Service innovation - lessons from modularization and open innovation - a new service value

The traditional manufacturing model of volume-variety influencing the conduct of business is not entirely representative of service-centric business. The latter has two key differences â it is much more end-user centric and individualistic in experience. The complex nature of service attributes also make it much more convoluted. The notion of product being the centre of interaction is being replaced with service processes involving participants and generally defined between a service provider and service consumer. The aim of this paper is to validate the service innovation hypotheses put forward based on significant developments in value networks, open interfaces, and business models recently. In doing so, this theoretical paper substantiates the claim that prescriptive volume-variety relationships are little meaningful in service delivery environment

Understanding teamwork in rapidly deployed interprofessional teams in intensive and acute care: a systematic review of reviews.

The rapid increase of acute and intensive care capacities in hospitals needed during the response to COVID-19 created an urgent demand for skilled healthcare staff across the globe. To upscale capacity, many hospitals chose to increase their teams in these departments with rapidly re-deployed inter-professional healthcare personnel, many of whom had no prior experience of working in a high-risk environment and were neither prepared nor trained for work on such wards. This systematic review of reviews examines the current evidence base for successful teamwork in rapidly deployed interprofessional teams in intensive and acute care settings, by assessing systematic reviews of empirical studies to inform future deployments and support of rapidly formed clinical teams. This study identified 18 systematic reviews for further analysis. Utilising an integrative narrative synthesis process supported by thematic coding and graphical network analysis, 13 themes were found to dominate the literature on teams and teamwork in inter-professional and inter-disciplinary teams. This approach was chosen to make the selection process more transparent and enable the thematic clusters in the reviewed papers to be presented visually and codifying four factors that structure the literature on inter-professional teams (i.e., team-internal procedures and dynamics, communicative processes, organisational and team extrinsic influences on teams, and lastly patient and staff outcomes). Practically, the findings suggest that managers and team leaders in fluid and ad-hoc inter-professional healthcare teams in an intensive care environment need to pay attention to reducing pre-existing occupational identities and power-dynamics by emphasizing skill mix, establishing combined workspaces and break areas, clarifying roles and responsibilities, facilitating formal information exchange and developing informal opportunities for communication. The results may guide the further analysis of factors that affect the performance of inter-professional teams in emergency and crisis deployment

A Human-Centered Approach for Designing Decision Support Systems

The choice to include the human in the decision process affects four key areas of system design: problem representation, system analysis and design, solution technique selection, and interface requirements specification. I introduce a design methodology that captures the necessary choices associated with each of these areas. In particular I show how this methodology is applied to the design of an actual decision Support system for satellite operations scheduling. Supporting the user\u27s ability to monitor the actions of the system and to guide the decision process of the system are two key considerations in the successful design of a decision support system. Both of these points rely on the correct specification of human-computer interaction points. Traditional, computer-centered system design approaches do not do this well, if at all, and are insufficient for the design of decision support systems. These approaches typically leave the definition of human-computer interaction points till after the component and system level designs are complete. This is too late however since the component and system level design decisions can impose inflexible constraints on the choice of the human-computer interaction points. This often leads to the design of human-computer interaction points that are only good enough. These approaches result in ill-conceived problem representations and poor user-system interaction points because the system lacks the underlying architecture to support these constructs efficiently. Decision support systems require a new, human-centered design approach rather than the traditional computer-centered approaches

FIRMS’INVOLVEMENT IN OPEN SOURCE PROJECTS: A CONTROVERSIAL ROLE

In this paper, we focus on Community OS projects with the goal of understanding whether the involvement of firms through their professional developers has an impact on the quality of the software product and on its overall success. We distinguish between two main typologies of firms’ involvement: Development firms contributions and Non-development firms contributions. The paper posits that a higher percentage of code contributed by paid developers has a positive impact of project success and size. However, it also puts forward a negative impact of non-development firms contribution on software design quality. Hypotheses are tested on a sample of 643 applications from the SourceForge.net repository, corresponding to 5,335 versions. Data were collected by means of an online questionnaire and a tool developed ad hoc to calculate software design quality metrics. Empirical findings support our hypotheses. Overall, our data confirm that firms are significantly investing in OS projects and that they can play a crucial role in determining projects’ success when they also take active part in code development. However, most of them are taking a short-term perspective that does not focus on quality. This may lead to higher costs and a lower user satisfaction in the long term

The Open Source Way of Working: a New Paradigm for the Division of Labour in Software Development?

