Managing knowledge for capability engineering

The enterprises that deliver capability are trying to evolve into through-life businesses by shifting away from the traditional pattern of designing and manufacturing successive generations of products, towards a new paradigm centred on support, sustainability and the incremental enhancements of existing capabilities from technology insertions and changes to process. The provision of seamless through-life customer solutions depends heavily on management of information and knowledge between, and within the different parts of the supply chain enterprise. This research characterised and described Capability Engineering (CE) as applied in the defence enterprise and identified to BAE Systems important considerations for managing knowledge within that context. The terms Capability Engineering and Through Life Capability Management (TLCM), used synonymously in this thesis, denote a complex evolving domain that requires new approaches to better understand the different viewpoints, models and practices. The findings and novelty of this research is demonstrated through the following achievements: Defined the problem space that Requirements Engineers can use in through-life management projects. Made a contribution to the development of models for Systems Architects to enable them to incorporate ‘soft’ systems within their consideration. Independently developed a TLCM activity model against which BAE Systems validated the BAE Systems TLCM activity model, which is now used by UK Ministry of Defence (MoD). Developed, and published within INCOSE1, the INCOSE Capability Engineering ontology. Through the novel analysis of a directly applicable case study, highlighted to Functional Delivery Managers the significance of avoiding the decoupling of information and knowledge in the context of TLCM. Through experimentation and knowledge gained within this research, identified inadequacies in the TechniCall (rapid access to experts) service which led to the generation of requirements for an improved service which is now being implemented by BAE Systems. The results showed that managing knowledge is distinct when compared to information management. Over-reliance on information management in the absence of tacit knowledge can lead to a loss in the value of the information, which can result in unintended consequences. Capability is realised through a combination of component systems and Capability Engineering is equivalent to a holistic perspective of Systems Engineering. A sector-independent Capability Engineering ontology is developed to enable semantic interoperability between different domains i.e. defence, rail and information technology. This helped to better understand the dependencies of contributing component systems within defence, and supported collaboration across different domains. Although the evaluation of the ontology through expert review has been accomplished; the ontology, KM analysis framework and soft systems transitioning approach developed still need to undergo independent verification and validation. This requires application to other case studies to check and exploit their suitability. This Engineering Doctorate research has been disseminated through a number of peer reviewed publications

SmartPowerchair: characterisation and usability of a pervasive System of Systems

A characterisation of a pervasive System of Systems called the SmartPowerchair is presented, integrating pervasive technologies into a standard powered wheelchair (powerchair).The SmartPowerchair can be characterised as a System of Systems (SoS) due to focusing on selection of the correct combination of independent and interoperable systems that are networked for a period of time to achieve the specific overall goal of enhancing the quality of life for people with disability. A high-level two-dimensional SoS model for the SmartPowerchair is developed to illustrate the different SoS lifecycle stages and levels. The results from a requirements elicitation study consisting of a survey targeting powerchair users was the input to a Hierarchical Task Analysis defining the supported tasks of the SmartPowerchair. The system architecture of one constituent system (SmartATRS) is described as well as the results of a usability evaluation containing workload measurements. The establishment of the SmartAbility Framework was the outcome of the evaluation results that concluded Range of Movement (ROM) was the determinant of suitable technologies for people with disability. The framework illustrates how a SoS approach can be applied to disability to recommend interaction mediums, technologies and tasks depending on the disability,impairments and ROM of the user. The approach therefore, creates a‘recommender system’ by viewing Disability Type, Impairments, ROM, Interaction Medium, Technologies and Tasks as constituent systems that interact together in a SoS

SmartDisability: A Smart System of Systems approach to Disability

This paper introduces the SmartDisability Framework; a System of Systems to consider mappings between the Disability Types, Range of Movement and Interaction Mediums to produce Technology and Task recommendations. Each element is seen as a constituent system that relies on interaction between the user and technology. The recommended technologies are viewed as independent and operable constituent systems that are networked together to assist people with disability. The SmartDisability conceptual model (based on the familiar disability symbol) and extracts from the initial development stage of the framework are presented. The framework has been populated through a systematic literature review of disability classification, Range of Movement, interaction mediums, `off-the-shelf' technologies and tasks. The framework was augmented by the results of a previously conducted requirements elicitation process, involving surveys and semi-structured interviews, and a user evaluation with head tracking technology. Quality Function Deployment determined the relationships within the framework to ensure that user requirements were fully analysed. The anticipated validation process involving a focus group utilising fictional personas and routes to exploitation (through the development of an application) are also discussed

Designing Mobile Friendly CAPTCHAs: An Exploratory Study.

CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) are one of the most widely used authentication mechanisms that help to prevent online service abuse. With the advent of mobile computing, mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets have become the primary way people access the Internet. As a result, increasing attention has been paid to designing CAPTCHAs that are mobile friendly. Although such CAPTCHAs generally show their advantages over traditional ones, it is still unclear what the best practices are for designing a CAPTCHA scheme that is easy to use on mobile devices. In this paper, we present an exploratory study that focuses on developing a more holistic view of usability issues with interactive CAPTCHAs to inform design guidance. This is done through investigating the usability performance of seven mobile friendly CAPTCHA schemes representing five different CAPTCHA types

E-Military Recruitment: A Conceptual Model for Contextualizing the Problem Domain

The rapidly changing labor market led by the hypergrowth of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) has forced organizations from different sectors to adopt e-recruitment. Among these sectors is the military. The migration from compulsory recruitment to a self-choice force relying on labor market has made the military sector encountering challenges to harness e-recruitment. This paper examines the various problems embedded with a unique case study of military recruitment and develops a conceptual model based on this. The objective of model is to contextualize the problems perceived and maps them to organizational recruitment objectives thereby enabling informed decisions about how to solve them. The result of analysis has given insight into the viability of model developed

A conceptual approach to support through-life business transformation in an aerospace and defence context

Through Life Capability Management (TLCM) is a complex evolving domain that requires a new approach to better understand the different viewpoints, models and practices within various enterprises to support a future conceptual model development. This research applied Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) to identify the activities necessary to transform an existing aerospace and defence business model to one that would support TLCM. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with experts and stakeholders across a range of different relevant functions and organisations to identify the activities required to support conceptual model development. A bottom-up approach was used to provide a TLCM ontology and a top-down approach was proposed to develop the root definitions derived from the experts' perception of TLCM. The benefits and drawbacks of using SSM including the human-activity system and mapping the activities onto a TLCM cube (architectural) model are discussed

Transforming Diagrams' Semantics to Text for Visually Impaired

Using models and diagrams is a very useful and effective tool for representing information and systems in a graphical form to communicate and understand them better. On the other hand, graphical representations bring extra cognitive load and the process for understanding the diagrams is long and tedious in most cases for the visually impaired. To solve this problem, semantics of the diagrams should be converted to a different format that is both human and machine readable as well as communicable for the visually impaired. Most existing diagramming tools are not easily usable for the visually impaired as a tool for creating and using diagrams. In this paper, we propose an online system for defining specific diagrams and converting their semantics to text which can have a speech output for the visually impaired. We present analysis and design of this online system as well as a proof of concept prototype implementation. The prototype system provides create, save, load and transform features and tested with participants to recreate the diagrams using the automatically generated text output. Our case study showed that the results are very promising and the proposed solution can provide a way to correctly and accurately represent the information in diagrams textually

Problem-Oriented Conceptual Model and Ontology for Enterprise e-Recruitment

Internet-led labour market has become so competitive forcing many organisations from different sectors to embrace e-recruitment. However, realising the value of the e-recruitment from a Requirements Engineering (RE) analysis perspective is challenging. The research is motivated by the results of a failed e-recruitment project as a case study by focusing on the difficulty of scoping and representing recruitment problem knowledge to systematically inform the RE process towards an e-recruitment solution specification. In this paper, a Problem-Oriented Conceptual Model (POCM) supported by an Ontology for Recruitment Problem Definition (Onto-RPD) for contextualisation of the enterprise e-recruitment problem space is presented. Inspired by Soft Systems Methodology (SSM), the POCM and Onto-RPD are produced based on the detailed analysis of three case studies: (1) Secureland Army Enlistment, (2) British Army Regular Enlistment, and (3) UK Undergraduate Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS). The POCM and the ontology are demonstrated and evaluated by a focus group against a set of criteria. The evaluation showed a valuable contribution of the POCM in representing and understanding the recruitment problem and its complexity

Have Usability and Security Trade-offs in Mobile Financial Services (MFS) become Untrustworthy?

The trade-off between Usability and Security has been well researched with various models proposed on how best to improve Usability without jeopardizing Security and vice visa. Usable Security has become a key factor in Mobile Financial Services (MFS), the new frontier for mobile phones utilisation. However, have the compromises gone too far? The trustworthiness of MFS system has already slowed down new adoption and impacted ongoing security trust issues and user confidence in spite of potential MFS benefits for its users. To understand this growing lack of trust with MFS, we need to comprehend the nature of Usable Security in assuring the behaviours of MFS users and determine the right trade-off to improve trust whilst facilitating future uptake. We conducted an empirical survey of 698 user’s experience of MFS and here present our findings of this investigation for further synthesis towards proposing practical control elements to assure Usable Security in MFS