Managing value creation in knowledge intensive business services organisations

Value creation is essential in the Knowledge Intensive Business Service (KIBS) industry, due to its problem-solving nature. KIBS organisations need to understand their internal value creation processes as well as the complexity in the environment in order to survive and thrive. This paper investigates how value creation is managed in KIBS organisation through a case study. It then goes on to adopt Beer's Viable System Model (VSM) to propose an organisational design, namely the Value Integration Office (VIO). The VIO focuses on the 5 functions/systems defined by VSM in the meta-system and operation of an organisation in order to manage value creation. This design is implemented in a case study organisation with the aim to adopt a holistic view on value creation within the organisation as well as facilitate future planning function. The implementation and impact of the proposed organisational design are reported in this paper

Engineering Crowdsourced Stream Processing Systems

A crowdsourced stream processing system (CSP) is a system that incorporates crowdsourced tasks in the processing of a data stream. This can be seen as enabling crowdsourcing work to be applied on a sample of large-scale data at high speed, or equivalently, enabling stream processing to employ human intelligence. It also leads to a substantial expansion of the capabilities of data processing systems. Engineering a CSP system requires the combination of human and machine computation elements. From a general systems theory perspective, this means taking into account inherited as well as emerging properties from both these elements. In this paper, we position CSP systems within a broader taxonomy, outline a series of design principles and evaluation metrics, present an extensible framework for their design, and describe several design patterns. We showcase the capabilities of CSP systems by performing a case study that applies our proposed framework to the design and analysis of a real system (AIDR) that classifies social media messages during time-critical crisis events. Results show that compared to a pure stream processing system, AIDR can achieve a higher data classification accuracy, while compared to a pure crowdsourcing solution, the system makes better use of human workers by requiring much less manual work effort

Event-Cloud Platform to Support Decision- Making in Emergency Management

The challenge of this paper is to underline the capability of an Event-Cloud Platform to support efficiently an emergency situation. We chose to focus on a nuclear crisis use case. The proposed approach consists in modeling the business processes of crisis response on the one hand, and in supporting the orchestration and execution of these processes by using an Event-Cloud Platform on the other hand. This paper shows how the use of Event-Cloud techniques can support crisis management stakeholders by automatizing non-value added tasks and by directing decision- makers on what really requires their capabilities of choice. If Event-Cloud technology is a very interesting and topical subject, very few research works have considered this to improve emergency management. This paper tries to fill this gap by considering and applying these technologies on a nuclear crisis use-case

Metacognition and Reflection by Interdisciplinary Experts: Insights from Cognitive Science and Philosophy

Interdisciplinary understanding requires integration of insights from different perspectives, yet it appears questionable whether disciplinary experts are well prepared for this. Indeed, psychological and cognitive scientific studies suggest that expertise can be disadvantageous because experts are often more biased than non-experts, for example, or fixed on certain approaches, and less flexible in novel situations or situations outside their domain of expertise. An explanation is that experts’ conscious and unconscious cognition and behavior depend upon their learning and acquisition of a set of mental representations or knowledge structures. Compared to beginners in a field, experts have assembled a much larger set of representations that are also more complex, facilitating fast and adequate perception in responding to relevant situations. This article argues how metacognition should be employed in order to mitigate such disadvantages of expertise: By metacognitively monitoring and regulating their own cognitive processes and representations, experts can prepare themselves for interdisciplinary understanding. Interdisciplinary collaboration is further facilitated by team metacognition about the team, tasks, process, goals, and representations developed in the team. Drawing attention to the need for metacognition, the article explains how philosophical reflection on the assumptions involved in different disciplinary perspectives must also be considered in a process complementary to metacognition and not completely overlapping with it. (Disciplinary assumptions are here understood as determining and constraining how the complex mental representations of experts are chunked and structured.) The article concludes with a brief reflection on how the process of Reflective Equilibrium should be added to the processes of metacognition and philosophical reflection in order for experts involved in interdisciplinary collaboration to reach a justifiable and coherent form of interdisciplinary integration. An Appendix of “Prompts or Questions for Metacognition” that can elicit metacognitive knowledge, monitoring, or regulation in individuals or teams is included at the end of the article

From governance to meta-governance in tourism?: Re-incorporating politics,interests and values in the analysis of tourism governance

Despite its theorization in the political and policy sciences in the early 1990s, the concept of metagovernance has gained relatively little recognition in tourism studies. Nevertheless, its significance in the political sciences and policy literature, especially as a result of the perceived failure of governance systems following the recent global financial crisis, has only served to reinforce its relevance. Metagovernance addresses some of the perceived failures of traditional governance approaches and associated interventions, and has enabled the understanding of central-state led regimes of shadowed hierarchical authorities and local-level micro-practices of social innovation and self-government. In contrast, tourism studies have tended to restrict study of the political dimension of tourism governance and the role of the state under the traditional parallelism between government and governance. Examination of how governance is itself governed enables a better understanding of the practices of planning and policy making affecting tourism and destinations. In particular, the applications of concepts of governance are inextricably linked to a given set of value assumptions which predetermine the range of its application. A short example of the application of the metagovernance paradigm is provided from the New Zealand context. It is concluded that governance mechanisms are not value-neutral and instead serve to highlight the allocation of power in a destination and the dominance of particular values and interests

Stakeholder engagement in water governance as social learning: lessons from practice

The OECD Principles on Water Governance set out various requirements for stakeholder engagement. Coupled with conceptualizations of social learning, this article asks how we define and enact stakeholder engagement and explores the actual practice of engagement of stakeholders in three fields of water governance. The results suggest that a key consideration is the purpose of the stakeholder engagement, requiring consideration of its ethics, process, roles and expected outcomes. While facilitators cannot be held accountable if stakeholder engagement ‘fails’ in terms of social learning, they are responsible for ensuring that the enabling conditions for social learning are met