Managing Enterprise Systems Post Implementation through Competency Centers: An Inquiry into Assemblage and Emergence

Enterprise Systems (ESs) are more than a collection of people, technology, processes, and capabilities. The responsibilities of post implementation management of ES lie in the unit called the Competency Center (CC). The CC has a bidirectional relationship with ESs wherein the CC influences the shaping of ESs, and the CC is affected by the dynamic interaction between people, technology, process, and capabilities within the ES. These dynamic interactions keep the CC, fluid and always in-process. The general-use definition of the term “process” as used in the Enterprise Systems literature treats the notion as “repeatable processes” or replicable processes . However, arising from comparative case studies in four large organizations, I found that decision making, managing, and governing in the ES are not “replicable processes”, not reifications of structural variations over time when examined through the lens of the Assemblage Theory. Assemblage Theory incorporates the dynamic interplay of two continua: the first, territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization, and the second, material vs. expression. Although the notion of the terms formation, deformation, and reformation are suitable for understanding the processes these CCs encounter in a broad and general manner, they do not sufficiently describe the not-so-solid, never-quite-finished, always in-process or structuring referred to by Hopper (1996) as emergent regularities . In contrast to the notion of stable structures, this dissertation research adopts the language of Deleuzian assemblage of Territorialization, deterritorialization, and Reterritorialization. Although the four study organizations planned and intended to develop clearly defined competency centers, which would create formalized processes and procedures to manage the post implementation phase, none of the study organizations ever achieved the anticipated stability. Instead, the CCs exhibited the signs of being ‘in-process’ and ‘structuring’. The contribution of this research to the IS field is an understanding of the CCs as processes as opposed to structures and how CCs structuring impact the ESs in organizations

Knowledge Solutions: Tools, Methods, and Approaches to Drive Development Forward and Enhance Its Effects

[Excerpt] Today, sustainable competitive advantage derives from strenuous efforts to identify, cultivate, and exploit an organization’s core competencies. This calls for relentless design of strategic architecture, deployment of competence carriers, and commitment to collaborate across silos. Put simply, core competencies are the product of collective learning: their tangible fruits are composite packages of products and services that anticipate and meet demand. Knowledge is what you learn from experience before, during, and after the event. Since it is both a thing and a flow, the best way to manage knowledge is to cater at all times to the environment in which it can be identified, created, stored, shared, and used. Tools, methods, and approaches are needed to enable that. And so, to drive development forward and enhance its effects, the Asian Development Bank has, since 2008, published the Knowledge Solutions series, available at www.adb.org/knowledgesolutions. It aims to build competencies in the areas of strategy development, management techniques, collaboration mechanisms, knowledge sharing and learning, and knowledge capture and storage—all of which are essential to high-performance organizations

Unify, Regionalize, Diversify: An Economic Development Agenda for Nevada

Nevada stands at a crossroads, yet it appears ready to remap its future.Silver Staters sense that the current economic slump has not been just a temporary reversal but a challenge to the state’s traditional growth model—one that has revealed an economy over-dependent on consumption sectors, prone to booms and busts, and too little invested in innovation and economic diversification. And yet, for all that Nevadans have been early to recognize that the current slump will beget, in some places, innovation and renewal, and in other places erosion—and so requires action. To that end, this report draws on an intense five-month inquiry that sought to define the nature of the economic challenges the state and its major regions face; identify industries and industry clusters that have the highest potential for expansion as part of an economic diversification effort; and suggest policy options that will enable the state, its regions, and the private sector to work more effectively to build a more unified, regionally vibrant, and diversified Nevada

Frugal innovation for healthcare: strategies and tools for the identification and evaluation of frugal and reverse innovations in healthcare

