Leadership and Context to Create the New Technological Society

Technological advances have been instrumental in creating a new form of society, where developments have led to the creation of new products and mechanisms, precipitating a revolution of all aspects of personal and professional life. Every sector has seen changes in service and product delivery with improvements and paradigm change being prevalent. The advent of disruptive technologies have caused major shifts in social, political and economic life. The recent global pandemic exemplifies the revolution in communications, where socialisation, commerce and professional activities, including teaching and government, could continue despite severe restrictions on the movements of most of the global population [1]. The 'new normal' was virtual, via standard, widely available technologies. This entails the use of systems thinking to develop new knowledge via artificial intelligence, analysis of big data to enhance understanding, formation of virtual teams to deliver societal outcomes, agile techniques to organise innovation and transformational leadership to stimulate the requisite changes. Research to identify and create these changes has been critical in global developments to date. This paper uses a review of a broad range of literature to consider the key requirements for leadership and environmental context to develop and sustain the new technological society. The objective is to try to provide a summary of some of the critical elements needed to further the 'new world order'. This will provide a basis for further debate and questions concerning leadership and the use of resources in the next iteration of the technological society

Guiding Design Principle Projects: A Canvas for Young Design Science Researchers

Particularly young researchers face challenges in organizing large design science research (DSR) projects and often struggle to capture, communicate, and reflect on important components to produce purposeful outcomes. Making informed decisions at the project start, such as selecting suitable kernel theories and development procedures, is of great relevance because they affect the entire design process and the resulting design products. Although DSR can produce different types of outcomes, from more situational artifacts to more abstract design knowledge, scholars point to the need for generalizing insights collected in such projects to advance the knowledge base. As design principles are among the prevailing forms of such design knowledge, this paper builds a visual inquiry tool—represented as a canvas—that navigates researchers through common components for crafting design principles and leverages collaborative reflections on essential project decisions. To build our canvas, we adapt inquiry-based learning (IBL) guidelines and visual inquiry tools to DSR education. Evaluations with doctoral students revealed promising indications for the canvas’s applicability and usefulness in guiding iterative DSR projects, reflecting on basic components, and communicating work-in-progress to other scholars and practice. Overall, we complement the body of DSR literature by providing an educational visual inquiry tool for producing design principles

Data Profiling in Cloud Migration: Data Quality Measures while Migrating Data from a Data Warehouse to the Google Cloud Platform

Internship Report presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Data Science and Advanced AnalyticsIn today times, corporations have gained a vast interest in data. More and more, companies realized that the key to improving their efficiency and effectiveness and understanding their customers’ needs and preferences better was reachable by mining data. However, as the amount of data grow, so must the companies necessities for storage capacity and ensuring data quality for more accurate insights. As such, new data storage methods must be considered, evolving from old ones, still keeping data integrity. Migrating a company’s data from an old method like a Data Warehouse to a new one, Google Cloud Platform is an elaborate task. Even more so when data quality needs to be assured and sensible data, like Personal Identifiable Information, needs to be anonymized in a Cloud computing environment. To ensure these points, profiling data, before or after it migrated, has a significant value by design a profile for the data available in each data source (e.g., Databases, files, and others) based on statistics, metadata information, and pattern rules. Thus, ensuring data quality is within reasonable standards through statistics metrics, and all Personal Identifiable Information is identified and anonymized accordingly. This work will reflect the required process of how profiling Data Warehouse data can improve data quality to better migrate to the Cloud

Research Perspectives: The Anatomy of a Design Principle

This essay derives a schema for specifying design principles for information technology-based artifacts in sociotechnical systems. Design principles are used to specify design knowledge in an accessible form, but there is wide variation and lack of precision across views regarding their formulation. This variation is a sign of important issues that should be addressed, including a lack of attention to human actors and levels of complexity as well as differing views on causality, on the nature of the mechanisms used to achieve goals, and on the need for justificatory knowledge. The new schema includes the well-recognized elements of design principles, including goals in a specific context and the mechanisms to achieve the goal. In addition, the schema allows: (1) consideration of the varying roles of the human actors involved and the utility of design principles, (2) attending to the complexity of IT-based artifacts through decomposition, (3) distinction of the types of causation (i.e., deterministic versus probabilistic), (4) a variety of mechanisms in achieving aims, and (5) the optional definition of justificatory knowledge underlying the design principles. We illustrate the utility of the proposed schema by applying it to examples of published research

