Research on Role-Centric Collaborative Technology

With the development of e-business, the collaboration between enterprises is increasingly strengthened, which, at the same time, challenges coordination technologies in distributed enterprise transactions. Workflow management has as its priority the support of coordination functions and workflow interoperability points the way towards collaborative business environments. Though WfMC, Workflow Management Coalition, specifies the abstract interoperability, differences such as workflow concept models, ontology etc. cannot be dealt with effectively because the specification is only technical. On the other hand, portal technology focuses on the integration of information and application services customized according to roles. It can provide support for the interoperability of workflows. In this paper, workflows are integrated with portal technology. And a role centric collaborative environment is proposed which is a way out for problems existing in workflow interoperability

Learning architectures and negotiation of meaning in European trade unions

As networked learning becomes familiar at all levels and in all sectors of education, cross-fertilisation of innovative methods can usefully inform the lifelong learning agenda. Development of the pedagogical architectures and social processes, which afford learning, is a major challenge for educators as they strive to address the varied needs of a wide range of learners. One area in which this challenge is taken very seriously is that of trade unions, where recent large-scale projects have aimed to address many of these issues at a European level. This paper describes one such project, which targeted not only online courses, but also the wider political potential of virtual communities of practice. By analysing findings in relation to Wengers learning architecture, the paper investigates further the relationships between communities of practice and communities of learners in the trade union context. The findings suggest that a focus on these relationships rather than on the technologies that support them should inform future developments

Boundary Spanning through Enterprise Social Software: An External Stakeholder Perspective

Recent boundary spanning literature has recommended a shift toward assessing the role of virtual tools—such as social media. Simultaneously the proliferation of Enterprise Social Software (ESS) points to the need to theorize and investigate the supra-individual usage of these tools. This exploratory study responds to both mandates through a longitudinal, multi-method investigation of ESS’ effects on boundary spanning by virtual research teams within a worldwide provider of workplace solutions. Combining survey, ESS log, and content data, this study complements the dominant internal focus of the boundary spanning literature with an external stakeholder perspective to analyze the types of boundary spanning activities enacted through ESS, the perceptions of these activities by external parties, as well as the effect of ESS hereon. Disentangling ESS’ effects on boundary spanning not only extends our current understanding of the potential role of social media, but can further inform the design of supportive tools

Intra-Organizational Boundary Spanning: A Machine Learning Approach

With the ubiquity of data, new opportunities have emerged for the application of data science and machine learning approaches to help enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of knowledge management. With the growing use of social media technologies in enterprise settings, one specific area of knowledge management warranting the use of big data analytics involves cross-boundary knowledge creation and management. The objective of this paper is to develop and test a machine learning approach that can assist knowledge managers in detecting three types of intra-organizational boundary spanning activities with the goal of predicting and improving such important outcomes as team effectiveness, collaboration, knowledge sharing, and innovation

Boundary Objects and their Use in Agile Systems Engineering

Agile methods are increasingly introduced in automotive companies in the attempt to become more efficient and flexible in the system development. The adoption of agile practices influences communication between stakeholders, but also makes companies rethink the management of artifacts and documentation like requirements, safety compliance documents, and architecture models. Practitioners aim to reduce irrelevant documentation, but face a lack of guidance to determine what artifacts are needed and how they should be managed. This paper presents artifacts, challenges, guidelines, and practices for the continuous management of systems engineering artifacts in automotive based on a theoretical and empirical understanding of the topic. In collaboration with 53 practitioners from six automotive companies, we conducted a design-science study involving interviews, a questionnaire, focus groups, and practical data analysis of a systems engineering tool. The guidelines suggest the distinction between artifacts that are shared among different actors in a company (boundary objects) and those that are used within a team (locally relevant artifacts). We propose an analysis approach to identify boundary objects and three practices to manage systems engineering artifacts in industry

What is a networked business?

Due to increasing competitive pressure in their market, many enterprises are implementing changes to the way they conduct business. These changes range from implementing new IT, to redesigning the structure of the organization and entering into all kinds of cooperations with other enterprises, forming what we call a ‘networked business’. In this paper, we try to explain the origin of the networked business from three different, but related, perspectives: resource dependence, transaction cost and IT impact. We also explore some terms that are used to describe interorganizational structures to find their principal components in an attempt to determine relationships between them and find a broad and precise, new definition of the term ‘networked business’

