AMCIS 2010 Panel Report: External Benchmarks in Information Systems Program Assessment

Accrediting bodies and other external constituencies are placing increased emphasis on the assessment of academic degree programs for continuous improvement. Most assessment plans are focused on determining how well program outcomes or goals are being met. However, benchmarking a degree program across institutions is rarely considered. This article provides general principles for assessing information systems programs and presents quantitative and qualitative methodologies and tools for benchmarking student learning in Information Systems programs

Knowledge formalization in experience feedback processes : an ontology-based approach

Because of the current trend of integration and interoperability of industrial systems, their size and complexity continue to grow making it more difficult to analyze, to understand and to solve the problems that happen in their organizations. Continuous improvement methodologies are powerful tools in order to understand and to solve problems, to control the effects of changes and finally to capitalize knowledge about changes and improvements. These tools involve suitably represent knowledge relating to the concerned system. Consequently, knowledge management (KM) is an increasingly important source of competitive advantage for organizations. Particularly, the capitalization and sharing of knowledge resulting from experience feedback are elements which play an essential role in the continuous improvement of industrial activities. In this paper, the contribution deals with semantic interoperability and relates to the structuring and the formalization of an experience feedback (EF) process aiming at transforming information or understanding gained by experience into explicit knowledge. The reuse of such knowledge has proved to have significant impact on achieving themissions of companies. However, the means of describing the knowledge objects of an experience generally remain informal. Based on an experience feedback process model and conceptual graphs, this paper takes domain ontology as a framework for the clarification of explicit knowledge and know-how, the aim of which is to get lessons learned descriptions that are significant, correct and applicable

Continuous process improvement applied to an engineering education system

The Engineering education is considered to be a system. Most engineering education systems are under pressure to meet the demands set by its government and private industries . While an expensive student throughput increase is possible, continuous improvement of the education system at all levels will be a more feasible and realistic approach. Within the operation management community a multitude of process improvement champions are competing for the attention of managers (or organisaion leaders). Each champion advocates the adoption of thier improvement methodology. Almost all plead that if one can adopt their specific tools or follow a specific way of thinking, all operation problems can be solved. Most managers (leaders) are however still confused to select the best process improvement methodology for their situation or system’s culture. In this research study several process improvement methodologies were evaluated and related to issues in an engineering education system. The objective is to support heads of an engineering education system with strategic operation decisions to meet future demands. Working through the apparent conflicting claims of performance improvement programs, it was found to critical to concentrate on the primary and secondary effects of these programs. Although each improvement methodology can contribute valuable approaches to an engineering education system, it is still found to be a challenge for leaders to define quality education and set targets for continuous improvements. The finding of this study illustrates that the various continuous improvement process methodologies can be utilised at various levels of the engineering education system. In order to fully maximise the effectiveness of the improvement methodology or initiative the system must be transformed from the traditional engineering education system to a more innovative system which includes process improvement as part of its culture

Effectiveness and Best Practices of Lean and Six Sigma Methodologies in Hospitals

Healthcare quality and costs are a growing problem in the United States. Healthcare organizations are facing increasing costs combined with declining quality (Schoenbaum). This unsustainable trend is putting a great burden on the health care system as a whole. The improvement of quality within the healthcare system would increase the value of the care (Schoenbaum).Improving healthcare quality, and thereby lowering the costs, is critical for the sustainability of healthcare organizations. There are many different ways that organizations can use quality to reduce costs and increase the quality of service to their patients. There are also various ways an organization can implement quality. The processes can lead to different results and focuses. The potential processes include lean based A3 Report, Kaizen events, and Six Sigma. These processes focus on continuous improvement of quality within a process. The ideal situation would utilize these processes to create a high quality environment while lowering costs. This report will investigate the impact of projects utilizing the A3, Kaizen, and Six Sigmamethodologies in order to improve processes efficiency,increase quality, and reduce costs of care.These methods can be applied in many different organizations, including the health care industry. The impact of these process improvement projects should be substantial and essential to the health care industry. The impact of the methodologies will be analyzed to see if they substantially reduce the costs and increase the quality. The focus of this research is on hospitals and will compare hospitals in a quality position, as defined by the 100 Top hospitals list and the MalcolmBaldrigeQuality Award recipients nationwide, and other regional hospitals in the Northeast not currently on the 100 Top lists or a Baldrige award winner. The goal of any organization should be to increase the quality of their service. An ACPE Quality of Care Surveyfound that 18.5% of respondents utilized Six Sigma to improve quality, 13.3% utilized Lean processes, 12.2% used vendor-provided systems, 26.7% used other methods including homegrown, and 29.2% did not utilize any programs (Martin). This project looks to identify if there are trends between those that utilize the programs and positioning as a top quality performance hospital and if so what quality management programs had the biggest impact at the different types of hospitals. While this project focused on hospitals as the health care organization to be surveyed and examined, similar principals would be expected to hold true for any patient facing organization

