Business Architecture: A Suitable Basis for Planning and Designing a Business Process Outsourcing Initiative

Business architecture, one of the components of enterprise architecture frameworks, is an underutilised but potentially powerful and useful notion for Information Systems (IS) business analysts and solution architects. The development of a future-oriented or target state business architecture representing an achievable operational framework for a business and comprising a set of business processes designed for high-performance can provide an effective basis for addressing and solving an organisation\u27s strategic issues and problems. This paper explores the concept of business architecture and demonstrates its usefulness by showing how it was utilised in planning, designing and communicating a business transformation based on business process outsourcing

Sex in the city: the rise of soft-erotic film culture in Cinema Leopold, Ghent, 1945-1954

Since the 1990s, film studies saw a disciplinary shift from approaches favoring a textual and ideological analysis of films to a broader understanding of the socio-cultural history of cinema under the banner of new cinema history. This turn not only allowed for ‘niche’ research domains to flourish such as film economics or cinema memory research, or for new empirical and critical methodologies to be applied to film and cinema history. This change in researching and writing film/cinema history also shed light on previously marginalized, neglected or uncharted film cultures and histories, burgeoning scholarship in for instance (s)exploitation cinema. This contribution examines a peculiar part of post-war local film culture in the Belgian city of Ghent, more precisely the one around the city-center soft-erotic cinema Cinema Leopold (1945-54). The research is based on a programming and box-office database compiled from archival sources and contextualized by other data (internal and external correspondence, posters,…) coming from the business archive of Octave Bonnevalle, Cinema Leopold’s founding pater familias (material kept in the State Archives of Belgium; RAB/B70/1928-1977). The database now contains information on 625 film titles shown between 1945 and 1954, out of which 233 were unidentified (due to lack of information). Although the database is at times crippled by source inconsistencies, it is extremely rich in documenting the everyday practices of a cinema that gradually turned into a soft-erotic movie theater. The database allows for some remarkable findings concerning shifts in the origin of films, their production years, genres, censorship and popularity. The key finding is that Cinema Leopold started out after the Second World War with a child-friendly, mainstream Hollywood-oriented film program, as did most cinemas in Ghent, but its profile slowly tilted towards more mature audiences and provocative film genres. These included French ‘risqué’ feature films containing some forms of nudity like Perfectionist/Un Grand Patron (Ciampi, 1951) and documentaries on venereal diseases like the successful Austrian Creeping Poison/Schleichendes Gift (Wallbrück, 1946), but also auteur movies such as Bergman’s Port of Call/Hamnstad (1948) were shown. It is interesting how Leopold walked a fine line between innovative, bold European art-house cinema, soft-erotic ‘didactic’ movies and flat-out commercial soft-porn. By 1954, Leopold had gathered a loyal crowd, which kept the cinema alive until 1981 despite the several law suits and trials. This micro-history offers a remarkable example of the post-war flourishing of alternative, yet profit-driven cinema circuits, riddled with media controversies and censorship

Navigating the gap between purposeful action and a Serving Information System

Thesis from De Montfort University, Milton KeynesThis work has been directed at the problem of developing practical means of supporting those involved in a problem situation, in designing their own information systems. The research is underpinned by an interpretive stance, and assumes that information systems are created to support purposeful action in continuously socially constructed organizational settings. It is argued that the initial phase of information system design necessitates undertaking sense making to create a shared appreciation of the situation amongst those involved. One of the main difficulties of designing technology-based information systems is that the methods suited to sense making in social situations are entirely different to the methods and techniques that have been employed to marshall knowledge into a suitable format to facilitate software design. The work offers the notion of navigating an inquiry process from a focus on creating ideas for purposeful action, to creating a logical specification for a technology-based information system. To facilitate this shift in focus, some explicit intellectual devices, or navigational devices, are offered, to structure and support further debate. These navigational devices enable those involved in the situation of concern, the clients, to conceptualise how purposeful action might unfold in the real world, so that some ideas for a serving system can be considered. Previous work addressing this problem area has been criticised for failing to provide a coherent movement from any ideas for purposeful action, to a logical specification for a supporting technology-based information system. By regarding the process of Client Led information system design as a collaborative sense making effort, the design process can be regarded as a learning system, or an appreciative system in Vickers' sense. By employing the same principles of inquiry throughout the design process and by using devices that maintain a similar view of any potential action, it is argued that a sense of coherence can be maintained and this is supported by experiences from practice.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) within the second round of the programme: Systems Engineering for Business Process Change (SEBPC, 1996

