Approaching VUCA Environment with Enterprise Agility in Government Organization : Case Business Finland and COVID-19

As we live in a VUCA world, many have experienced what crises can cause in business life. To be resilient and thrive in this increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world, top companies are gaining sustainable competitive advantages by embracing agility at scale. Those that fail to keep up with the rapid pace of change risk falling behind the competition. However, with crises come opportunities for change. Businesses of all sizes have never sensed so much pressure to make their business models fit changing requirements. This study aims to discover how a government organization embraced enterprise agility when the global pandemic (COVID-19) added another dimension to the already VUCA environment. Of particular interest is how the role of a public organization has affected a company’s agility in such a dynamic environment and what kind of capabilities are essential for agility. The study constructs a tentative theoretical framework based on existing research on a dynamic environment and enterprise agility considering the public context. The framework outlines the foundation for the exploratory qualitative case study on a single case from Business Finland, a Finnish government organization for innovation funding and trade, travel, and investment promotion. The primary data for the empirical study was collected by conducting semi-structured interviews with 12 knowledge representatives who were actively involved in Business Finland’s operations during the COVID-19 outbreak but who worked in different units and regions, thus providing various lookouts on the same phenomenon. The novelty of this study lies in the combination of dynamic environment and agility, and it contributes to both research fields. The findings show that Business Finland has embraced enterprise agile practices to respond to the volatility and uncertainty that followed the COVID-19 pandemic. Altogether six agility providers with several embedded practices emerged from the findings. A burning platform for change replaced the cultural aversion to risk-taking and highlighted empowered teams that worked within and across agencies to achieve rapid results. The findings indicate that these providers and practices did not only help Business Finland to navigate through the COVID-19 crisis but also pointed to more agile operating practices to be more resilient and agile in the future. It became evident that the driver behind various operating rules and practices that might have hindered government organizations’ agility is more often a habit, not law. Given the high environmental velocity, the findings suggest that Business Finland should incorporate the Lean Startup mindset and practices that emerged during the crisis into its daily operations to prepare for future changes and potential shock waves. Moreover, the study confirmed the primary capabilities of agility, of which flexibility and responsiveness, in particular, became essential during the COVID-19 pandemic

smart Emergency Response System (smartERS) – the Oil Spill use case

Thanks to the huge progress within the last 50 years in Earth Observation, Geospatial science and ICT technology, mankind is facing, for the first time, the opportunity to effectively respond to natural and artificial emergencies such as: earthquake, flood, oil spill, etc. Responding to an emergency requires to find, access, exchange, and of course understand many types of geospatial information provided by several types of sensors. Majors oil spills emergencies as, the Gulf of Mexico (Macondo/Deepwater Horizon) in 2010, the sinking of the oil tanker Prestige in 2002, have offered lessons learned and identified challenges to be addressed. Interoperability provides the principles and technologies to address those challenges. Since years interoperability has been developing based on traditional Service Oriented Architecture, request/response communication style, and implemented through Spatial Data Infrastructures. The experience handling oil spill responses shows that emergency services based on SDIs have some limitations, mainly due to their real-time peculiarity. Moreover despite the effort that Private Sector and Public Administration have been putting since years, the goal to provide an exhaustive picture of the situation during an Emergency Response is still far to be reached. We argue that to achieve this goal, we have to frame the problem in a different way. Emergency Response is not just sensing; it should be smart enough to encompass intelligent actions such as, automatically and dynamically acquire context driven information. The gaol of this paper is to define what a “smart Emergency Response System” (smartERS) should be.JRC.G.3-Maritime affair

