Development of a project level performance measurement model for improving collaborative design team work

This research explored a new direction of improving collaborative design by performance measurement. More specifically, a novel 3-dimensional performance measurement model is developed and the purpose of this model is to help project managers improve team collaboration by indicating strengths and weaknesses of team members during the project development process. Considering the complexity of collaborative design work, a multiple criteria model is proposed to reflect the design dynamics, which highlights five performance indicators: efficiency, effectiveness, collaboration, management skills and innovation. These five indicators are mostly influenced by role-based performance measurement criteria (the second dimension). Design and development process (time) is also considered (the third dimension). This 3D model allows all involved design participants to measure work performance at any time during the product development process. In order to develop this model, the role-based task analysis and industrial survey methods were utilized. Three groups of role-based product design and development performance measurement criteria were identified for measuring design performance of the top managers, middle managers and individual designers in a project team. A 3-dimensional performance measurement method was proposed to calculate final performance scores from a performance measurement matrix. The proposed model was evaluated as a tool which can support project managers to reduce potential design and collaboration risks and increase confidence in decision-making process. The model has been discussed on implementing in a web-based application for measuring design performance throughout the product design and development proces

Knowledge Management for Public Administrations: Technical Realizations of an Enterprise Attention Management System

The improvement of governments’ efficiency has gained great importance and validity especially in the current times of economic downturn. E-Government constitutes the most contemporary techno-managerial proposition in the track of possible interventions. The paper addresses, more specifically, empowerments necessitated by Public Administration (PA) organizations. Anchored on the needs of three real-life cases, the paper describes the conception and the realization of an IT artefact together with its methodological appeals aiming at improving information access and delivery and thus PAs’ decision making capacity. Our proposition constitutes a novel approach for managing users’ attention in knowledge intensive organizations which goes beyond informing a user about changes in relevant information towards proactively supporting the user to react on changes. The approach is based on an expressive attention model, which is realized by combining ECA (Event-Condition-Action) rules with ontologies. The technical realizations described in the paper constitute the underlying infrastructure of an Enterprise Attention Management System

Integration of decision support systems to improve decision support performance

Decision support system (DSS) is a well-established research and development area. Traditional isolated, stand-alone DSS has been recently facing new challenges. In order to improve the performance of DSS to meet the challenges, research has been actively carried out to develop integrated decision support systems (IDSS). This paper reviews the current research efforts with regard to the development of IDSS. The focus of the paper is on the integration aspect for IDSS through multiple perspectives, and the technologies that support this integration. More than 100 papers and software systems are discussed. Current research efforts and the development status of IDSS are explained, compared and classified. In addition, future trends and challenges in integration are outlined. The paper concludes that by addressing integration, better support will be provided to decision makers, with the expectation of both better decisions and improved decision making processes

Information support and interactive planning in the digital factory : approach and industry-driven evaluation

In the modern world we are continuously surrounded by information. The human brain has to analyse and interpret this information to transform into useable knowledge that is then used in decision making activities. The advent and implementation of Industry 4.0 will make it a requirement for systems within factories to interact and share large quantities of information with each other. This large volume of information will make it even more difficult for the human resources within the factory to sift through the large amount of information required since there is a limit to the information that our brains can cope with. Just in time information retrieval (JITIR) within the digital factory environment aims to provide support to the human stakeholders in the system by proactively yet non-intrusively providing the required information at the right time based on the users context. This paper will therefore provide an insight into the cognitive difficulties experienced by humans in the digital factory and how JITIR can tackle these challenges. By validating the JITIR concept, several industry scenarios have been evaluated: an exemplary model, concerning the machine tool industry, is presented in the paper. The results of this research are a set of guidelines for the development of a digital factory support tool.peer-reviewe

The Internet-of-Things Meets Business Process Management: Mutual Benefits and Challenges

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a network of connected devices collecting and exchanging data over the Internet. These things can be artificial or natural, and interact as autonomous agents forming a complex system. In turn, Business Process Management (BPM) was established to analyze, discover, design, implement, execute, monitor and evolve collaborative business processes within and across organizations. While the IoT and BPM have been regarded as separate topics in research and practice, we strongly believe that the management of IoT applications will strongly benefit from BPM concepts, methods and technologies on the one hand; on the other one, the IoT poses challenges that will require enhancements and extensions of the current state-of-the-art in the BPM field. In this paper, we question to what extent these two paradigms can be combined and we discuss the emerging challenges