DOING INFORMATION SYSTEMS: INFORMATIZING AND SYSTEMATIZING FROM A PRACTICE LENS

This study applies the theory of practice to view the information systems (IS) field in terms of its essential activity—what it does as an intellectual enterprise. Drawing from Foucault, Bourdieu, Pickering and other practice theorists, it defines the IS field as continuously informatizing and systematizing its objects of study. Each of these two activities is elaborated into three dimensions: informatizing is characterized as automating, informating, and complexing; systematizing is characterized as analysing/ synthesizing, sensemaking and enacting. These dimensions are mapped into themes that can be characteristically said to be IS research, and based on each of their essential activities, provide a theoretically coherent image of research in IS that connects the dots despite the field’s apparent theoretical diversity and incongruity. Focusing on what the IS field does builds a distinctive identity for the field, opens up possibilities for theorizing the IT artefact and enables IS researchers to theorize not only traditional IS topics, but especially novel, unpredictable, and emergent socio-technical phenomena. By bringing back the IS field to its core concepts—information and system—the performative act of doing IS in both its discursive and non-discursive practices hold the potential for enhancing the intellectual and social relevance of the IS field

Investigating information management weaknesses in a local government organisation: A critical hermeneutic ethnographic case study of internet documents from information warfare and legal perspective(s)

In this thesis I develop an approach to analyse and interpret internet documents belonging to a particular organisation in a State of Australia. My intention in the research is to find ways to protect a local government organisation from litigation and other threats due to weaknesses in information management on the internet. Based on Gadamer\u27s (1985) approach to the interpretation of text discourse, this thesis is a critical hermeneutic ethnographic case study of one local government organisation investigating internet docunents from information warfare and legal perspective(s)

Interaction with rule-bound systems : introducing a new 'ideal type' problem context

This PhD thesis introduces a new ideal-type problem context of rule-bound systems. The thesis has been generated through a belief in the ability of metaphor to make the abstract visible, its capacity to make the unfamiliar familiar, and its effectiveness as a legitimate means of generating insight and organizing knowledge. Metaphorical description remains an integral part of this thesis from beginning to end.It shows how the new context of rule-bound systems provides closure of the ideal problem context grid along the participants access. Following the ideas that created the basis for this closure, insight into a new role for systems practitioners is provided and the ideal problem context grid developed to form of a Torus.Part 1 outlines the theoretical foundations and other inspirations that underpin the thesis. Grounded on a wider definition of rules, including rules in both a formal and informal sense, multiple ways of viewing rules are highlighted. The characteristics of rule-bound systems are identified, drawing comparisons with other 'ideal-types'. Suggestions are also drawn out as to how change might be affected in a rule-bound context. Part II of this thesis is an account of a real world intervention informed by Critical Systems Thinking, carried out under the auspices of Participatory Action Research. A number of systems research methods and concepts were employed to investigate the participation of students in policy making in two contrasting senior schools in the North of England - organizations believed to present many of the characteristics of the rule-bound system. The approach used was one mixing methods, specifically, the creation of a symbiotic relationship between Soft Systems Methodology and Critical Systems Heuristics. Part III describes the process of reflection undertaken and the conclusion to the thesis

A systems approach to health, well-being and the environment: air pollution and Shanghai's elderly

Using Soft Systems Methodologies (SSM) to transcend cultural boundaries in an open format, this paper examines the changes experienced by Shanghai's elderly in the context of health, well-being and the environment. Shanghai has undergone rapid urban transformation in the past three decades resulting in significant increases in cases of respiratory illness relating to environmental air pollution. Complex and non-linear issues have provoked a re-evaluation of traditional approaches to understanding real world problem situations. Systems thinking provides an epistemological foundation for methodologies that are holistic. A particular branch of systems thinking, SSM, highly values participant knowledge and provides techniques for examining this knowledge. However, the findings in this paper indicate that the participants believe health is not decreasing. Instead, a strong social hierarchy emerged demonstrating that the government heavily influences participant's opinions of the environment and their health. Additionally, overall increases in well-being are deemed as suitable tradeoffs for environmental degradation

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: NL

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: N