User Participation in Consulting Projects: Client and Provider Role Variations

This study presents a variation scheme of participation roles in consulting projects. Typical consulting assignments in the area known as IS planning involve strategic planning and information systems management, enterprise architecture, information management or information technology governance. Participation is a crucial issue in consulting on these issues. In the literature on participation, different roles and tasks have been found, but it is not always specified, on what types of projects or systems the results are based. The literature on consulting suggests some models for work division. In a two-phase qualitative study, we first collect possible tasks in ICT consulting projects, and then, based on further explorations, create a model for role variations in consulting. We compare roles suggested in the literature on participation and on consulting to our findings. The suggested variation model gives a common framework of reference for negotiations between the provider and the client, and helps to anticipate the needed competences and resources from both parties, and discern between their responsibilities

CoRiMaS—An Ontological Approach to Cooperative Risk Management in Seaports

For today’s global value chains, seaports and their operations are indispensable components. In many cases, the cargo handling takes place in close proximity to residential and/or environmentally sensitive areas. Furthermore, seaports are often not operated by a single organization, but need to be considered as communities of sometimes hundreds of internal and external stakeholders. Due to their close cooperation in the cargo handling process, risk management should be a common approach among the internal stakeholders as well in order to effectively mitigate and respond to emerging risks. However, empirical research has revealed that risk management is often limited to the organization itself, which indicates a clear lack of cooperation. Primary reasons in this regard are missing knowledge about the relations and responsibilities within the port and differing terminologies. Therefore, we propose an ontology (CoRiMaS) that implements a developed reference model for risk management that explicitly aims at seaports with a cooperative approach to risk management. CoRiMaS has been designed looking at the Semantic Web and at the Linked Data model to provide a common interoperable vocabulary in the target domain. The key concepts of our ontology comprise the hazard, stakeholder, seaport, cooperation aspect, and risk management process. We validated our ontology by applying it in a case study format to the Port of Hamburg (Germany). The CoRiMaS ontology can be widely applied to foster cooperation within and among seaports. We believe that such an ontological approach has the potential to improve current risk management practices and, thereby, to increase the resilience of operations, as well as the protection of sensitive surrounding areas.</jats:p