Continuous Improvement in Education

In recent years, 'continuous improvement' has become a popular catchphrase in the field of education. However, while continuous improvement has become commonplace and well-documented in other industries, such as healthcare and manufacturing, little is known about how this work has manifested itself in education.This white paper attempts to map the landscape of this terrain by identifying and describing organizations engaged in continuous improvement, and by highlighting commonalities and differences among them. The findings classify three types of organizations engaged in continuous improvement: those focused on instructional improvement at the classroom level; those concentrating on system-wide improvement; and those addressing collective impact. Each type is described in turn and illustrated by an organizational case study. Through the analysis, six common themes that characterize all three types of organizations (e.g., leadership and strategy, communication and engagement, organizational infrastructure, methodology, data collection and analysis, and building capacity) are enumerated. This white paper makes four concluding observations. First, the three case studies provide evidence of organizations conducting continuous improvement work in the field of education, albeit at different levels and in different ways. Second, entry points to continuous improvement work are not mutually exclusive, but are nested and, hence, mutually informative and comparative. Third, continuous improvement is not synonymous with improving all organizational processes simultaneously; rather, research and learning cycles are iterative and gradual in nature. Fourth, despite being both iterative and gradual, it is imperative that improvement work is planned and undertaken in a rigorous, thoughtful, and transparent fashion

A quality management based on the Quality Model life cycle

Managing quality is a hard and expensive task that involves the execution and control of processes and techniques. For a good quality management, it is important to know the current state and the objective to be achieved. It is essential to take into account with a Quality Model that specifies the purposes of managing quality. QuEF (Quality Evaluation Framework) is a framework to manage quality in MDWE (Model-driven Web Engineering). This paper suggests managing quality but pointing out the Quality Model life cycle. The purpose is to converge toward a quality continuous improvement by means of reducing effort and time.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2010-20057-C03-02Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN 2010-12312-EJunta de Andalucía TIC-578

An agile business process improvement methodology

Adoption of business process improvement strategies are now a concern of most organisations. Organisations are still facing challenges and finding transient solutions to immediate problems. The misalignment between IT solutions and organisational aspects evolves across space and time showing discrepancies. Unfortunately, existing business process approaches are not according with continuous business process improvement involving business stakeholders. Considering this limitation in well-known Business Process (BP) methodologies, this paper presents a comparative study of some approaches and introduces agility in the Business Process and Practice Alignment Methodology (BPPAM). Our intention is to present observed problems in existing approaches and introduce agility in our proposal to address features, like the alignment between daily work practices and business process descriptions, in a simple and agile way. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V

Six Sigma vs Lean : some perspectives from leading academics and practitioners

The purpose of this paper is to present the fundamental and critical differences between two of the most powerful methodologies in a process excellence initiative in any organisation. The approach taken was to collate opinions from a number of leading academics and practitioners from five different countries. It was also important to ensure that all participants have a good knowledge and expertise in the field of both Lean and Six Sigma methodologies. Although both methodologies are focused on process and quality improvement, Lean is formalisation and codification of experience and judgement which is not a feature of Six Sigma. Lean emphasises speed and waste, however Six Sigma emphasises variation, defects and process evaluation. The viewpoints expressed in the article are those of a few academics and practitioners. It is important to capture the viewpoints of more academics and practitioners to arrive at sound and valid conclusions. The paper provides an excellent resource for many researchers and for practitioners who are engaged in research and applications of the most two powerful methodologies for achieving and sustaining operational excellence. It is also critical to understand the fundamental differences between these two methodologies

INDUSTRIAL DEVICE INTEGRATION AND VIRTUALIZATION FOR SMART FACTORIES

Given the constant industry growth and modernization, several technologies have been introduced in the shop floor, in particular regarding industrial devices. Each device brand and model usually requires different interfaces and communication protocols, a technological diversity which renders the automatic interconnection with production management software extremely challenging. However, combining key technologies such as machine monitoring, digital twin and virtual commissioning, along with a complete communication protocol like OPC UA, it is possible to contribute towards industrial device integration on a Smart Factory environment. To achieve this goal, several methodologies and a set of tools were defined. This set of tools, as well as facilitating the integration tasks, should also be part of a virtual engineering environment, sharing the same virtual model, the digital twin, through the complete lifecycle of the industrial device, namely the project, simulation, implementation and execution/monitoring/supervision and, eventually, decommissioning phases. A key result of this work is the development of a set of virtual engineering tools and methodologies based on OPC UA communication, with the digital twin implemented using RobotStudio, in order to accomplish the complete lifecycle support of an industrial device, from the project and simulation phases, to monitoring and supervision, suitable for integration in Industry 4.0 factories. To evaluate the operation of the developed set of tools, experiments were performed for a test scenario with different devices. Other relevant result is related with the integration of a specific industrial device – CNC machining equipment. Given the variety of monitoring systems and communication protocols, an approach where various solutions available on the market are combined on a single system is followed. These kinds of all-in-one solutions would give production managers access to the information necessary for a continuous monitoring and improvement of the entire production process