The Impact of Technology on the Strategic Management of a Knowledge-Intensive Project Organization: Action Design Research of a Competence Management System

The combination of digitalization and globalization will have a dramatic impact on organizations and the way people work. Demographic upheavals and societal changes, as well as the inevitable focus on environmental issues, will amplify the effect of these trends. As a result, business executives around the world will face new challenges with business models on one hand and organizational practices on the other hand. There is now a great opportunity for information systems and human resources scientists and practitioners to work together in order to improve understanding of how technology can be utilized to make organizations more effective and inspiring. The “future of work” is already affecting strategic management, HR organizations, and technology in practice. As a result, this has created many exciting research opportunities, identified by scholars looking at human resource information systems, human resource management, enterprise systems, competence management systems, knowledge management, information management, agile software development, or design science. In this action design research I build on top of existing design science research on competence management systems and aim at 1) gaining more understanding about the organizational and technological aspects of enterprise systems design, especially regarding competence development, and 2) increasing understanding of the design of competence management as a strategic capability. In this action design research project we participated in the design, development, and evaluation of a particular organizational instantiation and a management system instantiation that both address important, previously unsolved problems. This study contributes to the existing body of scientific knowledge on information systems. The theoretical contribution is the improved design principles for competence management systems. The practical contribution of the study builds upon the guidance provided to system designers and managers through several frameworks, IT artifacts, and management practices for information systems design processes. In conclusion, this research provides new evidence of how action design research can lead to significant business benefits by integrating theory and practice in a real business context

On the real world practice of Behaviour Driven Development

Surveys of industry practice over the last decade suggest that Behaviour Driven Development is a popular Agile practice. For example, 19% of respondents to the 14th State of Agile annual survey reported using BDD, placing it in the top 13 practices reported. As well as potential benefits, the adoption of BDD necessarily involves an additional cost of writing and maintaining Gherkin features and scenarios, and (if used for acceptance testing,) the associated step functions. Yet there is a lack of published literature exploring how BDD is used in practice and the challenges experienced by real world software development efforts. This gap is significant because without understanding current real world practice, it is hard to identify opportunities to address and mitigate challenges. In order to address this research gap concerning the challenges of using BDD, this thesis reports on a research project which explored: (a) the challenges of applying agile and undertaking requirements engineering in a real world context; (b) the challenges of applying BDD specifically and (c) the application of BDD in open-source projects to understand challenges in this different context. For this purpose, we progressively conducted two case studies, two series of interviews, four iterations of action research, and an empirical study. The first case study was conducted in an avionics company to discover the challenges of using an agile process in a large scale safety critical project environment. Since requirements management was found to be one of the biggest challenges during the case study, we decided to investigate BDD because of its reputation for requirements management. The second case study was conducted in the company with an aim to discover the challenges of using BDD in real life. The case study was complemented with an empirical study of the practice of BDD in open source projects, taking a study sample from the GitHub open source collaboration site. As a result of this Ph.D research, we were able to discover: (i) challenges of using an agile process in a large scale safety-critical organisation, (ii) current state of BDD in practice, (iii) technical limitations of Gherkin (i.e., the language for writing requirements in BDD), (iv) challenges of using BDD in a real project, (v) bad smells in the Gherkin specifications of open source projects on GitHub. We also presented a brief comparison between the theoretical description of BDD and BDD in practice. This research, therefore, presents the results of lessons learned from BDD in practice, and serves as a guide for software practitioners planning on using BDD in their projects

Matchmakers or tastemakers? Platformization of cultural intermediation & social media’s engines for ‘making up taste’

There are long-standing practices and processes that have traditionally mediated between the processes of production and consumption of cultural content. The prominent instances of these are: curating content by identifying and selecting cultural content in order to promote to a particular set of audiences; measuring audience behaviours to construct knowledge about their tastes; and guiding audiences through recommendations from cultural experts. These cultural intermediation processes are currently being transformed, and social media platforms play important roles in this transformation. However, their role is often attributed to the work of users and/or recommendation algorithms. Thus, the processes through which data about users’ taste are aggregated and made ready for algorithmic processing are largely neglected. This study takes this problematic as an important gap in our understanding of social media platforms’ role in the transformation of cultural intermediation. To address this gap, the notion of platformization is used as a theoretical lens to examine the role of users and algorithms as part of social media’s distinct data-based sociotechnical configuration, which is built on the so-called ‘platform-logic’. Based on a set of conceptual ideas and the findings derived through a single case study on a music discovery platform, this thesis developed a framework to explain ‘platformization of cultural intermediation’. This framework outlines how curation, guidance, and measurement processes are ‘plat-formed’ in the course of development and optimisation of a social media platform. This is the main contribution of the thesis. The study also contributes to the literature by developing the concept of social media’s engines for ‘making up taste’. This concept illuminates how social media operate as sociotechnical cultural intermediaries and participates in tastemaking in ways that acquire legitimacy from the long-standing trust in the objectivity of classification, quantification, and measurement processes

