Applying lessons learned from counselling : On nurturing relations in design projects

This paper elaborates on the personal relation between the facilitator and the participants in Social Practice Design. It is argued that such processes can not just be managed, but have to fostered in relatively free way, so that results can transcend expectations and more closely approach the actual possibilities. This is explained by aspects of Rogers\u27 theory on therapy. The paper aims to be an interesting and strong example of the critical need for a good relationship in facilitating design. By itself, such a conclusion would not be surprising, but some of its constituent aspects are detailed: the paper elaborates on the relevance of deploying focus and effort on personal relation, in interventions for organisational innovation. Supporting the establishment of sense making and trust with Social Practice Design (SPD) approaches is found to be of primary importance in an e-Government development project. Here regional employees user-design a computer-based aid for public tender editing – a tender configurator - with the support of facilitators. We address the structural problem with infra-structural measures including open conversations to promote shared understanding, and user design laboratories to promote concept emergence and learning, while practicing relation and trust building all along. Our constructivist approach renounces from the start to solve the governance problem within a narrow managerial perspective. The paper offers a demonstration of the mission critical relevance of the relational component in SPD, intertwined with the customary functional component, in resuming governance towards project success. This experience is far from a complete experiment. But a wealth of indications and partial results have been harvested on needs, opportunities, and practices, for promoting shared understanding and trust in the project, and letting emerge idiosyncratic solutions. We judge the quality of the SPD approach by three requirements (Baskerville and Myers 2004): a contribution to practice (the action), a contribution to research (the theory), the criteria by which to judge the research, and we show explicitly how the research in the case meets these criteria

How German hospitals govern IT - An empirical exploration

Health care services in German hospitals are causing immense expenses. Successful IT Governance might help to support specific challenges for every organization with an adequate use of IT. The market structure of hospitals in Germany is very heterogeneous, e.g. in size and sponsorship. This paper analyses the state of the art of IT Governance based on a survey among 220 IT executives in German hospitals. The quantitative analyses of collected survey data reveal that hospitals govern their IT differently according to size and sponsorship. In addition, our analyses show that decision-making authority for the IT budget rises with hospital size and is positively correlated with the fraction of IT projects in the overall IT budget. We also show that the investments in innovative IT projects increase with hospital size. Our study revealed that a high number of private and larger hospitals lack a systematic IT Governance approach within the decision domain on IT projects. This study is the first to shed light into the empirical situation of IT Governance in German hospitals. Creativity-intensive processes such as the development of marketing campaigns or the production of visual effects increasingly find their way into the agenda of process managers. Such processes often comprise of both well-structured, transactional parts and creative parts that often cannot be specified in terms of their process flow, required resources, and outcome. Moreover, the processes’ high variability sets boundaries for the possible degree of automation. In this paper we introduce the concept of pockets of creativity as an analytic device which is hoped to support process managers in their efforts to identify and describe creative sections in business processes. We argue that this step of identifying and describing is imperative to successfully allocate resources, integrate creativity into the overall process, and introduce process automation for those parts that are well-structured and can actually be automated. Our argument rests in the examination of existent literature as well as in findings from exploratory case studies that were conducted in the film and visual effects industry in order to study processes that rely on creativity

Business process documentation in creative work systems:a design science study in television production

Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht den Einfluss von Kreativität auf die Modellierung und Dokumentation von Geschäftsprozessen. Dabei wird ausgehend von einer theoretischen Basis eine Methode entwickelt, die die Erfassung kreativitätsintensiver Prozesse ermöglicht. Deren Besonderheit ist, dass sie das in der Prozessmodellierung vorherrschende strenge Kontrollflussparadigma aufbricht, um so dem Anspruch kreativer Arbeitssysteme an Flexibilität gerecht zu werden. Ausgehend vom kreativen Produkt werden dabei sukzessiv kreative Teilprozesse von administrativen Aufgaben isoliert, um so ein angemessenes Management beider zu ermöglichen. Die Methode wird in einer umfassenden Studie im Kontext der Fernsehproduktion in Deutschland evaluiert. Auf Basis semi-strukturierter Interviews werden dabei umfassende Modelle für die Produktlinien TV-Film, Serie, Daily Soap und Entertainment diskutiert. Die Ergebnisse werden abschließend auf die Methode und die zu Grunde liegende Theorie zurückgespiegelt.This study investigates the influence of creativity on the modeling and documentation of business processes. Based on a substantive theory a modeling method is developed that allows for the capturing of creativity-intensive processes. This method discards a strict and formal interpretation of the predominant control-flow paradigm in process modeling and thus conforms to the flexibility requirements of creative work systems. Emanating from the creative product, creative and administrative subprocesses are successively revealed, thus enabling the adequate management of both process types. The method is applied to the context of German television production. Comprising process models for the product lines television movie, primetime series, daily soap and entertainment are derived from qualitative interview data. The results of this evaluation are fed back to both the method as well as the foundational theory

