A framework for investigating human factors issues associated with the implementation of new ICT systems in construction organisations

The failure of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) applications has been well documented in many industries and organisations. Many studies have attributed these failures to non-technical issues, i.e. those linked to human factors. A thorough review of the literature in ICT systems implementation and human factors domains suggests that a complete assessment of a new ICT systems implementation should address both organisation and end-user factors which demand different assessment approaches, but which are closely interrelated. This paper discusses the importance of taking account of socio-technical and user-centred issues in construction organisations, and presents a framework for enabling construction organisations to embed new ICT systems more effectively in the future. This framework combines aspects of action research methodology, the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and other usability evaluation studies, which allow integrated assessment of organisation and end-user factors. Due to their complementariness and synergy, the benefits gained from this integrated framework should be more than the sum of individual aspects. This integrated framework should help to reduce resistance to change within construction organisations, enhance user acceptance of new ICT systems and enhance organisation competitiveness

Reliable and Accountable System Design

Few would disagree with the assertion that safe engineering starts from the early stages of system design and should be maintained throughout the lifecycle. Different engineering domains have developed, mostly informal, frameworks with which they hope to promote this attitude. An interesting question for the KBS community is whether some of our methods for knowledge representation and reasoning can be used to assist in understanding, representing and interpreting such frameworks. This paper concentrates on what is (arguably) the area of greatest concern: relating system requirements to high level design. We highlight what appear to be the major difficulties which face us in this area, using examples from systems which have been built to tackle them.</jats:p

A framework for defining and analysing access policies in requirements models

Enforcing access policies derived from management control principles is a way by which organisations protect their information assets. The minimum privileges principle is an example of a management control principle, which specifies that users should only have access to resources they require to carry out their duties. Requirements models use actors to specify their access policies. Actors normally represent roles that users adopt, however a role can have different meanings, such as a position in an organisation or the assignment of a task, and can therefore be misleading. Current requirements modelling approaches do not provide a systematic way of defining roles for incorporation into access policies, and therefore we can not ensure that they satisfy management control principles. In this thesis we address the need to provide precise role definitions by developing a framework that facilitates the derivation of roles from the organisational context. The framework consists of a metamodel, which enables the organisational context to be represented and related to actors; a set of heuristics for deriving the organisational context; and a set of language constructs for formulating access policies, and verifying them using scenarios. We use the meta-model and language constructs that we developed to extend an existing requirements modelling language, the i* framework, and in particular a formal version of it, formal Tropos, to define and verify access policies definitions satisfying the minimum privileges principle. We also investigate the use of automated tool checking by translating the formal Tropos definitions into the specification language Alloy, which is supported by a tool that automatically checks assertions, to ensure consistency of the access policy definitions. We carry out a detailed case study taken from the literature to verify the extensions to the i* framework and the tool supported analysis. The framework presented in this thesis makes a novel contribution to the modelling of access policies as requirements, enabling us to define access policies using actors derived from the organisational context, that satisfy the minimum privileges principle

Utilising Industrial Internet in Product Management

There has been a lot of interest in Industrial Internet of Things lately. Its applications and their benefits have generally been widely researched, but the internal applications that product management use have not been sufficiently studied. In this thesis I study how product management can use and benefit from Industrial Internet of Things. I explore the different needs of product management, as well as different Industrial Internet applications and their benefits, to find how the needs could be fulfilled with the applications. I also use lean wastes and value to measure their benefits. All of product management’s objectives require information to aid in decision making. Some of the most important available information include customer information and product usage information. Industrial Internet can be used to build monitoring level applications that produce that information. Some of the most important applications include usage based customer segmentation, product faults analysis and sales support applications. These applications have been used as case studies in this work. Lean waste categories are good way of quantifying and evaluating the benefits of Industrial Internet applications. When the traditional manufacturing type waste categories are combined with information management waste categories, the different efficiency gains are easy to categorize. By estimating the value of the wastes and additional value created by the applications, as well as the costs of building the application, it is possible to evaluate their profitability. In both literature and empirical part, it was found that some of the information needs of product management can be fulfilled more efficiently than before, leading to the application being beneficial. They also tend to use the same technology stack as Industrial Internet applications in general, making them interesting

A requirements-based software process maturity model

The requirements phase of software development is an on-going problem for the software engineering community. The many disparate recommendations and best practices found in the literature make it difficult for software organisations to recognise which practices apply to their individual needs. The aim of this thesis is to pull together key solutions into a framework that allows practitioners to assess where their requirements process needs strengthening and to provide a means in which improvements can be achieved. In this thesis I show how I design, develop and validate a model of requirements engineering processes. This requirements capability maturity model (R-CMM) adheres to the characteristics of the Software Engineering Institute's Software Capability Maturity Model (SW-CMM) and is designed to take practitioners from an immature process capability through to an advanced capability. I contribute to the body of knowledge in both software process improvement and requirements engineering (RE) by providing rigorous detail of how a process maturity framework is developed to support RE practices. The model is generic and should apply to many software development organisations. The R-CMM guides users towards a view of RE that is based on goals and is problem driven. The SW-CMM framework is transformed into a simplified model that relates goals and problems to individual RE practises

