How can SMEs benefit from big data? Challenges and a path forward

Big data is big news, and large companies in all sectors are making significant advances in their customer relations, product selection and development and consequent profitability through using this valuable commodity. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have proved themselves to be slow adopters of the new technology of big data analytics and are in danger of being left behind. In Europe, SMEs are a vital part of the economy, and the challenges they encounter need to be addressed as a matter of urgency. This paper identifies barriers to SME uptake of big data analytics and recognises their complex challenge to all stakeholders, including national and international policy makers, IT, business management and data science communities. The paper proposes a big data maturity model for SMEs as a first step towards an SME roadmap to data analytics. It considers the ‘state-of-the-art’ of IT with respect to usability and usefulness for SMEs and discusses how SMEs can overcome the barriers preventing them from adopting existing solutions. The paper then considers management perspectives and the role of maturity models in enhancing and structuring the adoption of data analytics in an organisation. The history of total quality management is reviewed to inform the core aspects of implanting a new paradigm. The paper concludes with recommendations to help SMEs develop their big data capability and enable them to continue as the engines of European industrial and business success. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

The Open Source Way of Working: a New Paradigm for the Division of Labour in Software Development?

The interest the Open Source Software Development Model has recently raised amongst social scientists has resulted in an accumulation of relevant research concerned with explaining and describing the motivations of Open Source developers and the advantages the Open Source methodology has over traditional proprietary software development models. However, existing literature has often examined the Open Source phenomenon from an excessively abstract and idealised perspective of the common interests of open source developers, therefore neglecting the very important organisational and institutional aspects of communities of individuals that may, in fact, have diverse interests and motivations. It is the aim of this paper to begin remedying this shortcoming by analysing the sources of authority in Open Source projects and the hierarchical structures according to which this authority is organised and distributed inside them. In order to do so, a theoretical framework based on empirical evidence extracted from a variety of projects is built, its main concerns being the description and explanation of recruitment, enculturation, promotion and conflict resolution dynamics present in Open Source projects. The paper argues that 'distributed authority' is a principal means employed by such communities to increase stability, diminish the severity and scope of conflicts over technical direction, and ease the problems of assessing the quality of contributions. The paper also argues that distributed authority is principally derived from interpersonal interaction and the construction of trust between individuals drawn to the project by diverse interests that are mediated and moderated through participants' common interest in the project's successful outcome. The paper presents several conclusions concerning the governance of open source communities and priorities for future research.open source software, hierarchies, trust, teams, co-operation.

Using grounded theory to understand software process improvement: A study of Irish software product companies

Software Process Improvement (SPI) aims to understand the software process as it is used within an organisation and thus drive the implementation of changes to that process to achieve specific goals such as increasing development speed, achieving higher product quality or reducing costs. Accordingly, SPI researchers must be equipped with the methodologies and tools to enable them to look within organisations and understand the state of practice with respect to software process and process improvement initiatives, in addition to investigating the relevant literature. Having examined a number of potentially suitable research methodologies, we have chosen Grounded Theory as a suitable approach to determine what was happening in actual practice in relation to software process and SPI, using the indigenous Irish software product industry as a test-bed. The outcome of this study is a theory, grounded in the field data, that explains when and why SPI is undertaken by the software industry. The objective of this paper is to describe both the selection and usage of grounded theory in this study and evaluate its effectiveness as a research methodology for software process researchers. Accordingly, this paper will focus on the selection and usage of grounded theory, rather than results of the SPI study itself

On the role of Prognostics and Health Management in advanced maintenance systems

The advanced use of the Information and Communication Technologies is evolving the way that systems are managed and maintained. A great number of techniques and methods have emerged in the light of these advances allowing to have an accurate and knowledge about the systems’ condition evolution and remaining useful life. The advances are recognized as outcomes of an innovative discipline, nowadays discussed under the term of Prognostics and Health Management (PHM). In order to analyze how maintenance will change by using PHM, a conceptual model is proposed built upon three views. The model highlights: (i) how PHM may impact the definition of maintenance policies; (ii) how PHM fits within the Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) and (iii) how PHM can be integrated into Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) programs. The conceptual model is the research finding of this review note and helps to discuss the role of PHM in advanced maintenance systems.EU Framework Programme Horizon 2020, 645733 - Sustain-Owner - H2020-MSCA-RISE-201

