Social sensing of flood impacts in India: A case study of Kerala 2018

This is the final version. Available on open access from Elsevier via the DOI in this recordData availability: The Twitter data used in this word was purchased using the official Twitter PowerTrack API (https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/enterprise/powertrack-api/overview (accessed on 15 December 2020)). The Telegram data was collected from the Telegram desktop application (https://telegram.org/blog/export-and-more (accessed on 13 October 2020)). The Kerala Rescue data was initially sourced from the RebuildEarth Slack channel (https://rebuildearth.slack.com/(accessed on 15 October 2020)). The Rebuild Kerala data was collected from the Rebuild Kerala Database site (https://rebuild.lsgkerala.gov.in/rebuild2018/(accessed on 6 November 2020)).Flooding is a major hazard that is responsible for substantial damage and risks to human health worldwide. The 2018 flood event in Kerala, India, killed 433 people and displaced more than 1 million people from their homes. Accurate and timely information can help mitigate the impacts of flooding through better preparedness (e.g. forecasting of flood impacts) and situational awareness (e.g. more effective civil response and relief). However, good information on flood impacts is difficult to source; governmental records are often slow and costly to produce, while insurance claim data is commercially sensitive and does not exist for many vulnerable populations. Here we explore “social sensing” – the systematic collection and analysis of social media data to observe real-world events – as a method to locate and characterise the impacts (social, economic and other) of the 2018 Kerala Floods. Data is collected from two social media platforms, Telegram and Twitter, as well as a citizen-produced relief coordination web application, Kerala Rescue, and a government flood damage database, Rebuild Kerala. After careful filtering to retain only flood-related social media posts, content is analysed to map the extent of flood impacts and to identify different kinds of impact (e.g. requests for help, reports of medical or other issues). Maps of flood impacts derived from Telegram and Twitter both show substantial agreement with Kerala Rescue and the damage reports from Rebuild Kerala. Social media content also detects similar kinds of impact to those reported through the more structured Kerala Rescue application. Overall, the results suggest that social sensing can be an effective source of flood impact information that produces outputs in broad agreement with government sources. Furthermore, social sensing information can be produced in near real-time, whereas government records take several months to produce. This suggests that social sensing may be a useful data source to guide decisions around flood relief and emergency response.Newton FundWCSSP IndiaNatural Environment Research Council (NERC)Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Agile Software Development, XP 2022, which was held in Copenhagen, Denmark, in June 2022. XP is the premier agile software development conference combining research and practice. It is a unique forum where agile researchers, practitioners, thought leaders, coaches, and trainers get together to present and discuss their most recent innovations, research results, experiences, concerns, challenges, and trends.  XP conferences provide an informal environment to learn and trigger discussions and welcome both people new to agile and seasoned agile practitioners. This year’s conference was held with the theme “Agile in the Era of Hybrid Work”. The 13 full papers and 1 short paper presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 40 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: agile practices; agile processes; and agile in the large

A risk assessment method for online social transparency in enterprise information systems.

Enterprises integrate social networking tools within their information systems to enhance social networking, situational awareness, coordination and collaboration amongst their members. Social interaction can be empowered by traditional tools such as E-mail, or specialised social platforms, including Workplace by Facebook and Slack. More specialised systems enable bespoke features to declare, share and retrieve current and past engagements, team memberships, allocated tasks and priorities. Social transparency refers to the intentional sharing of information relating to intentions and reasoning of individual actions to others in the workplace. This includes announcing personal interests, activity status, priorities and personal achievements in order to explain individual intentions. Such transparency is typically intended to increase relatedness, motivation, coordination and trust amongst colleagues. However, an ad-hoc implementation of such transparency can pose issues such as information overload, social loafing, motivating unwanted grouping amongst colleagues and increasing pressure to perform in a particular manner. Although the current works on transparency and its effects illuminate the potential promise of managing social transparency in the enterprise, particularly in their online platforms, scholars still handle social transparency as an information quality issue and there is a lack of concrete knowledge about its potential risks and their factors. Moreover, there is a lack of systematic methods to evaluate and assess the quality of online social transparency in general and its shortcomings and risks in particular. In this research, we address the question of how to manage social transparency by identifying and assessing the risks of its ad-hoc practice. We provided a working definition of social transparency, and we assume that this transparency is an autonomous decision by organisation members to be open when conveying social information through online platforms. This research aims to provide a systematic method to identify and assess the risks of online social transparency within organisation members. To achieve the goal of this research, a qualitative approach has been adopted to explore the risks of online social transparency and how this transparency can be assessed. Implementing this approach resulted in several empirical studies involving employees, managers, systems analysts. Two focus groups resulted in exploring the concept of online social transparency and the assessment factors. An Interview study contributes to that aim by creating classifications of users’ perspective on risks and risk factors. An observational study conducted in two small multicultural companies to further explore the risks and risk factors from real organisational contexts. A novel assessment method for online social transparency was developed from these studies to assist system analysts and enterprise management in identifying and assessing the impact of online social transparency in their work environment