Global healthcare systems are united by their desire to widen patient access to safe and effective clinical services in the face of increasing demand and financial constraints. In low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), a variety of ingenious product and process solutions, termed frugal innovations, have been able to deliver services at a fraction of the cost. It is the broad proposition of this work that such ideas could be applicable to high-income countries (HICs), a concept labeled reverse innovation. Using a conceptual model of innovation scouting derived from the causal mechanism of critical realism, this work examined the development and testing of a tool to deductively identify frugal innovations in healthcare (FIH-ID tool) and then evaluated methodology to assess the reversibility of potential of frugal innovations. The FIH-ID tool demonstrated consistently acceptable inter-rater reliability scores using different methods of application and different raters, moreover, construct validity was shown by its ability to identify well-known frugal innovations. With respect to the assessment of the reversibility potential, the results of the present study highlighted the challenges of undertaking such a complex evaluation process using a simple scoring system. Raters achieved poor levels of inter-rater reliability and only 2 innovations were thought likely to reverse to a HIC. This study presents the first application of a critical realist approach to innovation scouting. It has identified a cohort of 76 potential frugal innovations in healthcare suggesting that the FIH-ID tool is likely to be a valuable asset for similar studies in the future. It has highlighted the challenges of assessing the reversibility potential of innovations from LMICs. It has documented the emergence of the global innovation curator, entities that seek to identify, curate and promote innovations from LMICs, and it proposes a conceptual model for the role of global innovation curators in the diffusion of innovation.Open Acces

Tempest: Geometries of Play

Atari’s 1981 arcade hit Tempest was a “tube shooter” built around glowing, vector-based geometric shapes. Among its many important contributions to both game and cultural history, Tempest was one of the first commercial titles to allow players to choose the game’s initial play difficulty (a system Atari dubbed “SkillStep”), a feature that has since became standard for games of all types. Tempest was also one of the most aesthetically impactful games of the twentieth century, lending its crisp, vector aesthetic to many subsequent movies, television shows, and video games. In this book, Ruggill and McAllister enumerate and analyze Tempest’s landmark qualities, exploring the game’s aesthetics, development context, and connections to and impact on video game history and culture. By describing the game in technical, historical, and ludic detail, they unpack the game’s latent and manifest audio-visual iconography and the ideological meanings this iconography evokes

Play Among Books

How does coding change the way we think about architecture? Miro Roman and his AI Alice_ch3n81 develop a playful scenario in which they propose coding as the new literacy of information. They convey knowledge in the form of a project model that links the fields of architecture and information through two interwoven narrative strands in an “infinite flow” of real books

Using Writing Studio Pedagogy To Help Students Reclaim Their Disabilities And Sexualities In A High School Writers\u27 Workshop

This dissertation is an exploration into what students stand to gain from being mentored in terms of reclaiming their disabilities and sexualities. Writing studio pedagogy supports the following ideas: an understanding that composition is a social process and, therefore, must take place in a social environment, an acceptance of multiple composing tools, multiple problem-solving strategies, an acceptance that students possess many and different creative thinking processes, an awareness that spatial design matters for successful teaching and learning, and, finally, an understanding of writing as play. My primary research question is how can practicing writing studio pedagogy transform the writing classroom into a space for students who identify as learning-disabled and LGBT to reclaim their disabilities and sexualities? My research project reveals that students who identify as learning-disabled and LGBT can reclaim their disabilities and sexualities when they are empowered, by others and themselves, to relearn their differences into strengths and use those strengths to become agents of social change by means of composing activist texts for their schools and their communities. By becoming agents of social change at school and in their communities, learning-disabled and LGBT students can motivate teachers and peers to unlearn accommodations and stereotypes. I bring a feminist methodology to my dissertation, committing myself to a deep listening of my research participants\u27 personal stories--triumphs and failures--and what Royster and Kirsch call critical imagination to their academic projects that are composed in our writers\u27 workshop. One distinguishing feature of my research project from other research projects about writing studios and about learning disabilities is the grounded theory method that I implement to discover answers to my research question. Grounded theory, with the mantra everything is data , made it possible for me to consider not only the interviews I collected from my two research participants and their academic work but also the memos that I wrote about my interactions and observations with my research participants in our writers\u27 workshop course. Another distinguishing feature of this dissertation is how I contextualize my research project in stories from my life as a learning-disabled, LGBT student and teacher. I weave into the chapters reports from my pediatrician, neurologist, neuropsychiatrist, teachers, and residence counselor, which point to how critical my own successes and failures were to brining this dissertation to fruition. My mother saved eighteen years of documentation on me, and when I asked her why she went to all the trouble to move literally pounds of reports with her from house to house, she replied that she didn\u27t know. She just imagined them to be useful one day. Perhaps the most distinguishing feature of my research project is my focus on secondary students who are both open about their learning disabilities and their sexualities. My research participants are courageous because they came to this research project looking for an opportunity to help make a positive change in how I and my colleagues teach a demographic of student who receives little positive attention in the public schools across the United States. The projects my two research participants compose--a video on being a transgender teenager, a coming out blog on Tumblr, a mural for our classroom, and an invisible theatre project on bullying aimed to engage our school in an important dialogue--highlight their courage to advocate for social change in their lives and at their school and also their strengths as multimodal writers

