An examination, planning and control & the management process, to better performance and profitability or: The management process to improve performance for better profitability

Everest and Blanc (E&B) is at a crossroad. It grew from a ‘mom and pop’ operation into a small professional firm and plateaued. Thus, there is a desire to bring about operation efficiency, followed by expansion of the company. In order to be successful, a systematic decision making process is necessary to ensure a high probability of success, and able to pinpoint dysfunctions early for improvement. In addition, implementing processes need careful consideration and progress monitoring. This study was founded on these premises using M2 mode research methodology to establish an optimal structural course of action by surveying paradigms of management theories and concepts. The study began with an exposition on research methodologies and focused on the M2 research mode. It continued on with considering operations topics (micro concerns), extending to general issues (macro concerns) in conjunction with management theories and concepts. Finally a decision making model was shaped and applied to E&B. During the process, several important decisions were made, grounded on the findings on the research, such as relocating the corporate office anticipating expansion. Overall, the changes introduced, the process of change, the decision-making process, and implementation were all effective. The decision making model, SOMM, Strato Operation Management Model, is an extension of both Ansoff’s and Anthony’s management models together with the decision-making process. The emphasis is on the relationship of the system structure’s characteristics where it is symbolized by a matryoshka representing the three management modules (Strategic Management, Management Control and Planning and Tactical Operation) nesting within each other. Relating to the overall strategic and management control and planning competency, the workhorse is a combination of defensive and offensive approaches together with evaluation methodologies to capture emerging and unintended strategies and to control performance; whereas the tactical operation process is to bring about efficiency and effectiveness. These are new knowledge and policies cast into members of E&B. It is, therefore, fundamental that careful interventions are necessary to cause changes by motivation and to align goal congruency. Further, the inquiry had specifically focused on the needs of E&B, it did not preclude application to other organizations. For academics, it may be an engaging topic for further empirical studies advancing knowledge in management and operations. With respect to a wider world application, it was also concluded that the findings for E&B are applicable and adaptable to other professional and business concerns as innovative tools to their problems and issues

Empirical modelling for participative business process reengineering

The purpose of this thesis is to introduce a new broad approach to computing - Empirical Modelling (EM) - and to propose a way of applying this approach for system development so as to avoid the limitations of conventional approaches and integrate system development with business process reengineering (BPR). Based on the concepts of agency, observable and dependency, EM is an experiencebased approach to modelling with computers in which the modeller interacts with an artefact through continuous observations and experiments. It is a natural way of working for business process modelling because the modeller is involved in, and takes account of, the real world context. It is also adaptable to a rapidly changing environment as the computer-based models serve as creative artefacts with which the modeller can interact in a situated and open-ended manner. This thesis motivates and illustrates the EM approach to new concepts of participative BPR and participative process modelling. That is, different groups of people, with different perceptions, competencies and requirements, can be involved during the process of system development and BPR, rather than just being involved at an early stage. This concept aims to address the well-known high failure rate of BPR. A framework SPORE (situated process of requirements engineering), which has been proposed to guide the process of cultivating requirements in a situated manner, is extended to participative BPR (i.e. to support many users in a distributed environment). Two levels of modelling are proposed for the integration of contextual understanding and system development. A comparison between EM and object-orientation is also provided to give insight into how EM differs from current methodologies and to point out the potential of EM in system development and BPR. The ISMs (interactive situation models), built using the principles and tools of EM, are used to form artefacts during the modelling process. A warehouse and logistics management system is taken as an illustrative case study for applying this framework

Supporting Source Code Feature Analysis Using Execution Trace Mining

Software maintenance is a significant phase of a software life-cycle. Once a system is developed the main focus shifts to maintenance to keep the system up to date. A system may be changed for various reasons such as fulfilling customer requirements, fixing bugs or optimizing existing code. Code needs to be studied and understood before any modification is done to it. Understanding code is a time intensive and often complicated part of software maintenance that is supported by documentation and various tools such as profilers, debuggers and source code analysis techniques. However, most of the tools fail to assist in locating the portions of the code that implement the functionality the software developer is focusing. Mining execution traces can help developers identify parts of the source code specific to the functionality of interest and at the same time help them understand the behaviour of the code. We propose a use-driven hybrid framework of static and dynamic analyses to mine and manage execution traces to support software developers in understanding how the system's functionality is implemented through feature analysis. We express a system's use as a set of tests. In our approach, we develop a set of uses that represents how a system is used or how a user uses some specific functionality. Each use set describes a user's interaction with the system. To manage large and complex traces we organize them by system use and segment them by user interface events. The segmented traces are also clustered based on internal and external method types. The clusters are further categorized into groups based on application programming interfaces and active clones. To further support comprehension we propose a taxonomy of metrics which are used to quantify the trace. To validate the framework we built a tool called TrAM that implements trace mining and provides visualization features. It can quantify the trace method information, mine similar code fragments called active clones, cluster methods based on types, categorise them based on groups and quantify their behavioural aspects using a set of metrics. The tool also lets the users visualize the design and implementation of a system using images, filtering, grouping, event and system use, and present them with values calculated using trace, group, clone and method metrics. We also conducted a case study on five different subject systems using the tool to determine the dynamic properties of the source code clones at runtime and answer three research questions using our findings. We compared our tool with trace mining tools and profilers in terms of features, and scenarios. Finally, we evaluated TrAM by conducting a user study on its effectiveness, usability and information management

The Essence of Software Engineering

Software Engineering; Software Development; Software Processes; Software Architectures; Software Managemen

The Impact of Legislation on the Organization: Evaluating the Impact of Corporate Governance Regulation on the Internal Audit Function

The intent of this research is to inform companies that the internal audit function has greater utility than just corporate governance. The internal audit function represents a resource to the business that can be used in a number of ways to help it survive, compete and establish new growth opportunities in the marketplace for the firm. The proposed project will demonstrate through an interpretive process study using case study research how the internal audit function can be a strategic business partner by highlighting its contribution ability in a dynamic, ever-changing, regulatory laden environment. This paper uses Punctuated Equilibrium Theory to explain the organizational transformation of the internal audit function from a professional bureaucracy to an adhocracy as an unintended consequence of corporate governance legislation over time. The study contributes to the literature by explaining the evolutionary change in the internal audit function from scorekeeper-and-watchdog to business-partner-and-change agent. This study analyzes how senior management benefits from utilizing the internal auditors’ experience as an organizational tool to address threats and opportunities