Strategic and large scale government IT projects management: innovation report

This research focuses on the Implementation of IT systems and public sector and national ID card projects in particular. Such projects have high expectations but low success rates. The study Investigated the factors contributing to IT projects failure through on extensive review of the existing literature. This was enriched and tested by close Involvement with the UAE national ID card project, surveys and In depth interviews with senior managers from other ID card projects and presentations and attendance at over 50 conferences on this subject. Many of the factors leading to either success or failure identified in many practical studies could be addressed through a well designed project management methodology. Based on the literature, practical experience, observations and feedback from practitioners a project management methodology; named PROMOTE - PROject Management Of Technology Endeavours - was developed and tested for the planning and Implementing large scale IT projects mainly In a government context. The US$200+ million dollar national ID programme In the United Arab Emirates was the main test vehicle. Its Innovations include a hybrid systems development/project management customer based philosophy, a number of new tools and techniques and the Introduction of a mentor for the project manager. To help assess the general applicability of the methodology it was also tested In the Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Bahrain national ID initiatives. The methodology phases were refined several times (and other phases were added) to address the problems Identified from UAE project, the literature, the experiences reported at GCC committee meetings and from other large scale Implementations around the world (from conferences and study visits to other countries). From the testing conducted, the methodology is believed to add a significant contribution to the field of IT projects Implementation and In Increasing the success chances of such projects. Such success should have a profound Impact on government services. The study also recognises that a better understanding of the new methodology and its contributions Is only possible through further research and application In other large scale IT projects. This should allow the extension of the applicability of this methodology to a much wider spectrum

Knowledge and Management Models for Sustainable Growth

In the last years sustainability has become a topic of global concern and a key issue in the strategic agenda of both business organizations and public authorities and organisations. Significant changes in business landscape, the emergence of new technology, including social media, the pressure of new social concerns, have called into question established conceptualizations of competitiveness, wealth creation and growth. New and unaddressed set of issues regarding how private and public organisations manage and invest their resources to create sustainable value have brought to light. In particular the increasing focus on environmental and social themes has suggested new dimensions to be taken into account in the value creation dynamics, both at organisations and communities level. For companies the need of integrating corporate social and environmental responsibility issues into strategy and daily business operations, pose profound challenges, which, in turn, involve numerous processes and complex decisions influenced by many stakeholders. Facing these challenges calls for the creation, use and exploitation of new knowledge as well as the development of proper management models, approaches and tools aimed to contribute to the development and realization of environmentally and socially sustainable business strategies and practices

Multidisciplinary design problem solving on product development teams

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, Technology, Management, and Policy Program, February 2001.Includes bibliographical references (p. 197-216).This investigation, conducted under the auspices of the Lean Aerospace Initiative (LAI), studied how engineers from different specialties interpret and communicate about technical design problems while working on product development teams. Data was collected on 98 cases via interviews with engineers at LAI member companies. For approximately one-third of the cases, two engineers with different backgrounds were interviewed, allowing comparisons to be made between their descriptions of the problems under study. For the remaining cases, one interview was conducted per case. The most important finding of this study was that engineers from different specialties do interpret the same problem differently. Specifically, two engineers were likely to evaluate the benefits or drawbacks of a potential solution using different sets of criteria. Thus, some design disputes were the result not of mutually exclusive needs but of a failure to recognize the different ways in which engineers were evaluating solutions to the problem. Furthermore, data collected during this study illustrated that in some cases these differences were the result of engineers addressing related, but unique problems. Therefore, a solution to one engineer's problem often created a new problem for another engineer on the team.(cont.) A second conclusion of this study was that how design tools were used had a greater impact on a team's problem solving abilities than what tool was used. In this context, design tools included objects such as real or "virtual" prototypes as well as processes like simulations and tests. The results of this investigation suggested that such tools offered their greatest benefits when they were used in a participatory fashion in which a large fraction of a team shared in their use. Additionally, the more elements of a problem's context that were captured in a design tool, the greater its utility. Under such conditions, team members were able to create a shared evaluation system to judge potential solutions to the problem they were confronting, thereby facilitating problem resolution. Based on these results, the traditional model of engineering communication derived from the information processing framework requires modification. The information processing model assumes that individuals have a shared understanding of meaning when they communicate. This study, however, suggests that such shared understandings do not exist in advance, but are instead ...by Joshua I. Bernstein.Ph.D

A pattern-oriented and model-driven architecture for interactive systems

Day-to-day experiences suggest that it is not enough to approach a complex design equipped with design tips, guidelines, and hints. Developers must also be able to use proven solutions emerging from the best design practices to solve new design challenges. Without these, the designer is unable to properly apply guidelines or take full advantage of the power of technology, resulting therefore in poor performance, poor scalability, and poor usability. Furthermore, the designer might "reinvent the wheel" when attempting to implement a design solution. A number of design problems continue to arise, such as: (1) decoupling the various aspects of interactive systems (for example, business logic, the UI, navigation, and information architecture) and (2) isolating platform specifics from the concerns common to all interactive systems. In the context of a proposal for a Pattern-Oriented and Model-driven Architecture (POMA) for interactive systems, this thesis identifies an extensive list of pattern categories and types of models aimed at providing a pool of proven solutions to these problems. The models of patterns span several levels of abstraction, such as domain, task, dialog, presentation and layout. The proposed POMA architecture illustrates how several individual models can be combined at different levels of abstraction into heterogeneous structures which can then be used as building blocks in the development of interactive systems. This document is divided into six chapters: the first chapter presents a background and related work on "Patterns" in general and on various architectures for interactive systems development such as "N-tiers architectures", "Pattern-Oriented Design" (POD), "Pattern- Supported Approach" (PSA), and "Model-Driven Architecture" (MDA). The second chapter introduces the research topic with its objectives, its limits, the research methodology, and research steps. The third chapter describes primarily the most important parts of the research which is the development of a new architecture called Pattern-Oriented and Model-Driven Architecture, facilitating the development of interactive systems including fundamentals and key concepts, an overview, justifications versus N-tiers, POD, PSA, and MDA architectures and specifications. The fourth chapter describes architectural levels and categories of patterns used in POMA. The fifth chapter describes the categories of models used in POMA. The sixth chapter presents an exploratory case study applied to the architecture proposed in this research. The last chapter presents a conclusion on this research work and its expected evolution in the future

Towards an ontology framework for the integrated design of modular assembly systems

Next generation manufacturing companies have to become highly responsive in order to succeed in an ever more rapidly changing global market. The ability to effectively develop and adapt their assembly facilities (systems) to changing requirements on demand plays a crucial role in achieving high responsiveness since the assembly process has to deal with the full inherent complexity of increasingly mass-customised products. This work was motivated by the current lack of a holistic assembly system design theory that would enable design environments to address the need for rapid system development and adaptation. The challenge is to create a common environment where domain experts can effectively collaborate while taking advantage of the best practices of their diverse domains. This thesis investigates how a domain ontology can help to overcome those challenges. The approach is taking advantage of the higher levels of standardisation inherent in the modular assembly system paradigm which is considered to be one of the fundamental enabling factors to achieve a high level of adaptation. A new ontology framework has been developed to support the design and adaptation of modular assembly systems (ONTOMAS). The ONTOMAS framework is based on engineering ontology principles structuring the domain using formalisms for aggregation, topology, taxonomies, and system theory principles. A number of design patterns have been identified and formalised to support key design decision-making tasks during the design of modular assembly systems. Furthermore, the function-behaviour-structure paradigm has been applied to capture the characteristics of modular assembly equipment at different levels of abstraction that reflect the specific needs of the engineering design process. The proposed ONTOMAS framework provides a sound foundation for computer based support tools to reduce the assembly system design effort and time while maintaining a high level of quality. An integrated design framework for the requirements driven specification of assembly processes and configuration of modular assembly system has been developed. The design approach applies the new formalisms of ONTOMAS to support the design decision-making activities. The developed ONTOMAS framework has been applied in several industrial and synthetic use cases to verify its applicability and appropriateness. Furthermore, the new ontology and design framework have been used as foundation for the development of a prototype collaborative design environment which allows different domain experts to participate in the design of modular assembly systems