Strategic Assessment of Organizational Commitment

The concept of organizational commitment has been widely studied over recent decades, yet it remains one of the most challenging concepts in organizational research. While commitment is understood to be highly valuable in today’s dynamic business environment, its multifaceted nature is not necessarily understood adequately. The purpose of this study was to examine the concept of organizational commitment and its measurement issues within organizations, and to develop a practical evaluation tool for management, which is based on previous scientific research. First, a theoretical framework discussing organizational commitment and engagement was established. Based on the literature research, three ontologies were developed addressing organizational commitment and engagement, as well as academic engagement. The ontologies were constructed as a synthesis of existing theories. With the help of the ontologies and the created evaluation system, it is possible to better understand these concepts, gain a collective view of the organization’s current state and vision for the future, and to open a dialogue between members of the organization regarding their development. The results of the empirical case studies are presented at the end of this thesis, as well as in the attached research papers. The empirical results indicate that, by using these applications, it is possible to gain insights about the respondents’ feelings and aspirations, which can be used to support effective decision-making and as the basis for creating development actions within the organization.Organisaatiositoutumisen käsitettä on tutkittu laajasti kuluneiden vuosikymmenten aikana, kuitenkin se on edelleen yksi organisaatiotutkimuksen haastavimmista käsitteistä. Sitoutuminen on laajalti ymmärretty erittäin tärkeäksi tämän päivän liiketoimintaympäristössä mutta sen moniulotteista luonnetta ei yrityksissä ole välttämättä ymmärretty riittävästi. Tämän tutkimuksen tavoitteena oli tarkastella organisatorisen sitoutumisen käsitettä ja sen mittaamisen ongelmallisuutta sekä kehittää aikaisempaan tieteelliseen tutkimukseen perustuva käytännön sovellus sitoutumisen tason määrittämiseksi. Tutkimuksen ensimmäisessä osassa laadittiin organisaatioon sitoutumista käsittelevä teoreettinen viitekehys, jonka perusteella kehitettiin kolme ontologiaa. Ontologiat käsittelevät organisaation sitoutumista eri näkökulmista sekä opiskelijoiden akateemista sitoutumista. Ontologioiden sekä laaditun arviointijärjestelmän avulla on mahdollista ymmärtää sitoutumiseen liittyviä käsitteitä, saada yhteinen näkemys organisaation nykytilasta ja tulevaisuuden näkemyksestä sekä löytää mahdollisia kehityskohteita. Empiiristen case-tutkimusten tuloksia on esitetty tämän työn loppuosassa sekä liitteenä olevissa tutkimusartikkeleissa. Tulokset osoittavat, että laadittujen sovellusten avulla on mahdollista saada tietoa vastaajien tuntemuksista ja pyrkimyksistä. Tätä tietoa voidaan hyödyntää päätöksenteon tukena sekä perustana kehitystoimien luomiselle.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Content warehouses

Nowadays, content management systems are an established technology. Based on the experiences from several application scenarios we discuss the points of contact between content management systems and other disciplines of information systems engineering like data warehouses, data mining, and data integration. We derive a system architecture called "content warehouse" that integrates these technologies and defines a more general and more sophisticated view on content management. As an example, a system for the collection, maintenance, and evaluation of biological content like survey data or multimedia resources is shown as a case study

Modular reactors: What can we learn from modular industrial plants and off site construction research

New modular factory-built methodologies implemented in the construction and industrial plant industries may bring down costs for modular reactors. A factory-built environment brings about benefits such as; improved equipment, tools, quality, shift patterns, training, continuous improvement learning, environmental control, standardisation, parallel working, the use of commercial off shelf equipment and much of the commissioning can be completed before leaving the factory. All these benefits combine to reduce build schedules, increase certainty, reduce risk and make financing easier and cheaper.Currently, the construction and industrial chemical plant industries have implemented successful modular design and construction techniques. Therefore, the objectives of this paper are to understand and analyse the state of the art research in these industries through a systematic literature review. The research can then be assessed and applied to modular reactors.The literature review highlighted analysis methods that may prove to be useful. These include; modularisation decision tools, stakeholder analysis, schedule, supply chain, logistics, module design tools and construction site planning. Applicable research was highlighted for further work exploration for designers to assess, develop and efficiently design their modular reactors

Engineering of Augmented Reality-Based Information Systems - Design and Implementation for Intralogistics Services

The development of augmented reality glasses is still ongoing and faces barriers in diffusion and concerns about their impact on users, organizations and society. The study aims to find sufficient solutions for this struggling digital innovation and to provide guidance for the implementation of augmented reality glasses in design-oriented projects. During a 3-year consortium research, acceptance and privacy have been identified as major phenomena that influence the adoption of augmented reality glasses in the logistics domain. To forge ahead digital innovation research, the focus of the presented research lies on the diffusion of this technology with design knowledge for the development of augmented reality glasses-based systems. Evidence and artifacts contribute to the still limited knowledge of system design based on augmented reality glasses from a domain-specific instantiation and an implementation framework

An integrative framework for cooperative production resources in smart manufacturing

