An Ontology for Product-Service Systems

Industries are transforming their business strategy from a product-centric to a more service-centric nature by bundling products and services into integrated solutions to enhance the relationship between their customers. Since Product- Service Systems design research is currently at a rudimentary stage, the development of a robust ontology for this area would be helpful. The advantages of a standardized ontology are that it could help researchers and practitioners to communicate their views without ambiguity and thus encourage the conception and implementation of useful methods and tools. In this paper, an initial structure of a PSS ontology from the design perspective is proposed and evaluated

A two-stage framework for designing visual analytics systems to augment organizational analytical processes

A perennially interesting research topic in the field of visual analytics is how to effectively develop systems that support organizational knowledge worker’s decision-making and reasoning processes. The primary objective of a visual analytic system is to facilitate analytical reasoning and discovery of insights through interactive visual interfaces. It also enables the transfer of capability and expertise from where it resides to where it is needed–across individuals, and organizations as necessary. The problem is, however, most domain analytical practices generally vary from organizations to organizations. This leads to the diversified design of visual analytics systems in incorporating domain analytical processes, making it difficult to generalize the success from one domain to another. Exacerbating this problem is the dearth of general models of analytical workflows available to enable such timely and effective designs. To alleviate these problems, this dissertation presents a two-stage framework for informing the design of a visual analytics system. This two-stage design framework builds upon and extends current practices pertaining to analytical workflow and focuses, in particular, on investigating its effect on the design of visual analytics systems for organizational environments. It aims to empower organizations with more systematic and purposeful information analyses through modeling the domain users’ reasoning processes. The first stage in this framework is an Observation and Designing stage, in which a visual analytic system is designed and implemented to abstract and encapsulate general organizational analytical processes, through extensive collaboration with domain users. The second stage is the User-centric Refinement stage, which aims at interactively enriching and refining the already encapsulated domain analysis process based on understanding user’s intentions through analyzing their task behavior. To implement this framework in the process of designing a visual analytics system, this dissertation proposes four general design recommendations that, when followed, empower such systems to bring the users closer to the center of their analytical processes. This dissertation makes three primary contributions: first, it presents a general characterization of the analytical workflow in organizational environments. This characterization fills in the blank of the current lack of such an analytical model and further represents a set of domain analytical tasks that are commonly applicable to various organizations. Secondly, this dissertation describes a two-stage framework for facilitating the domain users’ workflows through integrating their analytical models into interactive visual analytics systems. Finally, this dissertation presents recommendations and suggestions on enriching and refining domain analysis through capturing and analyzing knowledge workers’ analysis processes. To exemplify the generalizability of these design recommendations, this dissertation presents three visual analytics systems that are developed following the proposed recommendations, including Taste for Xerox Corporation, OpsVis for Microsoft, and IRSV for the U.S. Department of Transportation. All of these systems are deployed to domain knowledge workers and are adopted for their analytical practices. Extensive empirical evaluations are further conducted to demonstrate efficacy of these systems in facilitating domain analytical processes

GSO: Designing a Well-Founded Service Ontology to Support Dynamic Service Discovery and Composition

A pragmatic and straightforward approach to semantic service discovery is to match inputs and outputs of user requests with the input and output requirements of registered service descriptions. This approach can be extended by using pre-conditions, effects and semantic annotations (meta-data) in an attempt to increase discovery accuracy. While on one hand these additions help improve discovery accuracy, on the other hand complexity is added as service users need to add more information elements to their service requests. In this paper we present an approach that aims at facilitating the representation of service requests by service users, without loss of accuracy. We introduce a Goal-Based Service Framework (GSF) that uses the concept of goal as an abstraction to represent service requests. This paper presents the core concepts and relations of the Goal-Based Service Ontology (GSO), which is a fundamental component of the GSF, and discusses how the framework supports semantic service discovery and composition. GSO provides a set of primitives and relations between goals, tasks and services. These primitives allow a user to represent its goals, and a supporting platform to discover or compose services that fulfil them

