The power and vulnerability of the ‘new professional’: Web management in UK universities

Research paper Purpose: To explore the character of an emergent occupational role, that of university web manager. Design/methodology/approach: The primary data used were 15 semi-structured interviews conducted in 2004. These were analysed partly for factual and attitudinal data, but also for the discursive interpretative repertoires in use. Findings: The paper examines the diverse backgrounds, occupational trajectories, organisational positions, job roles and status of practitioners working in ‘web management’ in UK Higher Education. The discursive divide between the marketing and IT approaches to the web is investigated. Two case studies explore further the complexity and creativity involved in individuals’ construction of coherent and successful occupational identities. Research implications / limitations: The paper examines the position of web managers within the framework of the notions of the marginal but powerful ‘new professional’ or ‘broker’ technician. It gives a vivid insight into how the web as a dynamic and open technology opens up opportunities for new forms of expertise; but also explores the potential vulnerabilities of such new roles. In order to examine personal experience in depth, data was gathered for only a relatively small number of individuals. The research was also limited to the UK university sector and to those with a broad responsibility for the web site of the whole institution, i.e. not library web managers and other web authors who work primarily to produce a departmental web presence. These limits imply obvious ways in which the research could be extended. Practical implications: There are implications for how institutions support people in such roles, and for how they can support each other. Originality: There is a vast literature about the web, little about the new work roles that have grown up around it

Coupling Performance Measurement and Collective Activity: The Semiotic Function of Management Systems. A Case Study

Theories about management instruments often enter dualistic debates between structure and agency: do instruments determine the forms of collective activity (CA), or do actors shape instruments to their requirements, or are instruments and concrete activity decoupled, as some trends of new institutionalist theory assume? Attempts to overcome the dualistic opposition between structure and activity stem from diverse sources: actors’ networks theory, structuration theory, pragmatism, theory of activity, semiotics. Performance measurement and management systems can be defined as structural instruments engaged in CA. As such they constrain the activity, but they do not determine it. Reciprocally, they are modified by the way CA uses them and makes sense of them. The central thesis of this paper will be that it is impossible to study the role of performance measurement as a common language in organizations independently from the design of the CA in which it is engaged. There is a not deterministic coupling between structure (i.e. management technical tools) and CA (i.e. business processes). The transformation of CA entails a transformation in the meaning of the “performance” concept, in the type of measurement required and in the performance management practices. The relationship between performance measurement and CA is studied here in the production division of a large electricity utility in France. The research extended over several years and took place when two new management systems were simultaneously implemented: a new management accounting system and an integrated management information system (ERP), both in the purchasing process. The new management accounting system was designed by the purchasing department; the new management information system was designed by the operational departments. Whereas the coherence between both projects could have been given by their common subordination to the rebuilding of CA (the purchasing process), their disconnection from concrete CA opened the possibility of serious dissonances between them. Both the new performance management system and the new ERP met difficulties to provide common languages, since the dimension of CA was taken for granted and consequently partly ignored in the engineering of both systems. When CA incurs radical transformations, actors’direct discursive exchanges about it, “collective activity about collective activity”, become necessary to ensure a flexible and not deterministic coupling between CA and new management systems. This reflexive and collective analysis of the process by actors themselves requires the establishment of “communities of process”, which can jointly redesign the CA and its performance measurement system. We conclude that performance measurement can be a common language as far as there is a clear and shared understanding of how CA should concretely take place and should be assigned to the different categories of actors.Business Process; Collective Activity; Community of Process; Management Instruments; Performance Measurement; Semiotics; Theory of Activity

Evaluating megaprojects: from the “iron triangle” to network mapping

Evaluation literature has paid relatively little attention to the specific needs of evaluating large, complex industrial and infrastructure projects, often called ‘megaprojects’. The abundant megaproject governance literature, in turn, has largely focused on the so-called ‘megaproject pathologies’, i.e. the chronic budget overruns, and failure of such projects to keep to timetables and deliver the expected social and economic benefits. This article draws on these two strands of literature, identifies shortcomings, and suggests potential pathways towards an improved evaluation of megaprojects. To counterbalance the current overemphasis on relatively narrowly defined accountability as the main function of megaproject evaluation, and the narrow definition of project success in megaproject evaluation, the article argues that conceptualizing megaprojects as dynamic and evolving networks would provide a useful basis for the design of an evaluation approach better able to promote learning and to address the socio economic aspects of megaprojects. A modified version of ‘network mapping’ is suggested as a possible framework for megaproject evaluation, with the exploration of the multiple accountability relationships as a central evaluation task, designed to reconcile learning and accountability as the central evaluation functions. The article highlights the role of evaluation as an ‘emergent’ property of spontaneous megaproject ‘governing’, and explores the challenges that this poses to the role of the evaluator