Enterprise modelling and its application to organisational requirements, capture and definition

PhD ThesisComputers have gone from being solely large number crunching machines to small devices capable of performing a myriad of functions in a very small space of time. Computers are now used to control just about every facet of daily life; they can now be found in automobiles, washing machines and home heating systems. This rapid diversification brings a great many problems. Traditional software engineering methodologies are failing to meet and address these new problems. The goal of this thesis is to develop a new approach to organisational requirements engineering. A new modelling approach to representing organisations will be developed which will draw upon the concepts of a systems architecture, modelling the life cycle of responsibilities and the execution of conversations. Using this architecture an organisation will be able to embed social and cultural aspects within the modelling notation. From the modelling of responsibilities a clearer picture of the organisation's aims, objectives and policies will be developed along with a definition of what objects and access rights are required in order for the organisation to function. Using speech act and Petri net based models to model conversations a clearer understanding of the dynamics and constraints governing organisational behaviour can be developed. These modelling approaches are then applied to two real life case studies in order to demonstrate and evaluate their performance and usefulness

Managing sociotechnical risks in infrastructure projects : Sociotechnical Systems (STS) perspectives on systems

As systems become larger, more complex and integrated, the cost of failure increases rapidly, leading to a need for effective risk management tools. However, conventional risk management tools such as the ones based on hazard analysis or accident causation analysis have a narrow focus on either human or technical actors and on single causal chains at one organisational level. This led researchers to introduce the concept of Sociotechnical Systems (STS), involving the interaction of human and non-human technical components. The present study was conducted with the aim of developing ways of applying STS principles and STS-based methods to improve the risk management in large infrastructure projects. Initially, the sets of STS principles for the system design, which had been developed so far, were identified and then integrated and synthesised to produce a list of 20 core STS principles for applying them further in the current study. A comprehensive literature review of the work done in this field since its inception in the 1950s was then conducted, producing a unified list of 103 STS-based methods. These methods were then evaluated for their validity and visibility (occurrence). To identify and analyse major risks in complex infrastructure projects from an STS perspective, an observational case study of a large-scale collaborative design project at Heriot-Watt University was conducted, including running the surveys and interviews with the project participants. The aim was to find out if the presence or absence of the 20 STS principles and 18 associated risk factors affected the performance of the teams. It was found that the team performance was strongly related to the presence or absence of STS principles that was supported by statistically meaningful results of a quantitative analysis. The same STS principles were then applied retrospectively to a second case study, which was the construction of the Edinburgh Tram Network, based on documentary sources and employing the AcciMap and Abstraction Hierarchy (AH) methods. It was concluded that failure to apply these principles and the resulting risks could play a major role in the failure to deliver the project on time and within budget. Finally, a five-phase framework was constructed for STS-based risk management framework of infrastructure projects, with the guideline principles aligning the existing risk management framework with STS theory

Dialectic approach to multidisciplinary practice in requirements engineering

This thesis develops an approach that supports multidisciplinary practice in requirements engineering. It is argued that multidisciplinary requirements engineering practice is ineffective, and some specific problems for multidisciplinary practice are identified. It is also suggested that the incommensurability of conflicting paradigms is an underlying cause of the problems in multidisciplinary practice, and a number of criteria for support to overcome such problems are proposed. A form of methodological support, which it is claimed may help overcome some of the problems associated with multidisciplinary practice in requirements engineering, is developed. This methodological support takes the form of a dialectic process, and its associated products, which is conceptualised and then operationalised. As an illustration of the methodological support offered to multidisciplinary practice, the operationalisation of the dialectic process is applied to requirements constructed by the use of two different requirements engineering techniques from two different disciplines (representing two different paradigms), in the domain of Accident and Emergency healthcare. Finally, the application of the operationalisation of the dialectic process is assessed with respect to the criteria for support for multidisciplinary practice proposed earlier, and this assessment is used to reconceptualise the dialectic process. The limitations of the research are identified, and possibilities for future work proposed. This thesis is aimed primarily at the requirements engineering community, and in particular the practising requirements engineer. It makes two contributions to knowledge supporting the practices of requirements engineering. First, the thesis contributes two types of substantive discipline knowledge: an explanation of why multidisciplinary practice in requirements engineering is problematic; and the proposal of criteria for support to allay the difficulties of multidisciplinary practice. It is suggested that these criteria might be used in the development of new types of support to overcomes such difficulties, or in the assessmment of new requirements engineering techniques that claim to address multidisciplinary practice. Second, the thesis contributes methodological knowledge in the form of a dialectic approach that offers a new way of reasoning about requirements engineering. This methodological knowledge takes two forms: a generic dialectic approach that might be applied by requirements engineering practitioners to requirements, generated by a wide range of requirements engineering techniques, representing alternative paradigms; and a specific instantiation of the dialectic approach using the MUSE method and the Grounded Theory method, that might be used in its current form by requirements engineering practitioners to support their own multidisciplinary practice