Toward Process Modeling in Creative Domains

Process modeling has emerged as a widely accepted approach in order to reduce organizational complexity in organizations. Process models are used for different purposes, including process analysis and redesign, risk management, and the implementation of software systems. However, the majority of existent approaches is restricted to processes that are wellstructured and predictable. Highly creative environments, such as the film industry or R&D departments, however, are characterized by high levels of flexibility. As existent approaches do not provide ample means to model such processes, this paper discusses the capabilities that a conceptual process modeling grammar for processes in creative environments must provide. Furthermore, we suggest an approach to process analysis that aims at the identification and specification of creativity in business processes. The study belongs to the design science paradigm; the discussion is grounded in a theory that explains the nature of processes that rely on creativity

ABSTRACT

The Model Driven Architecture (MDA) describes software development based on models on different levels of abstraction. The development process is outlined as a sequence of model transformations which add specific details to the software models with each subsequent step. The OMG MDA guide refers to the computation independent model (CIM) as the highest level of abstraction. However this model type is disregarded by most MDA methodologies and tools, which start their transformation process on the level of platform independent software models (PIM). This paper investigates the role and nature of the CIM, especially focussing on development processes for management information systems. Therefore, existing transformational approaches for the transition from models as real world perceptions to software designs are evaluated. Finally the transformational view on software development is extended by decision theory aspects during the design task, which significantly influence the feasibility of design process automation

Applying theory-building techniques to the design of modelling languages

In their 2004 paper Hevner et. al proposed a set of guidelines for conducting design science research projects in the IS discipline. While useful, these guidelines have a relatively high level of abstraction. However, various IT artifacts such as models, methods, techniques and implementations require IS researchers to apply differing methods in order to construct and evaluate purposeful artifacts respectively. In this paper we discuss a particular class of IT artifacts: conceptual modeling languages. As constituent parts of software development methods, a multitude of such languages has been proposed and discussed. Yet, in the related literature on method design only little guidance is provided on how to derive appropriate conceptual modeling languages from empirical data. We believe that “good methods” need to be rigorously grounded in empirical findings. Taking a look at the related literature on inductive theory building reveals that at there are prominent similarities between the elements that constitute theories and those that constitute conceptual modeling languages: whereas theories comprise of constructs and relationships between these, conceptual modeling languages comprise of language constructs and relationships among these. We draw from the body of literature on grounded theory building and propose a new approach to designing conceptual modeling languages

Using grounded theory for studying business process management phenomena

Health care services in German hospitals are causing immense expenses. Successful IT Governance might help to support specific challenges for every organization with an adequate use of IT. The market structure of hospitals in Germany is very heterogeneous, e.g. in size and sponsorship. This paper analyses the state of the art of IT Governance based on a survey among 220 IT executives in German hospitals. The quantitative analyses of collected survey data reveal that hospitals govern their IT differently according to size and sponsorship. In addition, our analyses show that decision-making authority for the IT budget rises with hospital size and is positively correlated with the fraction of IT projects in the overall IT budget. We also show that the investments in innovative IT projects increase with hospital size. Our study revealed that a high number of private and larger hospitals lack a systematic IT Governance approach within the decision domain on IT projects. This study is the first to shed light into the empirical situation of IT Governance in German hospitals. Creativity-intensive processes such as the development of marketing campaigns or the production of visual effects increasingly find their way into the agenda of process managers. Such processes often comprise of both well-structured, transactional parts and creative parts that often cannot be specified in terms of their process flow, required resources, and outcome. Moreover, the processes’ high variability sets boundaries for the possible degree of automation. In this paper we introduce the concept of pockets of creativity as an analytic device which is hoped to support process managers in their efforts to identify and describe creative sections in business processes. We argue that this step of identifying and describing is imperative to successfully allocate resources, integrate creativity into the overall process, and introduce process automation for those parts that are well-structured and can actually be automated. Our argument rests in the examination of existent literature as well as in findings from exploratory case studies that were conducted in the film and visual effects industry in order to study processes that rely on creativity