The interest the Open Source Software Development Model has recently raised amongst social scientists has resulted in an accumulation of relevant research concerned with explaining and describing the motivations of Open Source developers and the advantages the Open Source methodology has over traditional proprietary software development models. However, existing literature has often examined the Open Source phenomenon from an excessively abstract and idealised perspective of the common interests of open source developers, therefore neglecting the very important organisational and institutional aspects of communities of individuals that may, in fact, have diverse interests and motivations. It is the aim of this paper to begin remedying this shortcoming by analysing the sources of authority in Open Source projects and the hierarchical structures according to which this authority is organised and distributed inside them. In order to do so, a theoretical framework based on empirical evidence extracted from a variety of projects is built, its main concerns being the description and explanation of recruitment, enculturation, promotion and conflict resolution dynamics present in Open Source projects. The paper argues that 'distributed authority' is a principal means employed by such communities to increase stability, diminish the severity and scope of conflicts over technical direction, and ease the problems of assessing the quality of contributions. The paper also argues that distributed authority is principally derived from interpersonal interaction and the construction of trust between individuals drawn to the project by diverse interests that are mediated and moderated through participants' common interest in the project's successful outcome. The paper presents several conclusions concerning the governance of open source communities and priorities for future research.open source software, hierarchies, trust, teams, co-operation.

THE ROLE OF SAAS SERVICE QUALITY FOR CONTINUED SAAS USE: EMPIRICAL INSIGHTS FROM SAAS USING FIRMS

Despite its success in the software industry, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) still struggles with fulfilling customer expectations regarding service quality. To contain customer churn rates to low levels, SaaS providers have to address their service quality weak spots and find out which factors are crucial for continued SaaS usage. Drawing on previous service quality literature, we develop a Zone-of-Tolerance (ZOT)-based SaaS-QUAL scale and validate it in a model of IS continuance based on two empirical surveys of SaaS using firms. By doing this, we examine the importance of SaaS service quality factors for shaping customer satisfaction and SaaS continuance intentions. Furthermore, we provide insights into what service factors effectively meet or miss SaaS customer expectations. As a practical contribution, we develop and apply a SaaS-QUAL scale that can be used as a diagnostic tool by SaaS providers and users alike. For researchers, we enrich existing research models on IS continuance by integrating a more fine-grained conceptualization of service quality confirmation that provides stronger explanatory power than in previous models

Information management in work organization domain in network organizations

Tese de mestrado. Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

Understanding teamwork in rapidly deployed interprofessional teams in intensive and acute care: A systematic review of reviews

The rapid increase of acute and intensive care capacities in hospitals needed during the response to COVID-19 created an urgent demand for skilled healthcare staff across the globe. To upscale capacity, many hospitals chose to increase their teams in these departments with rapidly re-deployed inter-professional healthcare personnel, many of whom had no prior experience of working in a high-risk environment and were neither prepared nor trained for work on such wards. This systematic review of reviews examines the current evidence base for successful teamwork in rapidly deployed interprofessional teams in intensive and acute care settings, by assessing systematic reviews of empirical studies to inform future deployments and support of rapidly formed clinical teams. This study identified 18 systematic reviews for further analysis. Utilising an integrative narrative synthesis process supported by thematic coding and graphical network analysis, 13 themes were found to dominate the literature on teams and teamwork in inter-professional and inter-disciplinary teams. This approach was chosen to make the selection process more transparent and enable the thematic clusters in the reviewed papers to be presented visually and codifying four factors that structure the literature on inter-professional teams (i.e., team-internal procedures and dynamics, communicative processes, organisational and team extrinsic influences on teams, and lastly patient and staff outcomes). Practically, the findings suggest that managers and team leaders in fluid and ad-hoc inter-professional healthcare teams in an intensive care environment need to pay attention to reducing pre-existing occupational identities and power-dynamics by emphasizing skill mix, establishing combined workspaces and break areas, clarifying roles and responsibilities, facilitating formal information exchange and developing informal opportunities for communication. The results may guide the further analysis of factors that affect the performance of inter-professional teams in emergency and crisis deployment