Essays on enterprise social media: moderation, shop floor integration and information system induced organizational change

The digital transformation increases the pressure on innovation capabilities and challenges organizations to adapt their business models. In order to cope with the increased competitiveness, organizations face two significant internal challenges: Enabling internal digital collaboration and knowledge sharing as well as information system-induced change. This dissertation will investigate seven related research questions divided in two main parts. The first part focuses on how an organization can foster digital knowledge exchanges and collaboration in global organizations. Enterprise social media has attracted the attention of organizations as a technology for social collaboration and knowledge sharing. The dissertation will investigate how organizations can moderate the employee discourse in such platforms from a novel organizational perspective and provide insights on how to increase the encouragement for employees to contribute and assure content quality. The developed framework will provide detailed moderation approaches. In addition, the risk of privacy concerns associated with organizational interference in the new digital collaboration technologies are evaluated. The second part of the dissertation shifts the focus to the shop floor environment, an area that has faced substantial digital advancements. Those advancements change the organizational role of the shop floor to a more knowledge work-oriented environment. Firstly, a state of research regarding technology acceptance and professional diversity is presented to create an enterprise social media job-characteristic framework. Further, a unique and longitudinal shop floor case study is investigated to derive organizational challenges for enterprise social media and potentials for empowerment. To validate the future shop floor environment needs use cases for the shop floor are derived and a user profile is established. The case study is extended by expert interviews to focus on conceptualizing organizational information systems-induced change. In this regard, the role of work practices, organizational and employee mindset and information system change are integrated into a holistic organizational change model that targets employee empowerment. This dissertation provides a comprehensive overview of enterprise social media from an organizational management and shop floor perspective. It contributes to understanding new digital needs at the shop floor and the information systems-induced change journey towards digital employee empowerment

Succession Planning Strategies for Retiring Employees in the Department of Defense

In 2017, more than 18% of the workforce in the Department of Defense (DoD) was eligible to retire. Employee retirement continues to present a persistent shortage of DoD knowledge workers, especially in security protections. The purpose of this qualitative single case study within a DoD intelligence agency was to explore succession planning strategies that DoD managers use to ensure knowledge possessed by retirees was transitioned to incumbent knowledge workers. The conceptual frameworks for this study were the 7-pointed star model for succession planning and the 4 pillars of knowledge management. The population was DoD managers from STEM and cyber intelligence agency departments located in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C., area who have successfully implemented succession planning for senior knowledge workers. Data were collected from interviews with 6 DoD managers and a comprehensive review of documents on succession planning. Data were analyzed using Yin’s 5-phased cycle. Four themes emerged from this study: prioritize and shift the culture toward succession planning, implement succession planning for the entire workforce, develop individual and organizational succession plans, and establish a succession planning policy and enterprise-wide program. The implications for positive social change include the potential for increased agency continuity by improving employee retention, which may enhance organizational and community relationships through the prosperity of knowledge workers

A conceptual model of enterprise application integration in higher education institutions

Copyright @ 2013 EMCIS.It is eminent that several applications’ systems are deployed at different levels in Higher Education (HE), ranging from academic and administrative to staff and students record systems. Many of these systems suffer from different problems due to the lack of integration such as data redundancy, inconsistency and maintenance cost. Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) can provide substantial benefits to these systems, such as assisting with business process integration, facilitating e-service based transformation and supporting collaborative decision-making. However, some factors that influence EAI adoption process in HE will be defined. This paper introduces a conceptual model to explain the outcome of using EAI in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). Analyzing the combination of the existing classification of EAI factors with the HE factors will enhance the implementation of EAI in HEI at both organizational and operational levels. A pilot study at King Abdulaziz University (KAU), Kingdom of Saudi Arabia will be presented in this paper to show that the integration of the multiple information systems gives an integrated view to facilitate information access and reuse. Moreover data from different information systems is combined to gain a more comprehensive basis to satisfy the educational needs

Costs, Benefits and Value Distribution – Ingredients for Successful Cross-Organizational ES Business Cases

This paper introduces my PhD research project on developing guidelines for creating successful business cases for Enterprise System implementations in network settings. Three important aspects that were found to be important in such business cases are: the costs, benefits and the value distribution within a network. Each of the three aspects is addressed in this paper and the relationships between them are pointed out. A research model is presented showing how all three aspects contribute to the main goal of defining successful business case guidelines

Community Development Evaluation Storymap and Legend

Community based organizations, funders, and intermediary organizations working in the community development field have a shared interest in building stronger organizations and stronger communities. Through evaluation these organizations can learn how their programs and activities contribute to the achievement of these goals, and how to improve their effectiveness and the well-being of their communities. Yet, evaluation is rarely seen as part of a non-judgemental organizational learning process. Instead, the term "evaluation" has often generated anxiety and confusion. The Community Development Storymap project is a response to those concerns.Illustrations found in this document were produced by Grove Consultants

The Country-specific Organizational and Information Architecture of ERP Systems at Globalised Enterprises

The competition on the market forces companies to adapt to the changing environment. Most recently, the economic and financial crisis has been accelerating the alteration of both business and IT models of enterprises. The forces of globalization and internationalization motivate the restructuring of business processes and consequently IT processes. To depict the changes in a unified framework, we need the concept of Enterprise Architecture as a theoretical approach that deals with various tiers, aspects and views of business processes and different layers of application, software and hardware systems. The paper outlines a wide-range theoretical background for analyzing the re-engineering and re-organization of ERP systems at international or transnational companies in the middle-sized EU member states. The research carried out up to now has unravelled the typical structural changes, the models for internal business networks and their modification that reflect the centralization, decentralization and hybrid approaches. Based on the results obtained recently, a future research program has been drawn up to deepen our understanding of the trends within the world of ERP systems.Information System; ERP; Enterprise Resource Planning; Enterprise Architecture; Globalization; Centralization; Decentralization; Hybrid

Knowledge management support for enterprise distributed systems

Explosion of information and increasing demands on semantic processing web applications have software systems to their limits. To address the problem we propose a semantic based formal framework (ADP) that makes use of promising technologies to enable knowledge generation and retrieval. We argue that this approach is cost effective, as it reuses and builds on existing knowledge and structure. It is also a good starting point for creating an organisational memory and providing knowledge management functions

Unleashing the Effectiveness of Process-oriented Information Systems: Problem Analysis, Critical Success Factors, Implications

Process-oriented information systems (IS) aim at the computerized support of business processes. So far, contemporary IS have often fail to meet this goal. To better understand this drawback, to systematically identify its rationales, and to derive critical success factors for business process support, we conducted three empirical studies: an exploratory case study in the automotive domain, an online survey among 79 IT professionals, and another online survey among 70 business process management (BPM) experts. This paper summarizes the findings of these studies, puts them in relation with each other, and uses them to show that "process-orientation" is scarce and "process-awareness" is needed in IS engineering

Collaborative method to maintain business process models updated

Business process models are often forgotten after their creation and its representation is not usually updated. This appears to be negative as processes evolve over time. This paper discusses the issue of business process models maintenance through the definition of a collaborative method that creates interaction contexts enabling business actors to discuss about business processes, sharing business knowledge. The collaboration method extends the discussion about existing process representations to all stakeholders promoting their update. This collaborative method contributes to improve business process models, allowing updates based in change proposals and discussions, using a groupware tool that was developed. Four case studies were developed in real organizational environment. We came to the conclusion that the defined method and the developed tool can help organizations to maintain a business process model updated based on the inputs and consequent discussions taken by the organizational actors who participate in the processes.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio