How should a small company interact in its business network to sustain its exchange effectiveness?

This paper investigates the dynamic alignment of network and business\ud development of two small firms in the printing industry. Developments are\ud followed over more than 8 years. The aim of the paper is to understand how\ud small firms can manage their network relations by maintaining both their\ud efficiency in existing business and flexibility to develop new business. The case comparison suggests that different networking approaches drive business\ud development. For successful business development both strong and varied ties\ud as well as the existence of different intermediary functions of partners are\ud necessary

Roles and responsibilities in agile ICT for development

This paper examines the different roles in designing interactive software in a ICT for development context. Using experiences from a participatory action research project, in which we used agile methods to design and deploy an system to support ‘agricultural information flow’ for a co-operative of small farmers in rural India, we identify points of difference between the roles in standard descriptions of agile software methods and the roles as they emerged in our project. A key finding is the critical role played by a ‘Development Project Manager’ in facilitating dialogue, orchestrating the activities of other actors and in building the capabilities and confidence of all the participants in joint action

Customising software products in distributed software development a model for allocating customisation requirements across organisational boundaries

Requirements engineering plays a vital role in the software development process. While it is difficult to manage those requirements locally, it is even more difficult to communicate those requirements over organisational boundaries and to convey them to multiple distribution customers. This paper discusses the requirements of multiple distribution customers empirically in the context of customised software products. The main purpose is to understand the challenges of communicating and allocating customisation requirements across distributed organisational boundaries. We conducted an empirical survey with 19 practitioners, which confirmed that communicating customisation requirements in a DSD context is a significant challenge. We therefore propose a model for allocating customisation requirements between a local, customer-based agile team and a distributed development team that uses a traditional development approach. Our conjecture is that the model would reduce the challenge of communicating requirements across organisational boundaries, address customers’ requirements and provide a focus for future empirical studies

An exploratory investigation of aberrant consumer behaviour in Libya: a sociocultural approach

Studies concerning aberrant consumer behaviour (ACB) are dominated by research conducted in the West. By examining the impact social and cultural factors have on the management and understanding of ACB in Libya, a Muslim country, this paper extends knowledge by exploring this issue in a different setting. Materials were collected by conducting in-depth interviews with 26 sellers in Libya and ACB was explored in three different contexts: grocery stores, computer stores and hotels. The study finds that the sellers use alternative marketplace behaviours to manage ACB to that described in the literature, namely informal, community based approaches which reflect accepted societal and cultural norms. Furthermore, the study finds that not all activities reported to be ACB in the literature are perceived to be misbehaviour by the Libyan sellers

Software acquisition: a business strategy analysis

The paper argues that there are new insights to be gained from a strategic analysis of requirements engineering. The paper is motivated by a simple question: what does it take to be a world class software acquirer? The question has relevance for requirements engineers because for many organisations market pressures mean that software is commonly acquired rather than developed from scratch. The paper builds on the work of C. H. Fine (1998) who suggests that product, process and supply chain should be designed together, i.e., 3D concurrent engineering. Using a number of reference theories, it proposes a systematic way of carrying out 3D concurrent engineering. The paper concludes that the critical activity in supply chain design is the design of the distribution of skills and the nature of contract

A systematic literature review of the use of social media for business process management

In today’s expansion of new technologies, innovation is found necessary for organizations to be up to date with the latest management trends. Although organizations are increasingly using new technologies, opportunities still exist to achieve the nowadays essential omnichannel management strategy. More precisely, social media are opening a path for benefiting more from an organization’s process orientation. However, social media strategies are still an under-investigated field, especially when it comes to the research of social media use for the management and improvement of business processes or the internal way of working in organizations. By classifying a variety of articles, this study explores the evolution of social media implementation within the BPM discipline. We also provide avenues for future research and strategic implications for practitioners to use social media more comprehensively

Technical Debt Prioritization: State of the Art. A Systematic Literature Review

Background. Software companies need to manage and refactor Technical Debt issues. Therefore, it is necessary to understand if and when refactoring Technical Debt should be prioritized with respect to developing features or fixing bugs. Objective. The goal of this study is to investigate the existing body of knowledge in software engineering to understand what Technical Debt prioritization approaches have been proposed in research and industry. Method. We conducted a Systematic Literature Review among 384 unique papers published until 2018, following a consolidated methodology applied in Software Engineering. We included 38 primary studies. Results. Different approaches have been proposed for Technical Debt prioritization, all having different goals and optimizing on different criteria. The proposed measures capture only a small part of the plethora of factors used to prioritize Technical Debt qualitatively in practice. We report an impact map of such factors. However, there is a lack of empirical and validated set of tools. Conclusion. We observed that technical Debt prioritization research is preliminary and there is no consensus on what are the important factors and how to measure them. Consequently, we cannot consider current research conclusive and in this paper, we outline different directions for necessary future investigations