Agile Adoption in Information Technology Departments at Research Universities

This dissertation analyzes Agile methods and how they are adopted by Information Technology (IT) departments in research universities. Existing literature has focused on Agile adoption in private and public sectors. This study fills a knowledge gap in the research literature on Agile adoption in university contexts. Three research questions guide this study: What are the uses of Agile methods in research universities? What are the specific factors that affect adoption of agile methods in research universities? Why do research universities adopt (or not adopt) Agile methods? By answering these questions, the present study contributes to the growing literature on the opportunities and challenges of adopting Agile methods. Methodologically, the study is based on a survey of the Chief Information Officers (CIOs) of 418 research universities (response rate of 41.4%) and elite interviews. The survey included questions about Agile adoption in terms of purpose, methods, challenges, and organizational environment. The elite interviews explored the factors affecting Agile adoption and were supplemented with secondary documents about the organizational characteristics of the IT departments. The survey results show that many IT departments (nearly 60%) in these universities have adopted Agile. Agile is used to accelerate software development, manage projects, and increase productivity. The challenges of adopting Agile include pervasiveness of traditional waterfall methods, funding limitations, lack of skills, inconsistent process and practices, and organizational resistance to change. With respect to organizational factors, the level of research university is a determinant for adopting Agile. R1 Doctoral Universities (i.e., very high research activity) have more adoption of Agile methods compared to R2 Doctoral Universities (i.e., high research activity) or R3 Doctoral/ Professional Universities (i.e., D/PU). CIOs’ experience with Agile is a critical factor for adopting Agile. Elite interviews with the CIOs show the significance of the organizational context to adopt Agile. IT departments support university research and teaching; hence, these departments have a constant need to address the university departments’ needs. Leadership of these departments influences Agile adoption. Agile fosters frequent and effective communication among the team members. Overall, IT departments adopt Agile to increase their organizational efficiency in delivering their services efficiently within the universities

Empowering society by reusing privately held data for official statistics - A European approach

The High-Level Expert Group on facilitating the use of new data sources for official statistics has been created in the context of the data and digital strategy of the European Commission (EC). The task of the Expert Group is to provide recommendations aimed at enhancing data sharing between businesses and government (B2G) for the purpose of producing official statistics (B2G4S). The Expert Group consists of high-level experts with various backgrounds that are particularly relevant to B2G4S. Businesses generate and use data primarily for business-related purposes. The motivation for B2G4S stems from the high societal value that such privately held data can potentially generate when transformed into reliable, relevant and timely official statistics that are made available to everybody, for free. Transforming data into statistical information requires cooperation between private data holders and statistical authorities. On a voluntary basis there have been many collaborative efforts by businesses and statistical authorities to produce statistics based on privately held data, but for various reasons the use of such data for official statistics is still far below the level required to provide society with the high-quality and timely official statistics it needs in the increasingly data-driven world