Serviços omni-canal na indústria de serviços bancários: investigação qualitativa multi-método

O art.º 64 (modalidade alternativa à tese) do regulamento de estudos da Universidade de Aveiro contempla a possibilidade de apresentação de uma modalidade alternativa para teses de doutoramento. Esta modalidade assinala que “caso a tese seja substituída por um conjunto de trabalhos científicos já publicados, estes terão de formar um conjunto coerente e relevante para a área cientifica do doutoramento (...)”. Neste contexto, esta tese é baseada em 8 publicações científicas, já publicadas, ou aceites para publicação, onde estão incluídas: comunicações orais em conferências internacionais, artigos em revistas científicas e capítulos de livros. O interesse pelo tema foi aliado ao crescente desenvolvimento da estratégia omni-canal na indústria de serviços onde a banca tem sido pioneira. O objetivo é contribuir para a caracterização e compreensão das implicações decorrentes de diferentes estratégias e configurações de canal de serviço para a gestão de operações e, consequentemente para a qualidade dos serviços e satisfação dos clientes. A tese está dividida em seis capítulos. Inicia-se com duas revisões sistemáticas da literatura, para analisar as oportunidades de investigação e divulgar os caminhos de pesquisa para os serviços multicanal. Seguidamente, explicam-se as opções metodológicas e o relacionamento que existe entre a engenharia e gestão industrial e as ciências sociais. A partir desse momento, entramos na fase empírica e, analisamos os serviços omni-canal à lente das redes de negócio baseadas em tecnologia e da gestão de reclamações. Terminamos a tese com uma breve conclusão, limitações e perspetivas de investigação futura. Com maior detalhe, a revisão da literatura sugeriu que à data, os estudos existentes estavam predominantemente formulados sob a perspetiva do marketing, sendo notória uma menor representatividade de estudos focados na gestão de processos e operações de serviço. Neste contexto, o trabalho desenvolvido vem oferecer algumas contribuições ao nível da gestão de operações de serviços com recurso a múltiplos canais, permitindo nomeadamente identificar, caraterizar e consolidar diferentes estratégias de múltiplos canais, e discutir princípios para o alinhamento entre estratégias de front-office de múltiplos canais e níveis operacionais da organização. O trabalho adotou uma metodologia qualitativa multi-método (i.e., revisão sistemática e estudo de caso) recorrendo a diferentes métodos e fontes para a recolha de dados (e.g., entrevistas), bem como para a sua análise. O trabalho permitiu também ilustrar como a estratégia multi-método oferece múltiplas possibilidades de investigação que conduzem a resultados fiáveis para estudos na área da engenharia. É geralmente equilibrada e integra estudos teóricos e empíricos, o que dá maior enfase às dimensões de desenvolvimento, triangulação e complementaridade. A evidência empírica analisada no âmbito deste trabalho sugere que a prestação de serviços através de múltiplos canais potencia novas sinergias organizacionais, e cria novos desafios operacionais, ao permitir a configuração de novos sistemas de serviço que oferecem aos clientes a integração de serviços e canais de diferentes prestadores, numa experiência única. As operações de serviços omni-canal estão agora a basear-se em redes de negócio com base tecnológica, já que as empresas estão a mudar a forma como competem entre si. As empresas estão a adotar processos e canais de modo a poderem colaborar em redes heterogéneas. Essas redes de empresas geralmente combinam mais de um canal e serviços. O que origina uma experiência multimarca, que ultrapassa claramente a experiência típica omnicanal. Nesta perspetiva, a rede heterogénea de empresas é uma experiência que envolve a combinação de uma tríade de diferentes elementos canaisserviços- organizações. O que está implícito é que as redes de negócios baseadas em tecnologia estão a revolucionar a indústria de serviços, embora pouco se tenha investigado. Porém, o movimento para estratégias omni-canal e de rede de negócios está longe de ser linear. Embora indesejáveis, as falhas de serviço omni-canal são inevitáveis, nesse sentido, a gestão de reclamações sempre foi considerada como uma ferramenta essencial para os gestores. Por esse facto, o trabalho incluiu ainda uma abordagem às falhas e recuperação de serviços num contexto omni-canal, bem como as debilidades da prestação de serviços associadas às novas redes baseadas em tecnologia, no contexto dos serviços financeiros. O estudo sugeriu que os clientes geralmente não estão conscientes dos atributos de recuperação de cada canal e são muitas vezes obrigados a procurar ajuda dos colaboradores de primeira linha, em particular quando a resposta nos canais virtuais não estão a reagir de acordo com as expectativas. Os clientes também já não estão dispostos a interagir com um grande número de canais, o que implica um elevado número de interações. Em alternativa, estão dispostos a aguardar por uma recuperação personalizada quando percebem que uma falha específica pode exigir um elevado nível de tomada de decisão. Essa tolerância ocorre quando os clientes percebem que uma empresa está a realizar todos os esforços necessários para a recuperação do serviço, de modo a garantir que a falha não se volte a repetir. Os resultados evidenciaram a importância da recuperação de soluções permanentes e da gestão de operações, para permitir processos de recuperação efetivos no contexto dos serviços omni-canal e de rede de negócio. No que diz respeito às redes de negócios baseadas em tecnologia, encontrámos quatro tipos de debilidades: a) barreiras à estratégia de migração de canais; b) barreiras à entrega automatizada de serviços; c) barreiras baseadas na integração do serviço; d) barreiras à padronização de operações em contextos de rede. Os gestores devem estar cientes das debilidades das redes de negócio baseadas em tecnologia, porque a sua (in)atividade pode afetar positivamente ou negativamente a imagem da marca de rede. A resolução das debilidades Tb2N permite que as organizações sejam mais sincronizadas e competitivas. Os resultados apresentados nesta tese revelam que as estratégias de canais múltiplos estão longe de estar ultrapassadas. Esta área de estudo requer atenção permanente da comunidade académica de modo a compreender a sua evolução, o aparecimento de novas estratégias e avançar a sua base de