Can Business Development Services practitioners learn from theories on innovation and services marketing?�

innovation, services, marketing, innovation, business development

The Emergent Logic of Health Law

The American health care system is on a glide path toward ruin. Health spending has become the fiscal equivalent of global warming, and the number of uninsured Americans is approaching fifty million. Can law help to divert our country from this path? There are reasons for deep skepticism. Law governs the provision and financing of medical care in fragmented and incoherent fashion. Commentators from diverse perspectives bemoan this chaos, casting it as an obstacle to change. I contend in this Article that pessimism about health law’s prospects is unjustified, but that a new understanding of health law’s disarray is urgently needed to guide reform. My core proposition is that the law of health care provision is best understood as an emergent system. Its contradictions and dysfunctions cannot be repaired by some master design. No one actor has a grand overview—or the power to impose a unifying vision. Countless market players, public planners, and legal and regulatory decisionmakers interact in oft-chaotic ways, clashing with, reinforcing, and adjusting to each other. Out of these interactions, a larger scheme emerges—one that incorporates the health sphere’s competing interests and values. Change in this system, for worse and for better, arises from the interplay between its myriad actors. By quitting the quest for a single, master design, we can better focus our efforts on possibilities for legal and policy change. We can and should continuously survey the landscape of stakeholders and expectations with an eye toward potential launching points for evolutionary processes—processes that leverage current institutions and incentives. What we cannot do is plan or predict these evolutionary pathways in precise detail; the complexity of interactions among market and government actors precludes fine-grained foresight of this sort. But we can determine the general direction of needed change, identify seemingly intractable obstacles, and envision ways to diminish or finesse them over time. Dysfunctional legal doctrines, interest group expectations, consumers’ anxieties, and embedded institutional and cultural barriers can all be dealt with in this way, in iterative fashion. This Article sets out a strategy for doing so. To illustrate this strategy, I suggest emergent approaches to the most urgent challenges in health care policy and law—the crises of access, value, and cost

Integrating automated support for a software management cycle into the TAME system

Software managers are interested in the quantitative management of software quality, cost and progress. An integrated software management methodology, which can be applied throughout the software life cycle for any number purposes, is required. The TAME (Tailoring A Measurement Environment) methodology is based on the improvement paradigm and the goal/question/metric (GQM) paradigm. This methodology helps generate a software engineering process and measurement environment based on the project characteristics. The SQMAR (software quality measurement and assurance technology) is a software quality metric system and methodology applied to the development processes. It is based on the feed forward control principle. Quality target setting is carried out before the plan-do-check-action activities are performed. These methodologies are integrated to realize goal oriented measurement, process control and visual management. A metric setting procedure based on the GQM paradigm, a management system called the software management cycle (SMC), and its application to a case study based on NASA/SEL data are discussed. The expected effects of SMC are quality improvement, managerial cost reduction, accumulation and reuse of experience, and a highly visual management reporting system

A NEW CLASSIFICATION OF IT RESOURCES: A RESEARCH AGENDA UNDER THE COMPLEMENTARITY OF THE RBV

The effects of Information Technology (IT) on firm performance constitute one of the most recent lines of research. In developing this study, we take a Resource-Based View (RBV) as our basic theoretical focus. Adopting this paradigm means that IT alone is incapable of sustaining a competitive advantage (CA), making it necessary to analyze the existence of resources that complement IT to achieve greater organizational performance. The goal of this paper is to determine the combination of key resources, both exclusively IT resources and other organizational resources not necessarily belonging to this technology, to set a useful research agenda to contribute to the improvement of current knowledge of the IT effects on organizational performance.Information Technology, organizational performance, RBV.

Eco‐Holonic 4.0 Circular Business Model to Conceptualize Sustainable Value Chain Towards Digital Transition

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize a circular business model based on an Eco-Holonic Architecture, through the integration of circular economy and holonic principles. A conceptual model is developed to manage the complexity of integrating circular economy principles, digital transformation, and tools and frameworks for sustainability into business models. The proposed architecture is multilevel and multiscale in order to achieve the instantiation of the sustainable value chain in any territory. The architecture promotes the incorporation of circular economy and holonic principles into new circular business models. This integrated perspective of business model can support the design and upgrade of the manufacturing companies in their respective industrial sectors. The conceptual model proposed is based on activity theory that considers the interactions between technical and social systems and allows the mitigation of the metabolic rift that exists between natural and social metabolism. This study contributes to the existing literature on circular economy, circular business models and activity theory by considering holonic paradigm concerns, which have not been explored yet. This research also offers a unique holonic architecture of circular business model by considering different levels, relationships, dynamism and contextualization (territory) aspects