The Management and Use of Social Network Sites in a Government Department

In this paper we report findings from a study of social network site use in a UK Government department. We have investigated this from a managerial, organisational perspective. We found at the study site that there are already several social network technologies in use, and that these: misalign with and problematize organisational boundaries; blur boundaries between working and social lives; present differing opportunities for control; have different visibilities; have overlapping functionality with each other and with other information technologies; that they evolve and change over time; and that their uptake is conditioned by existing infrastructure and availability. We find the organisational complexity that social technologies are often hoped to cut across is, in reality, something that shapes their uptake and use. We argue the idea of a single, central social network site for supporting cooperative work within an organisation will hit the same problems as any effort of centralisation in organisations. We argue that while there is still plenty of scope for design and innovation in this area, an important challenge now is in supporting organisations in managing what can best be referred to as a social network site 'ecosystem'.Comment: Accepted for publication in JCSCW (The Journal of Computer Supported Cooperative Work

Knowledge as Culture

Culture must not be seen as something that merely reflects an organization’s social reality: rather, it is an integral part of the process by which that reality is constructed. Knowledge management initiatives, per se, are not culture change projects; but, if culture stands in the way of what an organization needs to do, they must somehow impact

The role of boundary objects in the co-evolution of design and use: the KMP project experimentation

Nowadays, it is widely recognized that an ICT tool cannot be built without knowing who will use it and what they will do with. In this perspective, Human-Computer Interaction community (Carroll, 1990; Jarke, Tung Bui and Carroll, 1998; Young and Barnard, 1987; Young and al., 1989) developed a scenario-based approach contrasting with the traditional information system design. The scenario describes an existing or envisioned system from the perspective of one or more users and includes a narration of their goals, plans and reactions (Rosson and Carroll, 2002). As a result, design is founded on the use of scenarios as a central representation for the analysis and design of use. The scenario-based design appears to be a first step in the integration of users in the design of ICT tool. However, we would like to underline in this paper a more active role of users in the design process. According to Orlikowski (2000) while a technology can be seen to have been constructed with particular materials and inscribed with developers' assumptions and knowledge about the world at a point in time, it is only when this technology is used in recurrent social practices that it can be said to structure user's action. The use of technology in recurrent social practices must be considered because how technological properties will for the moment be used or appropriate is not inherent or predetermined. Finally, this approach leads us to dissociate the designers' world from the users' world. In this perspective, the design project is the result of the co-evolution and the convergence of both worlds: on the one hand, the world of design and a first integration of users by scenarios; on the other hand, the world of users where innovation is the art of interesting an increasing number of allies who will make the world of design stronger and stronger. The objective of this paper is to understand the mechanisms of interaction between the world of design and that of users i.e. between loops of co-design and loops of uses. Indeed, according to Akrich, Callon and Latour (1988) we adopt a whirlwind model of innovation. In this perspective, “innovation continuously transforms itself according to the trials to which it is submitted i.e. of the “interessements” tried out » (Akrich and al., 2002: 7). We will demonstrate that the key success of an innovation depends on the co-evolution and convergence of design and use around boundary objects developed during this process (see Figure 1). More specifically, we will show the role of boundary objects on the integration and on the involvement of users in the design process. In order to do so, we carried out an empirical research – the Knowledge Management Platform project - located in the scientific park of Sophia Antipolis (Alpes-Maritimes, France), focusing on the Telecom Valley® (TV) association which gathers the main actors of the Sophia Antipolis Telecom cluster. Indeed, the KMP project aims to build a semantic web service of competencies in order to enhance exchange and combination dynamics of knowledge within the Telecom cluster thanks to an interactive mapping of competencies. This paper will comprise three parts: Based on the researches of Akrich, Callon and Latour (1988), Hatchuel and Mollet (1986), Orlikowski (2000), Romme and Endenburg (2006) we will identify and analyse in a first part the process of design. The combination of these approaches leads us to distinguish the design' world from the users' world. In this perspective, the success of an innovation may be explained by the co-evolution and the convergence of these two worlds. In this process, we suggest that boundary objects play a key role in the convergence of these two worlds. We will present in a second part the empirical study of the KMP project within the TV network. The KMP project involved researchers from socio-economic sciences (GREDEG Laboratory, UNSA-CNRS, Rodige and Latapses teams), cognitive sciences and artificial intelligence (INRIA, Acacia team), telecommunications (GET) and users (TV) for a total force of 187 men per month for a two-year period (2003-2005). At this present time this project is being set up in a pre-industrialization phase, supported by TV and the PACA region. Here, we will analyse the specific process of design experimented by KMP. Finally, the third part discusses the role of boundary objects in the KMP experimentation. In this part, we will show the evolution of boundary objects during the loops of design. More specifically, the focus will be on the emergence of compromises between designers and users, their materialisation in boundary objects and finally their evolution during the design' process.boundary objects, IS development, actor network theory