To Outsource or Not to Outsource: Resource Decision-Making in the Project Management Environment

Every organisation engages in some form of outsourcing in order to sustain their operations. The decision to outsource certain functions and the selection of the optimum providers is an important aspect of organisational strategy. Failure in respect of outsourcing could have a critical effect on an organisation, leading to losses and ultimately its termination. Failure to utilise the most efficient and effective option can also lead to problems, as competitors may improve their relative position and remove business from the organisation. The key factors in making decisions to outsource activities are discussed. The importance of the features of the organisation and its context are emphasised. The rationale behind outsourcing is mentioned, principally this concerns the supply of products or services that the organisation would prefer not to make or perform, for various reasons. The form of the contract between the provider and client is also studied, in order to discern the key features. The option of global sourcing is considered. Organisations can move all or some of their activities overseas, termed offshoring. This paper considers outsourcing in respect of technology. The area of cloud computing is discussed, as both an illustration and a key mechanism for the provision of outsourced IT services. A thematic analysis of selected, key literatures is undertaken. A summary of factors related to outsourcing decision-making and contract formulation is provided, in order to assist practice and constitute a focus for further research. The principal facets of an outsourcing contract are identified, utilising an empirical study

Engineering Blockchain Based Software Systems: Foundations, Survey, and Future Directions

Many scientific and practical areas have shown increasing interest in reaping the benefits of blockchain technology to empower software systems. However, the unique characteristics and requirements associated with Blockchain Based Software (BBS) systems raise new challenges across the development lifecycle that entail an extensive improvement of conventional software engineering. This article presents a systematic literature review of the state-of-the-art in BBS engineering research from a software engineering perspective. We characterize BBS engineering from the theoretical foundations, processes, models, and roles and discuss a rich repertoire of key development activities, principles, challenges, and techniques. The focus and depth of this survey not only gives software engineering practitioners and researchers a consolidated body of knowledge about current BBS development but also underpins a starting point for further research in this field

VESTIGE OF THE PRESENT SOCIO-TECHNICAL FACTORS IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF LEGACY PERCEPTIONS OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS ARTIFACTS

Legacy systems are formerly adequate incumbent information systems perceived as insufficient through a combination of social and technical factors. Legacy systems continue to be an expensive and challenging information technology asset for organizations to manage. However, much of the existing information systems literature does not focus on end-of-life information systems phenomena. This dissertation responds to this need for research on end-of-life information systems phenomena from a behavioral perspective by reviewing the information systems literature on legacy systems, developing a definition of legacy systems as a socio-technical construction, creating a scale for measuring a legacy perception of a system, and developing four additional scales for measuring the characteristics of information technology artifacts. New scales and statistical models were tested through a survey of IT managers in the United States.Findings from this research provide support for legacy perception as a new construct. Results also suggest that system age is not a key influencer of legacy perception, but system capability shortcomings and a lack of system support availability are key influences. This research also models interactions of the physical structures of legacy systems, finding that integration and complexity positively influence the adaptability of legacy system artifacts. As well as the adaptability of an artifact and state tracking abilities have a positive influence on representational fidelity. This study also finds that a legacy perception of a system positively influences both system investment behaviors and intentions to replace a system. Implications for theory and practice and opportunities for future research are discussed

Research Perspectives: The Anatomy of a Design Principle

This essay derives a schema for specifying design principles for information technology-based artifacts in sociotechnical systems. Design principles are used to specify design knowledge in an accessible form, but there is wide variation and lack of precision across views regarding their formulation. This variation is a sign of important issues that should be addressed, including a lack of attention to human actors and levels of complexity as well as differing views on causality, on the nature of the mechanisms used to achieve goals, and on the need for justificatory knowledge. The new schema includes the well-recognized elements of design principles, including goals in a specific context and the mechanisms to achieve the goal. In addition, the schema allows: (1) consideration of the varying roles of the human actors involved and the utility of design principles, (2) attending to the complexity of IT-based artifacts through decomposition, (3) distinction of the types of causation (i.e., deterministic versus probabilistic), (4) a variety of mechanisms in achieving aims, and (5) the optional definition of justificatory knowledge underlying the design principles. We illustrate the utility of the proposed schema by applying it to examples of published researc