Applying the business process and practice alignment meta-model: Daily practices and process modelling

Background: Business Process Modelling (BPM) is one of the most important phases of information system design. Business Process (BP) meta-models allow capturing informational and behavioural aspects of business processes. Unfortunately, standard BP meta-modelling approaches focus just on process description, providing different BP models. It is not possible to compare and identify related daily practices in order to improve BP models. This lack of information implies that further research in BP meta-models is needed to reflect the evolution/change in BP. Considering this limitation, this paper introduces a new BP meta-model designed by Business Process and Practice Alignment Meta-model (BPPAMeta-model). Our intention is to present a meta-model that addresses features related to the alignment between daily work practices and BP descriptions. Objectives: This paper intends to present a meta-model which is going to integrate daily work information into coherent and sound process definitions. Methods/Approach: The methodology employed in the research follows a design-science approach. Results: The results of the case study are related to the application of the proposed meta-model to align the specification of a BP model with work practices models. Conclusions: This meta-model can be used within the BPPAM methodology to specify or improve business processes models based on work practice descriptions

Dynamic, interactive and visual analysis of population distribution and mobility dynamics in an urban environment using the mobility explorer framework

© 2017 by the authors. This paper investigates the extent to which a mobile data source can be utilised to generate new information intelligence for decision-making in smart city planning processes. In this regard, the Mobility Explorer framework is introduced and applied to the City of Vienna (Austria) by using anonymised mobile phone data from a mobile phone service provider. This framework identifies five necessary elements that are needed to develop complex planning applications. As part of the investigation and experiments a new dynamic software tool, called Mobility Explorer, has been designed and developed based on the requirements of the planning department of the City of Vienna. As a result, the Mobility Explorer enables city stakeholders to interactively visualise the dynamic diurnal population distribution, mobility patterns and various other complex outputs for planning needs. Based on the experiences during the development phase, this paper discusses mobile data issues, presents the visual interface, performs various user-defined analyses, demonstrates the application's usefulness and critically reflects on the evaluation results of the citizens' motion exploration that reveal the great potential of mobile phone data in smart city planning but also depict its limitations. These experiences and lessons learned from the Mobility Explorer application development provide useful insights for other cities and planners who want to make informed decisions using mobile phone data in their city planning processes through dynamic visualisation of Call Data Record (CDR) data

A Three Cycle View of Design Science Research

As a commentary to Juhani Iivari’s insightful essay, I briefly analyze design science research as an embodiment of three closely related cycles of activities. The Relevance Cycle inputs requirements from the contextual environment into the research and introduces the research artifacts into environmental field testing. The Rigor Cycle provides grounding theories and methods along with domain experience and expertise from the foundations knowledge base into the research and adds the new knowledge generated by the research to the growing knowledge base. The central Design Cycle supports a tighter loop of research activity for the construction and evaluation of design artifacts and processes. The recognition of these three cycles in a research project clearly positions and differentiates design science from other research paradigms. The commentary concludes with a claim to the pragmatic nature of design science

A four-cycle model of IS design science research: capturing the dynamic nature of IS artifact design

We propose to extend the well-known three-cycle view for design science research (DSR) with a fourth cycle (change and impact cycle) that captures the dynamic nature of IS artifact design for volatile environments. The appropriation of in-innovative designs results in organizational changes that happen outside the new artifacts' immediate application contexts. The intention behind introducing the fourth cycle is to integrate recent advances in the DSR discourse conceptually within the DSR cycle model. We critically review such recent advances and integrate them into an extended model. We show how this change and impact (CI) cycle adds an important facet to DSR to cope with dynamic application contexts as well as artifact-induced organizational change and the resulting need for follow-up design efforts. Iterations of the CI cycle represent the continuous design evolution required to keep up with changing organizational environments

Effectuation and its implications for socio-technical design science research in information systems

We study the implications of the effectuation concept for socio-technical artifact design as part of the design science research (DSR) process in information systems (IS). Effectuation logic is the opposite of causal logic. Ef-fectuation does not focus on causes to achieve a particular effect, but on the possibilities that can be achieved with extant means and resources. Viewing so-cio-technical IS DSR through an effectuation lens highlights the possibility to design the future even without set goals. We suggest that effectuation may be a useful perspective for design in dynamic social contexts leading to a more dif-ferentiated view on the instantiation of mid-range artifacts for specific local ap-plication contexts. Design science researchers can draw on this paper’s conclu-sions to view their DSR projects through a fresh lens and to reexamine their re-search design and execution. The paper also offers avenues for future research to develop more concrete application possibilities of effectuation in socio-technical IS DSR and, thus, enrich the discourse

Introduction to the AIS THCI Special Issue on Design Research in Human-Computer Interaction

Design Research (DR) creates, builds, and evaluates innovative artifacts such as constructs, models, methods, and instantiations as well as operational information systems. It also investigates approaches, methods, behaviors, and processes related to design. Although the design research paradigm as an engineering approach in Information Systems (IS) research has been actively discussed in recent years (Hevner et al., 2004), comparatively little design related research has made its way into the IS community by means of widely recognized and outstanding publications. Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Research is concerned with the ways humans interact with information, technologies, and tasks; especially in business, managerial, organizational, and cultural contexts (Zhang et al., 2002). Despite the realization that it is important for HCI research to focus on all issues that occur along the lifecycles of any information and communication technology (ICT) artifacts, IS scholars have traditionally put less effort into the design and development stage and more effort into the use and impact stage (Zhang and Li, 2005; Zhang et al., 2009)

Team Synergy in Software Inspections: A Group Behavior Analysis

Inspections provide many benefits in the software development process. However, the cost effectiveness of inspections has been criticized. Also, many organizations simply do not have the time to perform complete inspections of all software artifacts within the development schedule. Due to its pragmatic and domain-specific nature, little formal research has been performed on inspections. We propose to begin a study of software development inspections by surveying several relevant research papers on group behavior theory. We applythis research to inspections and outline a laboratory experiment for future researc

Box-Structured Requirement Determination Methods

Requirements determination is an iterative process of eliciting, gathering, modeling, specifying, and analyzing system requirements information. It is the most critical, yet least understood, phase of systems development. This paper presents a rigorous approach for performing requirements determination with box-structured methods. By capturing requirements information in black box transactions and transaction hierarchies, intellectual control is maintained over large amounts of requirements information. The results of the box-structured requirements determination methods provide the basis for formal system design techniques. A concise example of box-structured requirements determination is included in an appendix