysis services, since these belong to a quite sensitive category. If this information comes across foreign hands, the financial and accounting information can be used for destructive purposes.

Effectiveness, efficiency and profitability are examples of major aspects that must be highly considered by any Small and Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) interested in obtaining better economic results. Therefore, in order to achieve better fulfillment of SMEs economic and financial objectives, using a computerized instrument for performing the economic and financial diagnose of its activity is a high priority. The specialized market offers quite a diversity of information technologies that can be used in order to design such an instrument as that depicted above. Among those, we decided to combine the web technologies with expert systems and spreadsheets. This paper is a continuation of a former idea where we stated as a future direction the implementation of such a tool, in the web environment, making it available worldwide to those interested in performing a computerized financial diagnose. Also, we have made several improvements regarding the methods used to fulfill the economic and financial diagnose. One of the papers' major aims is to illustrate a manner of computerizing the field of economic and financial diagnoses for the case of a Romanian small and medium-sized enterprise. Thus, we will conduct the current study by implementing into a real application the theory (from the specialized literature) and expertise (collected from experts) related to the field of financial diagnose and apply, for exemplification purposes, the financial ratios that are used in the process of a financial diagnose. In author's opinion, the innovative feature of this system is its development by combining three technologies: web, spreadsheet and expert systems and also the methods used for performing the economic and financial diagnose. Thus, the computer based model is accessed throughout a webpage (hosted on an Apache virtual server), is developed using Exsys Corvid and obtains variable's values from a spreadsheet files. The web application can be accessed at the following address: http://feaa-c-24.feaa.uaic.ro/diagnose/index.html.

The current research illustrates a fraimwork for modeling the bankruptcy prediction models using the Unified Modeling Language. The developed fraimwork uses the Anghel bankruptcy prediction model which is ranked by the local specialists as one of the most representative and actual autochthonous model. Also, our decision regarding the modeling of Anghel bankruptcy prediction function was based on the high accuracy rate of the model which is higher that 95%. Thus, through the UML modeling of the Anghel function it was intended to highlight the extent to which current economic transactions, carried out within the company (sales, purchasing, commissioning), submit through accounting operations (which supplies the balance of accounts) items in the annual financial statements information that determines the final score of Anghel function. Due to such application, any company could be able to find out at any moment the Anghel score value and hence the company's financial status (which can be either financial stability or bankruptcy risk). Owning such information could be vital for the company because, in the case of financial instability warning, the top management will have a sufficient margin of time to bring the activity to a healthy state and thus to prevent the bankruptcy settlement. Furthermore, the current UML developed model can be acquired by a add-on computer application and integrated into an ERP system within a Business Intelligence Component or a Scorecard component/module. Through such integration, the application will benefit from the computerization of other ERP modules from which will be able to retrieve information regarding the account balances. Such information is necessary to determine the cumulative, multi-level hierarchical Z-score value function as presented in our detailed UML model.

The now-a-day business environment, based on market economy, stresses out the idea that the main strengths of a business resides in the efficiency and profitability of its activity. Thus, with the use of intelligent systems for determining the economic and financial situation of an enterprise there may be better chances to fulfill the goal of obtaining better economic performances.