Supply chain management: An opportunity for metaheuristics

In today’s highly competitive and global marketplace the pressure on organizations to find new ways to create and deliver value to customers grows ever stronger. In the last two decades, logistics and supply chain has moved to the center stage. There has been a growing recognition that it is through an effective management of the logistics function and the supply chain that the goal of cost reduction and service enhancement can be achieved. The key to success in Supply Chain Management (SCM) require heavy emphasis on integration of activities, cooperation, coordination and information sharing throughout the entire supply chain, from suppliers to customers. To be able to respond to the challenge of integration there is the need of sophisticated decision support systems based on powerful mathematical models and solution techniques, together with the advances in information and communication technologies. The industry and the academia have become increasingly interested in SCM to be able to respond to the problems and issues posed by the changes in the logistics and supply chain. We present a brief discussion on the important issues in SCM. We then argue that metaheuristics can play an important role in solving complex supply chain related problems derived by the importance of designing and managing the entire supply chain as a single entity. We will focus specially on the Iterated Local Search, Tabu Search and Scatter Search as the ones, but not limited to, with great potential to be used on solving the SCM related problems. We will present briefly some successful applications.Supply chain management, metaheuristics, iterated local search, tabu search and scatter search

Integrative Ability as it Relates to Problem Solving Strategies: A Study of Possible Factors Affecting and Affected by this Ability

Individuals within the United States Forest Service, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and state park systems were studied to determine their integrative orientation (general problem solving strategies). This orientation involves a preference for trying new ideas, working within a long time frame, generalizing in planning or managing, taking risks, working in close association with others, examining many aspects of a problem, working on difficult problems, developing a variety of skills, and working on problems requiring continual revision. An attempt was made to relate this orientation to education, major field of study, agency, time, tasks, level in the organization, important skills, and situations in which skills are acquired. The results, for the most part, were inconclusive. However, much of this can be attributed to the sampling procedure and the format of the questionnaire. Integrative orientation tested with skills thought to be important yielded significant results, with definite differences appearing between the groups. The overall pattern which developed showed that an individual with a high integrative ability feels that a wider variety of skills is more important than does an individual with less integrative ability

Towards a Technician Marketplace using Capacity-Based Pricing

Today, industrial maintenance is organized as an on-call business: Upon a customer’ s service request, the maintenance provider schedules a service technician to perform the demanded service at a suitable time. In this work, we address two drawbacks of this scheduling approach: First, the provider typically prioritizes service demand based on a subjective perception of urgency. Second, the pricing of technician services is inefficient, since services are priced on a time and material basis without accounting for additional service quality (e.g. shorter response time). We propose the implementation of a technician marketplace that allows customers to book technician capacity for fixed time slots. The price per time slot depends on the remaining capacity and therefore incentivizes customers to claim slots that match their objective task urgency. The approach is evaluated using a simulation study. Results show the capabilities of capacity-based pricing mechanisms to prioritize service demand according to customers’ opportunity costs

Work Organisation and Innovation - Case Study: Radiometer, Denmark

[Excerpt] Established in 1935 by two engineers, Radiometer invented the world’s first blood gas analyser in 1954 in connection with the struggle against the childhood polio epidemic. This invention resulted in the development of a company that produces medico-technical products and services for hospitals. The company’s headquarters are in Denmark, where the largest group of employees (948) work. Worldwide, Radiometer has a total of 2,300 employees and subsidiary companies in 23 countries

Servitising manufacturers:the impact of service complexity and contractual and relational capabilities

Processes of servitisation will lead providers to change their service delivery structures, but they also need to transform broader organisational attributes including contractual and relational capabilities. Based on case studies in the European healthcare sector, we investigate the influence of increasing levels of service complexity on this transformation. Our findings are potentially counter-intuitive, suggesting that contractual capabilities do not increase with service complexity. Instead, we observed increased levels of relational capabilities, manifest in the visibility of the provider on the customer site, the number of ‘non-requested’ site visits and increasingly informal information exchange.</p