DETERMINING THE IMPACT OF BUSINESS STRATEGIES USING PRINCIPLES FROM GOAL-ORIENTED MEASUREMENT

In practice, the success or failure of business strategies is often determined by management as a gut feeling without taking into account quantitative information. If data is collected, it is often unclear how the data contributes to higher-level goals of the organization. GQM+Strategies® provides mechanisms for explicitly linking measurement goals to higher-level goals, and also to goals and strategies at the level of the entire business. It is based on experiences with software-related organizations, but is intended to be applicable in all kinds of businesses. This article gives an overview of the basic concepts and presents a practical case

Towards an Evaluation Framework for Business Process Integration and Management

Process-awareness in enterprise computing is a must in order to adequately support business processes. Particularly the interoperability of the (process-oriented) business information systems and the management of a company’s process map are difficult to handle. Process-oriented approaches (like workflow systems and enterprise application integration tools) offer promising perspectives in this respect. However, a major problem for project managers is the accomplishment of economic-oriented assessments of such approaches. Currently, there exists no suitable evaluation framework. This position paper discusses important issues related to the introduction of such a framework. Doing so, we distinguish two evaluation areas: Business Process Integration and Business Process Management. While the former operates at the technical level of process and application integration, the latter addresses organizational process topics. Starting from those two perspectives we describe benefits, evaluation criteria and metrics that are relevant to set up an evaluation framework

On the nature, origins and outcomes of Over Featuring in the new product development process

Developing new products and services beyond what is required by the needs of users, market demand and the resources of companies ranks among the top 10 risks leading to new product development (NPD) failures. This study defines and refers to this multifaceted phenomenon as ‘Over Featuring’ (OVF) to group different forms of excessive product development, from scope creep to overspecification and feature creep. The classification and theoretical development of the various forms of OVF is proposed, also origins and adverse outcomes, such as feature fatigue, are explored. Stage-Gate and Agile approaches are discussed in the light of the OVF phenomenon

Sea Level Requirements as Systems Engineering Size Metrics

The Constructive Systems Engineering Cost Model (COSYSMO) represents a collaborative effort between industry, government, and academia to develop a general model to estimate systems engineering effort. The model development process has benefited from a diverse group of stakeholders that have contributed their domain expertise and historical project data for the purpose of developing an industry calibration. But the use of multiple stakeholders having diverse perspectives has introduced challenges for the developers of COSYSMO. Among these challenges is ensuring that people have a consistent interpretation of the model’s inputs. A consistent understanding of the inputs enables maximum benefits for its users and contributes to the model’s predictive accuracy. The main premise of this paper is that the reliability of these inputs can be significantly improved with the aide of a sizing framework similar to one developed for writing software use cases. The focus of this paper is the first of four COSYSMO size drivers, # of Systems Requirements, for which counting rules are provided. In addition, two different experiments that used requirements as metrics are compared to illustrate the benefits introduced by counting rules

CREATING A COHERENT SCORE: THE MUSIC OF SINGLE-PLAYER FANTASY COMPUTER ROLE-PLAYING GAMES

This thesis provides a comprehensive exploration into the music of the ludic genre (Hourigan, 2005) known as a Computer Role-Playing Game (CRPG) and its two main sub-divisions: Japanese and Western Role-Playing Games (JRPGs & WRPGs). It focuses on the narrative category known as genre fiction, concentrating on fantasy fiction (Turco, 1999) and seeks to address one overall question: How do fantasy CRPG composers incorporate the variety of musical material needed to create a coherent score across the JRPG and WRPG divide? Seven main chapters form the thesis text. Chapter One provides an introduction to the thesis, detailing the research contributions in addition to outlining a variety of key terms that must be understood to continue with the rest of the text. A database accompanying this thesis showcases the vast range of CRPGs available; a literature review tackles relevant existing materials. Chapters Two and Three seek to provide the first canonical history of soundtracks used in CRPGs by dissecting typical narrative structures for games so as to provide context to their musical scores. Through analysis of existing game composer interviews, cultural influences are revealed. Chapters Four and Five mirror one another with detailed discussion respectively regarding JRPG and WRPG music including the influence that anime and Hollywood cinema have had upon them. In Chapter Six, the use of CRPG music outside of video games is explored, particularly the popularity of JRPG soundtracks in the concert hall. Chapter Seven concludes the thesis, summarising research contributions achieved and areas for future work. Throughout these chapters, the core task is to explain how the two primary sub-genres of CRPGs parted ways and why the music used to accompany these games differs so drastically

Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art

Projects that bring the ‘hard’ sciences into art are increasingly being exhibited in galleries and museums across the world. In a surge of publications on the subject, few focus on regions beyond Europe and the Anglophone world. Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art assembles a new corpus of art-science projects by Latin American artists, ranging from big-budget collaborations with NASA and MIT to homegrown experiments in artists’ kitchens. While they draw on recent scientific research, these art projects also ‘decolonize’ science. If increasing knowledge of the natural world has often gone hand-in-hand with our objectification and exploitation of it, the artists studied here emphasize the subjectivity and intelligence of other species, staging new forms of collaboration and co-creativity beyond the human. They design technologies that work with organic processes to promote the health of ecosystems, and seek alternatives to the logics of extractivism and monoculture farming that have caused extensive ecological damage in Latin America. They develop do-it-yourself, open-source, commons-based practices for sharing creative and intellectual property. They establish critical dialogues between Western science and indigenous thought, reconnecting a disembedded, abstracted form of knowledge with the cultural, social, spiritual, and ethical spheres of experience from which it has often been excluded. Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art interrogates how artistic practices may communicate, extend, supplement, and challenge scientific ideas. At the same time, it explores broader questions in the field of art, including the relationship between knowledge, care, and curation; nonhuman agency; art and utility; and changing approaches to participation. It also highlights important contributions by Latin American thinkers to themes of global significance, including the Anthropocene, climate change, and environmental justice. ‘Joanna Page presents a deeply researched account of contemporary art-science projects in Latin America. She situates them at the crux of current discussions on the decolonization of both the sciences and the arts: by questioning Eurocentric views on humanism and modernity, exploring expanded ideas of perception and cognition, and placing Western scientific knowledge within constellations of beliefs and practices that have been marginalised by colonial histories.’ – Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra, Birkbeck Colleg

Cartographic Efficacy: Histories of the Present, Participatory Futures

Throughout history, maps have held a particularly potent ability to inform and persuade their users. Recognizing the power maps and their modes of productions possess, participatory mapping has been celebrated for its capacity to empower systemically disenfranchised communities by way of establishing inclusive pathways for influencing collection and representation of spatial information. What has remained largely periphery to considerations of participatory mapping, however, has been discussions of map design. Decades of scholarship in both traditional and critical veins of cartography, however, argue that it’s the careful execution of design choices that grant the map its power. Without attention to design, cartographers warn, the map will not be able to successfully communicate its intended message. However, even with little direct discussion of map design being reported, participatory mapping has a proven track record in an expansive range of locations and contexts of successfully supporting communities in advocating for their rights. As such, this dissertation takes up this disciplinary dissonance to explore what, ultimately, makes a map effective. Through content analysis of cartographic education materials, interviews with leaders of participatory mapping projects, and participant observation at national and international professional gatherings for cartographers, this research reveals an underlying tension between what informs the established understandings of effectiveness and how that effectiveness is achieved. Such tension can result in instances of disciplinary shaming and gatekeeping which, in turn, limit exchange of information and consequently prevented an evolution of the understandings of effectiveness. This dissertation calls for an expansion of the discipline’s framework of cartographic efficacy. I ultimately invite cartographers to allocate resources for understanding forms of efficacy that expand beyond traditional modalities in addition to making space for those who are not professionally trained cartographers to assert their ability to make effective maps and explore design principles with aplomb

Ancient Greece and Rome in Videogames: Representation, Player Processes, and Transmedial Connections