conhecimento. Para terminar, estimulamos o desenvolvimento de investigações futuras que permitam a realização de estudos empíricos dentro das redes de negócio baseadas em tecnologia, e que se foquem não só na recolha de dados de uma empresa, mas de toda a rede.The 64th article of the regulation of studies of the University of Aveiro considers the possibility of presenting an alternative to the doctoral thesis. This modality emphasis that “if the thesis is replaced by a set of scientific papers already published, they will have to form a coherent and relevant set for the scientific area of the doctorate (…)”. In this context, this thesis is based on 8 scientific publications, some already published, some accepted for publication, which include: oral communications in international conferences, articles in scientific journals and book chapters. The interest in the subject is coined with the growing development of the omni-channel strategy in the service industry where the banks have been pioneers. The objective is to contribute to the characterization and understanding of the implications of different strategies and configurations of the service channel strategies for the management of operations and, consequently, for the service quality and customer satisfaction. The thesis is divided into six chapters. It begins with two systematic reviews of literature: to analyze research opportunities and to disseminate research paths for multi-channel services. From here on, the methodological options are explained and so are the existing relationship between the industrial engineering and the social sciences. The empirical phase starts at this point as well as the analysis of the omni-channel services in the lens of technology-based business networks and complaint management. The literature review suggested, that, to date, the existing studies were predominantly formulated from a marketing perspective, the studies focused on process management and service operations are less represented. In this context, the work developed offers some contributions to the management of multiple channel service operations, to identify, characterize and consolidate different multiple channel strategies, and discuss principles for the alignment between multiple channel front-office strategies and operational levels of the organization. A qualitative multi-method methodology (i.e., systematic review and case study) using different methods and sources was adopted for data collection (e.g., interviews) as well for its analysis. The work also illustrated how the multimethod strategy offers multiple research possibilities that lead to reliable results for studies in the field of engineering. This strategy is generally balanced and integrates theoretical and empirical studies, which give greater emphasis to the dimensions of development, triangulation and complementarity. The empirical evidence analyzed in this thesis suggests that service delivery through multiple channels raises new organizational synergies and creates new operational challenges, by allowing the configuration of new service systems that offer customers the integration of different service and channels from different providers in a unique experience. The omni-channel service operations are now based on technology-based business networks, as companies are changing the way they compete with each other. Companies are adopting processes and channels so they can collaborate in heterogeneous networks. These business networks generally combine more than one channel and services, which creates a multi-brand experience, clearly going beyond the typical omni-channel experience. In this perspective, the heterogeneous network of companies is an experience that involves the combination of a triad of different elements channel-service-organization. What is implicit is that, although still unexplored, technology-based business networks are revolutionizing the service industry. Nevertheless, the move to omni-channel and business network strategies is far from linear. Although undesirable, the omni-channel service failures are inevitable, thus complaint management has always been considered an essential tool for managers. As a result, this work also includes an approach to service failures and recovery in an omni-channel context, as well as the weaknesses in the service delivery concerning new technology-based networks, in the context of financial services. The study suggested that clients are generally unaware of the recovery attributes of each channel and are often forced to seek help from the frontline employees, particularly when the recovery from the virtual channels are not in agreement with the expectations. Customers are not willing to interact with a large number of channels which would lead to a high number of interactions. Alternatively, customers are willing to wait for a personalized recovery when they realize that a specific failure may require a high level of decision-making. This tolerance occurs when customers realize that a company is making all the necessary efforts over the service recovery, in order to ensure that the failure will not be repeated again. The results revealed the importance of recovering permanent solutions and operations management, in order to allow effective recovery processes in the context of omni-channel and business network services. With regard to technology-based business networks, we found four types of weaknesses: a) barriers to channel migration strategies; b) barriers to automated service delivery; c) barriers to employee-technology service integration; d) barriers to operations standardization in network contexts. Managers should be aware of the weaknesses of technology-based business networks because their (in)activity can affect either positively or negatively network brand image. Solving Tb2N weaknesses allows organizations to be more synchronized and competitive. The results presented in this thesis reveal that the multiple-channel strategies are far from being overcome. This area of study requires permanent attention from the academic community in order to understand its evolution, the emergence of new strategies and to advance its knowledge base. Finally, we encourage the development of future research that allows the conduction of empirical studies within technology-based business networks, focusing not only on collecting data from one company but from the entire network.Programa Doutoral em Engenharia e Gestão Industria