Under the push of Industry 4.0 paradigm modern manufacturing companies are dealing with a significant digital transition, with the aim to better address the challenges posed by the growing complexity of globalized businesses (Hermann, Pentek, & Otto, Design principles for industrie 4.0 scenarios, 2016). One basic principle of this paradigm is that products, machines, systems and business are always connected to create an intelligent network along the entire factory\u2019s value chain. According to this vision, manufacturing resources are being transformed from monolithic entities into distributed components, which are loosely coupled and autonomous but nevertheless provided of the networking and connectivity capabilities enabled by the increasingly widespread Industrial Internet of Things technology. Under these conditions, they become capable of working together in a reliable and predictable manner, collaborating among themselves in a highly efficient way. Such a mechanism of synergistic collaboration is crucial for the correct evolution of any organization ranging from a multi-cellular organism to a complex modern manufacturing system (Moghaddam & Nof, 2017). Specifically of the last scenario, which is the field of our study, collaboration enables involved resources to exchange relevant information about the evolution of their context. These information can be in turn elaborated to make some decisions, and trigger some actions. In this way connected resources can modify their structure and configuration in response to specific business or operational variations (Alexopoulos, Makris, Xanthakis, Sipsas, & Chryssolouris, 2016). Such a model of \u201csocial\u201d and context-aware resources can contribute to the realization of a highly flexible, robust and responsive manufacturing system, which is an objective particularly relevant in the modern factories, as its inclusion in the scope of the priority research lines for the H2020 three-year period 2018-2020 can demonstrate (EFFRA, 2016). Interesting examples of these resources are self-organized logistics which can react to unexpected changes occurred in production or machines capable to predict failures on the basis of the contextual information and then trigger adjustments processes autonomously. This vision of collaborative and cooperative resources can be realized with the support of several studies in various fields ranging from information and communication technologies to artificial intelligence. An update state of the art highlights significant recent achievements that have been making these resources more intelligent and closer to the user needs. However, we are still far from an overall implementation of the vision, which is hindered by three major issues. The first one is the limited capability of a large part of the resources distributed within the shop floor to automatically interpret the exchanged information in a meaningful manner (semantic interoperability) (Atzori, Iera, & Morabito, 2010). This issue is mainly due to the high heterogeneity of data model formats adopted by the different resources used within the shop floor (Modoni, Doukas, Terkaj, Sacco, & Mourtzis, 2016). Another open issue is the lack of efficient methods to fully virtualize the physical resources (Rosen, von Wichert, Lo, & Bettenhausen, 2015), since only pairing physical resource with its digital counterpart that abstracts the complexity of the real world, it is possible to augment communication and collaboration capabilities of the physical component. The third issue is a side effect of the ongoing technological ICT evolutions affecting all the manufacturing companies and consists in the continuous growth of the number of threats and vulnerabilities, which can both jeopardize the cybersecurity of the overall manufacturing system (Wells, Camelio, Williams, & White, 2014). For this reason, aspects related with cyber-security should be considered at the early stage of the design of any ICT solution, in order to prevent potential threats and vulnerabilities. All three of the above mentioned open issues have been addressed in this research work with the aim to explore and identify a precise, secure and efficient model of collaboration among the production resources distributed within the shop floor. This document illustrates main outcomes of the research, focusing mainly on the Virtual Integrative Manufacturing Framework for resources Interaction (VICKI), a potential reference architecture for a middleware application enabling semantic-based cooperation among manufacturing resources. Specifically, this framework provides a technological and service-oriented infrastructure offering an event-driven mechanism that dynamically propagates the changing factors to the interested devices. The proposed system supports the coexistence and combination of physical components and their virtual counterparts in a network of interacting collaborative elements in constant connection, thus allowing to bring back the manufacturing system to a cooperative Cyber-physical Production System (CPPS) (Monostori, 2014). Within this network, the information coming from the productive chain can be promptly and seamlessly shared, distributed and understood by any actor operating in such a context. In order to overcome the problem of the limited interoperability among the connected resources, the framework leverages a common data model based on the Semantic Web technologies (SWT) (Berners-Lee, Hendler, & Lassila, 2001). The model provides a shared understanding on the vocabulary adopted by the distributed resources during their knowledge exchange. In this way, this model allows to integrate heterogeneous data streams into a coherent semantically enriched scheme that represents the evolution of the factory objects, their context and their smart reactions to all kind of situations. The semantic model is also machine-interpretable and re-usable. In addition to modeling, the virtualization of the overall manufacturing system is empowered by the adoption of an agent-based modeling, which contributes to hide and abstract the control functions complexity of the cooperating entities, thus providing the foundations to achieve a flexible and reconfigurable system. Finally, in order to mitigate the risk of internal and external attacks against the proposed infrastructure, it is explored the potential of a strategy based on the analysis and assessment of the manufacturing systems cyber-security aspects integrated into the context of the organization\u2019s business model. To test and validate the proposed framework, a demonstration scenarios has been identified, which are thought to represent different significant case studies of the factory\u2019s life cycle. To prove the correctness of the approach, the validation of an instance of the framework is carried out within a real case study. Moreover, as for data intensive systems such as the manufacturing system, the quality of service (QoS) requirements in terms of latency, efficiency, and scalability are stringent, an evaluation of these requirements is needed in a real case study by means of a defined benchmark, thus showing the impact of the data storage, of the connected resources and of their requests