Case-based analysis in user requirements modelling for knowledge construction

Context: Learning can be regarded as knowledge construction in which prior knowledge and experience serve as basis for the learners to expand their knowledge base. Such a process of knowledge construction has to take place continuously in order to enhance the learners’ competence in a competitive working environment. As the information consumers, the individual users demand personalised information provision which meets their own specific purposes, goals, and expectations. Objectives: The current methods in requirements engineering are capable of modelling the common user’s behaviour in the domain of knowledge construction. The users’ requirements can be represented as a case in the defined structure which can be reasoned to enable the requirements analysis. Such analysis needs to be enhanced so that personalised information provision can be tackled and modelled. However, there is a lack of suitable modelling methods to achieve this end. This paper presents a new ontological method for capturing individual user’s requirements and transforming the requirements onto personalised information provision specifications. Hence the right information can be provided to the right user for the right purpose. Method: An experiment was conducted based on the qualitative method. A medium size of group of users participated to validate the method and its techniques, i.e. articulates, maps, configures, and learning content. The results were used as the feedback for the improvement. Result: The research work has produced an ontology model with a set of techniques which support the functions for profiling user’s requirements, reasoning requirements patterns, generating workflow from norms, and formulating information provision specifications. Conclusion: The current requirements engineering approaches provide the methodical capability for developing solutions. Our research outcome, i.e. the ontology model with the techniques, can further enhance the RE approaches for modelling the individual user’s needs and discovering the user’s requirements

Analyzing Trust Perceptions In System Implementations

Implementations of large scale information systems are complex and problematic with a reputation for being delayed and going over budget. A critical factor in the success of these implementations is trust in the system, in the project and between the various stakeholders. As problems and delays mount, trust relations become strained, leading to a circle of suspicion and disbelief which is both destructive and hard to break out of. This case study analyses trust relations during a problematic period of time in the implementation of the Faroese integrated healthcare information system, using a framework based on Giddens´ theory of modernity. The framework theorizes dynamic elements of the evolution of trust, not previously investigated in this context. The data collection involves 4 actors interviewed twice in 2006 and 2007; and the data analysis strategy is content analysis using Nvivo software. A major contribution is that if an implementation project interacts with many or complex abstract systems, the managers must focus on continuous embedding and re-embedding by interacting directly with representatives of the abstract systems in question to maintain trust. Also we observe that actors’ perceptions of trust relations influence future actions, and in this way have both negative and positive consequences. We also conclude that Giddens’ theories of trust provide a promising insight into the dynamic aspects of trust relations in implementation projects, which go further than trust theories currently used in the IS field

Managing the Tension between Standardization and Customization in IT-enabled Service Provisioning: A Sensemaking Perspective

The outsourcing literature has offered a plethora of perspectives and models for understanding decision determinants and outcomes of outsourcing of business processes. While past studies have contributed significantly to scholarly research in this area, there are an insufficient number of studies that are provider centric. Consequently, there is a need to understand how service providers address a core challenge: to achieve scalable growth by developing standardized offerings that can be sufficiently customized to meet the unique demands of individual customers. This study explores how patterns of collective action within and between a provider and two of their largest customers relate to the tension between standardization and customization of information technology (IT)-enabled service provisioning. Specifically, it investigates the relationship between such behavioral patterns and the development of an enterprise architecture designed to address the tension between standardization and customization. A socio-cognitive sensemaking framework consisting of six core properties provides the analytical lens through which the relationship is investigated. The study adopts an interpretive case study methodology guided by the assumption that distinct dimensions of the social world exist, but understanding them comes from inter-subjective interaction between researcher and subject. The approach adopts a combination of literal and theoretical replication strategies (Yin 1994) to help identify similarities and dissimilarities during cross case comparison. Data were collected from semi-structured interviews, direct observations, participant observations, and analysis of documentation and archival records. Our findings suggest that localized action at the expense of global coordination exacerbates the tension between standardization and customization. Furthermore, attempts to address the tension through the logics of spatial and temporal separation proved largely ineffective, as these initiatives put added pressure on the sensemaking processes responsible for guiding collective action. Our findings further suggest that a paradigm modification might be useful for service providers, where they shift their focus from reducing equivocality to improving their internal ability to respond to it. The results of this study contribute to a large body of outsourcing literature that has too often neglected a provider centric perspective. By uncovering key factors that exacerbate the tension within and between organizations, and providing practical methods for addressing them, this study also offers valuable insight for practicing managers