Understanding organisational digital transformation: towards a theory of search

As new forms of digital technologies continue to proliferate, Information Systems (IS) scholars argue that we are witnessing a paradigmatic shift in the nature of technologies and their potential in profoundly changing organisations and ways of working. These technologies and changes have implications across the information technology and marketing functions. Scholars have only thus far developed a rather partial understanding of these technologies and changes, adopting either a single disciplinary lens (IS or Marketing). To throw light on the nature of these transformations, this thesis produces an interdisciplinary study that draws insights from not just IS but also Marketing. The thesis studies the emergence of an exemplary digital organisation which appears to be heralding in a new form of data manipulation. Drawing on qualitative data and through developing a practice-oriented approach, this research shows how: i) the technology is remaking the organisation internally, leading to ii) the development of new roles and expertise outside Information Technology (IT) departments, and iii) recreating the organisations’ relationship with its customers. Whilst existing discussions have primarily looked at the implications of such technologies for organisations and their interactions with customers, they have not studied ‘how’ customers have been made more central within organisations. This study develops the idea of the ‘extended user’ and shows how these users (or data about these customers) are leading to the reconfiguration of work practices. The main contribution of the thesis is to articulate how there is a new ‘search’ logic emerging. This logic contains three elements: (i) the work organisations do to foster and facilitate the ways customers are accessing and searching their offerings (remaking the organisation customer relationship); (ii) how they handle this search processes through building new internal knowledge and expertise (adapting and changing, disrupting routines); (iii) how this new expertise within the organisation is responding to platform developments (elastic reactions to platforms). The more theoretical contribution of this thesis is to extend practice-oriented studies of technology and organisation by proposing a new analytical approach to study the digital transformation of work and organisation. In responding to recent calls (e.g. Orlikowski and Scott 2016) for the development of approaches to understand how “algorithmic phenomena” have the potential to transform how work is done, the thesis proposes a multi-level analysis of the ‘search’ logic mentioned above

The Proceedings of the 23rd Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research (DGO2022) Intelligent Technologies, Governments and Citizens June 15-17, 2022

The 23rd Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research theme is “Intelligent Technologies, Governments and Citizens”. Data and computational algorithms make systems smarter, but should result in smarter government and citizens. Intelligence and smartness affect all kinds of public values - such as fairness, inclusion, equity, transparency, privacy, security, trust, etc., and is not well-understood. These technologies provide immense opportunities and should be used in the light of public values. Society and technology co-evolve and we are looking for new ways to balance between them. Specifically, the conference aims to advance research and practice in this field. The keynotes, presentations, posters and workshops show that the conference theme is very well-chosen and more actual than ever. The challenges posed by new technology have underscored the need to grasp the potential. Digital government brings into focus the realization of public values to improve our society at all levels of government. The conference again shows the importance of the digital government society, which brings together scholars in this field. Dg.o 2022 is fully online and enables to connect to scholars and practitioners around the globe and facilitate global conversations and exchanges via the use of digital technologies. This conference is primarily a live conference for full engagement, keynotes, presentations of research papers, workshops, panels and posters and provides engaging exchange throughout the entire duration of the conference