Relationships Between Risks in an IT Project Development Portfolio

More and more it is seen that IT (Information Technology) projects are managed as a whole as part of a IT project portfolio. As one of the arguments for doing so, risk management at the portfolio level was identified as one of the advantages that could benefit from this. This was based on the notion that risks are not independent from each other and that an understanding of relationships between risks should support portfolio management. Given this origin it is somewhat surprising that the notion of relationships between risks does not play a part in IT portfolio literature. This prompted this research project aimed at investigating the existence and relevance of risk relationships in practice. A series of interviews with experienced IT project portfolio managers confirms both the existence and relevance of the risk relationships providing a basis for further research

A Methodology for Evaluating Data and Output Misfits in Commercial Off-The-Shelf ERP Systems

This paper presents a methodology based on the task-technology fit theory to identify data and output misfits in the ex-ante evaluation of an off-the shelf enterprise resources planning (ERP) package. The proposed methodology consists of two stages: output misfit analysis and data misfit analysis. The purpose of the first stage is to identify corresponding field (output misfits) and data glossary for data misfit analysis. The latter stage identifies data misfits for every corresponding activity in the business process sequence. The proposed methodology provides a systematic approach to alleviate the difficulty and complexity in identifying data and output misfits. The identification results identify where the misfits are and provide a degree of mismatch, thus providing a practical basis for ERP tool selection to reduce the risk of failure in its implementation

I think "Hedging" could be a Feminist Issue in Software Engineering

When it comes to software engineering and the development life-cycle, there are a number of opportunities for under-represented groups, gender being the focus of this paper, for decisions to be affected by language. Considering existing linguistics research surrounding gendered language, specifically "Hedging", alongside various stages of the development life-cycle, this paper poses that "Hedging" should be seen as a feminist issue in software engineering, and presents five areas for further research to uncover the potential negative effects it is having, and what can be done to mitigate these. This paper focuses on the subtleties in conversation, and how conversation takes place, building on Feminist Conversation Analysis, Feminist Methodologies, and Software Engineering Methodologies

Mediation of accumulated knowledge inside IS programs

Objectives of the Study: The purpose of this study is to build a model of how knowledge can be transferred within IS programs. More specifically, it seeks to identify how knowledge accumulated in an IS project can be mediated to another project in the same program. Academic background and methodology: The study builds upon theories from the fields of organizational learning and organizational knowledge creation. In order to study the phenomenon in preferred depth, the research was executed as a single-case study via triangulation. The study analyzes the learning and knowledge transfer between two consecutive projects from a case company's master data management program. In addition to the ways the organization pursued knowledge transfer, the study seeks to identify how the accumulated knowledge in the prior project is observable in the subsequent one. Being a case study, the theory formulation was done simultaneously with the observations. The model utilized in the study was built upon the 4Is framework by Zollo and Winter (2002). Findings and conclusions: The study results in a framework describing unidirectional inter-project knowledge mediation in programs. It consists of two projects, both having separate individual and group level learning stocks and a shared organizational level learning stock. While the individual level is capable of harnessing and transferring only tacit and the organizational level only explicit knowledge, the group learning stock is able to mediate both and serves as a platform for knowledge conversion (tacit to explicit or vice versa). The study states that in addition to the current trend of studying explicit knowledge codification, research on organizational knowledge transfer should acknowledge the existence of two other knowledge mediation methods: reflection and allocation. The study identified all the theorized streams for knowledge transfer with the case company - except for the mediation of purely tacit knowledge on group level