Adaptive organizations in the digital age : complexity, creativity and innovation

Adaptive organizations are the contemporary kind of socio-technical systems derived from the need to respond effectively to changes in the dynamic and unpredictable landscape of the digital economy. These organizations are both internetworked and knowledge-driven, and thus responsive to challenges and opportunitiesof the digital age. The networking capability (e.g. ICT-enabled virtuality,organizational teaming, and knowledge hyperlinking) provides for the adaptive organizations to cope with one of the biggest challenges they face today – complexity. For a small number of businesses, embracing complexity yields a competitive edge in terms of creativity, innovation, information management, and human resources. If we consider our countries, unions, departments, projects as complex adaptive systems, then we need to take into account their specificities to address and guide them properly. This paper looks through the lens of system design, complex adaptive systems, and the tactical management adaptability and effectiveness to provide an analysis of the European (1) strengths in strategy and operations (2) problems in ‘silos’, matrix- organizations, insufficient information and communication flows, current project management and slow risk management (3) example of the freedom of movement for workers (4) ‘business model’, and (5) growth paradigm that need to be fundamentally redefined through the value co-creation and co- evolution. The solutions we provide here are both conceptual (e.g. greater effectiveness delivered through the existing governance structures by drawing attention to the missing link between tactics and empowered project management), and tangible (e.g. methods providing adaptability in dynamic and unpredictable environment that is preserved by continuous Sense-Interpret-Decide-Act (SIDA) Loop and Role-and-Accountability system design, with proper information sensors, emitters and risk management for strategy and tactics)

Safety management theory and the military expeditionary organization: A critical theoretical reflection

Management of safety within organizations has become a key topic within safety science. Theorizing on this subject covers a diverse pallet of concepts such as “resilience” and “safety management systems”. Recent studies indicate that safety management theory has deficiencies. Our interpretation of these deficiencies is that much confusion originates from the issue that crucial meta-theoretical assumptions are mostly implicit or applied inconsistently. In particular, we argue that these meta-theoretical assumptions are of a systems theoretical nature. Therefore, we provide a framework that will be able to explicate and reflect on systems theoretical assumptions. With this framework, we analyze the ability of two frequently used safety management theories to tackle the problem of managing safety of Dutch military expeditionary organizations. This paper will show that inconsistent and implicit application of systems theoretical assumptions in these safety management theories results in problems to tackle such a practical problem adequately. We conclude with a reflection on the pros and cons of our framework. Also, we suggest particular meta-theoretical aspects that seem to be essential for applying safety management theory to organizations

Be vicarious: the challenge for project management in the service economy

Purpose. The paper aims to answer to the following questions: which are the critical dynamic capabilities to survive in the rubber landscape of service economy? Does it exist in service economy a dynamic capabilities provider? Methodology. The paper combines the literature review on dynamic capability perspective and that on vicariance to the Project Management professional services. Findings. Firstly, the paper identifies vicariance as an intriguing dynamic capability, crucial to survive in the rubber landscape of service economy. Secondly, the paper sheds light on Project Management (PM) as a vicarious that provides vicariance. Practical implications. For each critical organizational dimension, the paper identifies the links among the service economy challenges and the vicariance typology required to the project manager to face those challenge. Originality/value.The approach to conceive the PM as a vicarious that provides vicariance is original and leads to new insights on the professional services management. In fact, on one hand, dynamic capabilities cannot easily be bought through a market transaction; on the other hand, they must be built. This building can be achieved internally, by the organization itself (i.e. hierarchy), or through a partnership (i.e. hybrid form among hierarchy and market). PM professional services enrich organizations with additional information variety according to a hybrid (i.e. non- market) coordination model

The chaotic nature of healthcare information systems: The need for transdisciplinary collaboration

Copyright @ 2013 EMCIS.This paper demonstrates one of the challenges of the healthcare information systems development, namely the chaotic nature of healthcare systems. Although the reliable evidence demonstrating the positive effects of health information systems on safety and quality remains inconclusive (a growing body of research revealing the unintended consequences and potentially error producing effects of health information systems’ implementation. Different arguments from the literature concerning the chaotic nature of healthcare, including but not limited to the nature of patients and disease have been presented. The requirements of new ways of systems design and the need for transdisciplinary dynamic teams within the requirements engineering phase as a start has been discussed. These arguments have been investigated in the context of an exploratory case addressing one of the advanced oncology centres in the US. This paper concludes that there is an important need to rethink healthcare information systems development method, which has to be in a dynamic ongoing manner for some major issues

Large-scale Complex IT Systems

This paper explores the issues around the construction of large-scale complex systems which are built as 'systems of systems' and suggests that there are fundamental reasons, derived from the inherent complexity in these systems, why our current software engineering methods and techniques cannot be scaled up to cope with the engineering challenges of constructing such systems. It then goes on to propose a research and education agenda for software engineering that identifies the major challenges and issues in the development of large-scale complex, software-intensive systems. Central to this is the notion that we cannot separate software from the socio-technical environment in which it is used.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figure

A Typology of Virtual Teams: Implications for Effective Leadership

As the nature of work in today\u27s organizations becomes more complex, dynamic, and global, there has been an increasing emphasis on far-flung, distributed, virtual teams as organizing units of work. Despite their growing prevalence, relatively little is known about this new form of work unit. The purpose of this paper is to present a theoretical framework to focus research toward understanding virtual teams and, in particular, to identify implications for effective leadership. Specifically, we focus on delineating the dimensions of a typology to characterize different types of virtual teams. First, we distinguish virtual teams from conventional teams to identify where current knowledge applies and new research needs to be developed. Second, we distinguish among different types of virtual teams, considering the critical role of task complexity in determining the underlying characteristics of virtual teams and leadership challenges the different types entail. Propositions addressing leadership implications for the effective management of virtual teams are proposed and discussed

Organization of Multi-Agent Systems: An Overview

In complex, open, and heterogeneous environments, agents must be able to reorganize towards the most appropriate organizations to adapt unpredictable environment changes within Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). Types of reorganization can be seen from two different levels. The individual agents level (micro-level) in which an agent changes its behaviors and interactions with other agents to adapt its local environment. And the organizational level (macro-level) in which the whole system changes it structure by adding or removing agents. This chapter is dedicated to overview different aspects of what is called MAS Organization including its motivations, paradigms, models, and techniques adopted for statically or dynamically organizing agents in MAS.Comment: 12 page

Towards trusted volunteer grid environments

Intensive experiences show and confirm that grid environments can be considered as the most promising way to solve several kinds of problems relating either to cooperative work especially where involved collaborators are dispersed geographically or to some very greedy applications which require enough power of computing or/and storage. Such environments can be classified into two categories; first, dedicated grids where the federated computers are solely devoted to a specific work through its end. Second, Volunteer grids where federated computers are not completely devoted to a specific work but instead they can be randomly and intermittently used, at the same time, for any other purpose or they can be connected or disconnected at will by their owners without any prior notification. Each category of grids includes surely several advantages and disadvantages; nevertheless, we think that volunteer grids are very promising and more convenient especially to build a general multipurpose distributed scalable environment. Unfortunately, the big challenge of such environments is, however, security and trust. Indeed, owing to the fact that every federated computer in such an environment can randomly be used at the same time by several users or can be disconnected suddenly, several security problems will automatically arise. In this paper, we propose a novel solution based on identity federation, agent technology and the dynamic enforcement of access control policies that lead to the design and implementation of trusted volunteer grid environments.Comment: 9 Pages, IJCNC Journal 201