Improving Business Performance Through The Integration Of Human Factors Engineering Into Organizations Using A Systems Engineeri

Most organizations today understand the valuable contribution employees as people (rather than simply bodies) provide to their overall performance. Although efforts are made to make the most of the human in organizations, there is still much room for improvement. Focus in the reduction of employee injuries such as cumulative trauma disorders rose in the 80 s. Attempts at increasing performance by addressing employee satisfaction through various methods have also been ongoing for several years now. Knowledge Management is one of the most recent attempts at controlling and making the best use of employees knowledge. All of these efforts and more towards that same goal of making the most of people s performance at work are encompassed within the domain of the Human Factors Engineering/Ergonomics field. HFE/E provides still untapped potential for organizational performance as the human and its optimal performance are the reason for this discipline s being. Although Human Factors programs have been generated and implemented, there is still the need for a method to help organizations fully integrate this discipline into the enterprise as a whole. The purpose of this research is to develop a method to help organizations integrate HFE/E into it business processes. This research begun with a review of the ways in which the HFE/E discipline is currently used by organizations. The need and desire to integrate HFE/E into organizations was identified, and a method to accomplish this integration was conceptualized. This method consisted on the generation of two domain-specific ontologies (a Human Factors Engineering/Ergonomics ontology, and a Business ontology), and mapping the two creating a concept map that can be used to integrate HFE/E into businesses. The HFE/E ontology was built by generating two concept maps that were merged and then joined with a HFE/E discipline taxonomy. A total of four concept maps, two ontologies and a taxonomy were created, all of which are contributions to the HFE/E, and the business- and management-related fields

Supporting effective unexpected exception handling in workflow management systems within organizaional contexts

Tese de doutoramento em Informática (Engenharia Informática), apresentada à Universidade de Lisboa através da Faculdade de Ciências, 2008Workflow Management Systems (WfMS) support the execution of organizational processes within organizations. Processes are modelled using high level languages specifying the sequence of tasks the organization has to perform. However, organizational processes do not have always a smooth flow conforming to any possible designed model and exceptions to the rule happen often. Organizations require flexibility to react to situations not predicted in the model. The required flexibility should be complemented with robustness to guarantee system reliability even in extreme situations. In our work, we have introduced the concept of WfMS resilience that comprises these two facets: robustness and flexibility. The main objective of our work is to increase resilience in WfMSs. From the events demanding for WfMS resilience, we focused on ad hoc effective unexpected exceptions as those for which no previous knowledge exist is the organization to derive the handling procedure and no plan can be a priori established. These exceptions usually require human intervention and problem solving activities, since the concrete situation may not be entirely understood before humans start reacting to the event. After discussing existing approaches to increase WfMS resilience, we have identified five levels of conformity. The fifth level, being the most demanding one, requires unrestricted humanistic interventions to workflow execution. In this thesis, we propose a system to support unrestricted users' interventions to the WfMS and we characterize the interventions as unstructured activities. The system has two modes of operation: it usually works under model control and changes to unstructured activities support when an exception is detected. The exception handling activities are carried out until the system is placed back into a coherent mode, where work may proceed undermodel execution control