Videogames are a hugely popular entertainment medium that plays host to hundreds of different ancient world representations. They provide very distinctive versions of recreated historical and mythological spaces, places, and peoples. The processes that go into their development, and the interactive procedures that accompany these games, must therefore be equally unique. This provides an impetus to both study the new ways in which ancient worlds are being reconfigured for gameplayers who actively work upon and alter them, and to revisit our conception of popular antiquity, a continuum within popular culture wherein ancient worlds are repeatedly received and changed in a variety of media contexts. This project begins by locating antiquity within a transmedial framework, permitting us to witness the free movement of representational strategies, themes, subtexts and ideas across media and into ancient world videogames. An original approach to the gameplay process, informed by cognitive and memory theory, characterises interaction with virtual antiquity as a procedure in which the receiver draws on preconceived notions and ideas of the ancient past to facilitate play. This notion of “ancient gameplay” as a reception process fed by general knowledges, previous pop-cultural engagements, and dim resonances of antiquity garnered from broad, informal past encounters allows for a wide, all-encompassing study of “ancient games”, the variety of sources they (and the player) draw upon, and the many experiences these games offer. The first chapter demonstrates the interrelationships between cinematic and televisual representations of antiquity and their action-based videogame counterparts, illustrating the ways in which branches of the onscreen tradition are borrowed and evolved in their new interactive forms. The next collective of ancient games locates “general” ancient materials in role-playing videogames, where familiar signifying materials are deployed to confront players with colonial spaces. The next chapter investigates the other side of ancient gameplay in foreign lands by investigating at how strategy games can become entrenched within a standardised visual vocabulary to provide one-sided, even troubling, impressions of classical empires represented in these gameworlds. The final chapter concretizes the transmedial, broadly cultural approach to ancient games and their play processes by presenting first-person videogames as multi-layered, multifaceted texts in which disparate, but specific, nodes of interpretative traditions surrounding ancient materials are drawn upon to immerse players in stylised, narrative-rich and thematically deep experiences. This study therefore has three primary motivations: to see how antiquity is represented and made functional in the interactive medium; to see how this affects player reception of these ancient games; and to build an interconnected “big picture” of antiquity in videogames within a wider media environment

Sonic utopia and social dystopia in the music of Hendrix, Reznor and Deadmau5

Twentieth-century popular music is fundamentally associated with electronics in its creation and recording, consumption, modes of dissemination, and playback. Traditional musical analysis, placing primacy on notated music, generally focuses on harmony, melody, and form, with issues of timbre and postproduction effects remaining largely unstudied. Interdisciplinary methodological practices address these limitations and can help broaden the analytical scope of popular idioms. Grounded in Jacques Attali's critical theories about the political economy of music, this dissertation investigates how the subversive noise of electronic sound challenges a controlling order and predicts broad cultural realignment. This study demonstrates how electronic noise, as an extra-musical element, creates modern soundscapes that require a new mapping of musical form and social intent. I further argue that the use of electronics in popular music signifies a technologically-obsessed postwar American culture moving rapidly towards an online digital revolution. I examine how electronic music technology introduces new sounds concurrent with generational shifts, projects imagined utopian and dystopian futures, and engages the tension between automated modern life and emotionally validating musical communities in real and virtual spaces. Chapter One synthesizes this interdisciplinary American studies project with the growing scholarship of sound studies in order to construct theoretical models for popular music analysis drawn from the fields of musicology, history, and science and technology studies. Chapter Two traces the emergence of the electronic synthesizer as a new sound that facilitated the transition of a technological postwar American culture into the politicized counterculture of the 1960s. The following three chapters provide case studies of individual popular artists' use of electronic music technology to express societal and political discontent: 1) Jimi Hendrix's application of distortion and stereo effects to narrate an Afrofuturist consciousness in the 1960s; 2) Trent Reznor's aggressive industrial rejection of Conservatism in the 1980s; and 3) Deadmau5's mediation of online life through computer-based production and performance in the 2000s. Lastly, this study extends existing discussions within sound studies to consider the cultural implications of music technology, noise politics, electronic timbre, multitrack audio, digital analytical techniques and online communities built through social media