Innovation team members: emotive outlook and profiles comparisons

Continuous innovation provides competitive advantage to organisations. Teams are considered as a vehicle for achieving innovative objectives, provided that they implement projects successfully. Several studies reported requirements on what constitute the most suitable team composition to ensure innovation success. The question remained unanswered as to what could be considered to increase the possibility and probability of innovation implementation team success. It was evident from the literature review that solutions could be provided should such challenges be viewed from a multi-disciplinary perspective. The emphasis and impact of team members' emotions were emphasised as an additional insight into optimising success for implementing innovation projects. The theoretical framework guiding this study was the Emotional Style Theory of Davidson and Begley (2012). This affective neuro scientific theory was approached from an industrial psychologist point of view. This research introduced the concept of emotive outlook depicting six constructs namely: mental acuity, self/reality orientation, emotional fitness/change agility, emotional management(self), social sensitivity and sensitivity to context. The study's main contribution was examining and comparing the emotive outlook profiles and patterns of successful and unsuccessful innovation project implementation teams, within the financial services industry. Data was collected from an International Case (providing data from a multi-national company's operations in nine African countries) and a National Case (providing data from three Namibian Institutions). The total sample size was 169 participants. In this mixed methods convergent parallel design study, the quantitative results of certain assessments and the qualitative findings utilising semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions were merged, at the interpretation stage. The purposes of complementarity, completeness, diversity and compensation were achieved when the results were merged. The major contributions of this study were the findings that successful innovation implementation teams were characterized by intra-psychological strengths and cognitive abilities. The research findings concluded a weak focus on interpersonal aspects and team dynamics. The strengths of teams were found to be a reflection of the individual team members' strengths (mental acuity, emotional self-management, self-awareness and emotional intelligence). This led to postulations regarding team dynamics for innovation implementation teams and the importance of separating these teams from, for example, the creative teams in the innovation process. The context which could contribute to the success of these teams was highlighted by the qualitative strand of this research. The knowledge contribution of this study was the prioritising of the emotive outlook constructs presented as a formula. From a scholarly point of view mixed methods research was presented as an exciting methodological choice addressing business challenges. Practice implications were presented on team as well as Innovation Sponsors/ Champions selection criteria and Generation Y. Importantly, interesting areas for possible future research considerations were opened by this study

Best leadership practices of turnaround K-12 administrators

Leadership as organizational practice and its study as a phenomenon have been traced to the beginning of civilization. In the landscape of the 21st century, executives who lead their companies to thrive in the global economy are challenged to have and effectively apply a broad range of leadership skills in their daily work in a constantly changing environment. They have to continuously adapt their behaviors and those of their organizations in order to develop a corporate culture and sustain their competitive edge. Change once was episodic; deliberate, planned, and executed. But in today’s turbulent environment, change is constant and the role of senior executives in leading organizational change is to provide leadership that fosters a shared mindset, new behaviors, and culture. This phenomenological study will examine the best leadership practices of turnaround K–12 public school administrators in LA County who have led a major change effort in their respective organizations. The need for change usually induces a high degree of stress (Kets de Vries & Balazs, 1998; Lichtenstein, 2000), thus the best executives who lead positive change efforts embrace change as their real job and need more than one approach for leading it, ensuring its institutionalization in the organization’s daily practices, hence transforming the organization through an innovation-driven culture. Data were collected from 15 turnaround public school administrators and superintendents in the form of a 12–question, semi-structured interview scheme, which focused on their past cognizance of leading such efforts in their organizations. The key findings of this study generated 94 themes among which 80 answered 4 research questions. Conspicuously, communication, collaboration, situational leadership, and transformational leadership emerged as the best leadership practices of these turnaround K–12 public school administrators. Similarly, participants indicated that having a clear understanding of the school improvement model, involving parents early, understanding the why, empowering others, being one’s own brand, being proactive, improving teacher recruitment and selection, and changing the culture increase the chances of success of a turnaround effort. As a result of the study findings, a framework of recommendations emerged for endeavoring and current turnaround administrators who embark onto similar efforts