The Role of Human Resource Management in Achieving Organisational Agility

Whilst uncertainty and change has always been the focal point of strategic management theories, the increasing rate of change and uncertainty that organisations have been experiencing during the past few decades has stimulated new approaches to the strategic management of firms. ‘Agility’ has been introduced as an appropriate paradigmatic approach to integrative strategy making ((Doz and Kosonen, 2008, 2010; McGrath, 2013a, 2013b; Sharifi, 2014). The concept has been considered as providing a comprehensive and cohesive platform for addressing the new conditions in the business environment, epitomised in notions such as hyper-competition, hyper-turbulence, and the continuously morphing business environment, through the perpetual process of altering and adjusting the firm’s direction and courses of action (Doz and Kosonen, 2008). The main aim behind the concept is to maintain strategic supremacy and competitiveness by anticipating and taking advantage of change ((D'Aveni, 1994; Thomas, 1996; Doz and Kosonen, 2007; Jamrog et al., 2006), and coping with and surviving unexpected changes (Zhang and Sharifi, 2000). Agile organisations rely on a series of agility capabilities such as strategic sensitivity, decision making prowess, learning aptitude and resource fluidity and flexibility (Hamel and Prahalad, 1993; Dyer and Shafer, 2003; Doz and Kosonen, 2008; Lengnick-Hall and Beck, 2009), many of which are human-related. A review of the agility literature revealed that achieving agility, similar to other value-based management philosophies, is heavily dependent upon various human factors such as Human Resources (HR) strategy, management approach and the prevailing culture of an organisation (Harper and Utley, 2001; Street et al., 2003; Dyer and Ericksen, 2006). However, the review of Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM) literature indicated that the SHRM studies have not responded to the agility agenda, thus, little is known about human resource management strategies and systems enabling organisational agility. In an effort to fill this gap, this research has focused on exploring the people aspects of organisational agility aiming at: 1. Identifying the HRM critical roles in developing organisational agility 2. Developing a theoretical model for crafting and implementing a HR Strategy which assists organisations in acquiring agile attributes. The conceptual model delineates the key constructs and features of an Agility-Oriented Human Resource Strategy (AOHRS). The research was conducted through exploratory qualitative research, collecting data mainly through semi-structured interviews with HR directors, agility professionals and senior managers from 17 large public and private organisations in the UK. The research explicated the need and developed a conceptual framework for AOHRS, which gives explicit attention to an array of external environment forces. The framework proposes the need for ongoing reinterpretation of contextual information, frequent review of necessary individual and organisation-wide skills portfolio and capabilities profiles, and frequent re-evaluation of HR principles, policies and practices-in-use to reflect the persistent uncertainty and continuously morphing business conditions. The framework also offers for a dynamic HR system which can analyse capability needs continuously and have appropriate policies and practices in place to easily and quickly reconfigure the firms’ human assets. The study contributes to the knowledge in the field of SHRM and organisational agility by presenting a comprehensive conceptual framework for AOHR strategy, complemented by an expansive definition for an Agility-Oriented SHRM suitable for an uncertain business environment. As part of this, the attributes and capabilities of the agile workforce, a series of Agility-Oriented HR Principles and a series of widely-adopted Agility-Oriented HR Practices are also empirically identified in addition to the characteristics and dimensions of an Agile HR Function

A BENCHMARK STUDY OF RAPIDX, AN AIR FORCE CONTRACTING INNOVATION ORGANIZATION

The purpose of this qualitative study is to first conduct a benchmark analysis of RAPIDx, a new, agile, and innovative organization using the Government Accountability Office (GAO) Framework for Assessing the Acquisition Function at Federal Agencies for the Department of the Air Force (DAF). Second, this study provides a record of lessons learned from the implementation of the RAPIDx office from July 2018 to September 2022. Our research methodology includes a gap analysis to compare RAPIDx against two of the four cornerstones outlined within the GAO Framework. Our analysis also offers insight and visibility into RAPIDx’s effectiveness, and it informs our recommendations for evaluating new, agile, and innovative organizations. In particular, we find that RAPIDx had more areas of concern than best practices when compared against the GAO Framework. We captured 16 best practices and identified 20 areas of concern. Finally, to aid RAPIDx, we provide six recommended courses of action to address RAPIDx’s most significant area of concern, adapt the GAO Framework for innovative organizations, and improve the organization's effectiveness going forward.Captain, United States Air ForceCaptain, United States Air ForceApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited

Software Engineering Methodologies and Life

The paradigms of design patterns and software engineering methodologies are methods that apply to areas outside the software space. As a business owner and student, I implement many software principles daily in both my work and personal life. After experiencing the power of Agile methodologies outside the scope of software engineering, I always think about how I can integrate the computer science skills that I am learning at Columbia in my life. For my study, I seek to learn about other software engineering development processes that can be useful in life. I theorize that if a model such as Agile can provide me with useful tools, then a model that the government and most of the world trusts should have paradigms I can learn with as well. The software model I will study is open source software (OSS). My research examines the lateral software standards of (OSS) and closed source software (CSS). For the scope of this paper, I will focus on research primarily on Linux as the OSS model and Agile as the CSS model. OSS has had an extraordinary impact on the software revolution [1], and CSS models have gained such popularity that its paradigms extend far beyond the software engineering space. Before delving into research, I thought the methodologies of OSS and CSS would be radically different. My study shall describe the similarities that exist between these two methodologies. In the process of my research, I was able to implement the values and paradigms that define the OSS development model to work more productively in my business. Software engineering core values and models can be used as a tool to improve our lives