Participative enterprise modelling for balanced scorecard implementation

Balanced Scorecards (BSC) have been established as a valuable and practicable instrument addressing major management problems in organisations. BSC are commonly IT-supported and found a conceptual basis for management information systems. They are often applied to IT-Controlling, and they are also repeatedly applied to specify requirements towards the corporate IT architecture. However, BSC implementation often struggles when it comes to discovering and documenting organisational knowledge that is not easily accessible or not of sufficient quality. On the other hand, Enterprise modelling (EM) seeks to solve organisational design problems in, for instance, business process reengineering, strategy planning, enterprise integration, and information systems development. Here, participative EM methods lead to improved quality as well as to consensus and to increased acceptance of the business decisions. At this juncture, participative EM can support BSC implementation projects that comprise activities requiring the discovery and documentation of organisational knowledge that is not easily accessible or not of sufficient quality. For that reason, the aim of this paper is to integrate participative EM approaches, taking Enterprise Knowledge Development (EKD) as an example, and BSC implementation. In order to operationalise this conceptual improvement, we will perform a stepwise analysis of BSC implementation processes and identify shortcomings that are able to be addressed with the help of participative enterprise modelling

Criticality, epistemology and behaviour vs. Design –information systems research across different sets of paradigms

Due to its dynamic and rapid development and due to a variety of academic disciplines and research communities contributing to information systems (IS) research, a broad variety of research approaches can be found. These approaches are often discussed as contrasting “paradigms”. Positivism and interpretivism are frequently accepted to be the most relevant paradigms (cf., for instance, Klein & Myers 1999; Lee 1991; Walsham 1995; Weber 2004). A further set of paradigms consists of behavioural science research (‘problem understanding paradigm’) and design science research (‘problem understanding paradigm’) which has been introduced in the IS literature and heavily adopted since (cf., for instance, Hevner et al. 2004; Jani 2001; March & Smith 1995). On top of this distinction, the critical research paradigm, including its logical complement, the non-critical paradigm, shaped the discussion of IS research philosophy for more than two decades (cf., for instance, Brooke 2002; Klein & Huynh 2004; Landry & Banville 1992; Mumford et al. 1985). Though it is essential to research theory and practice in the IS discipline to discuss the interconnections between these different sets of paradigms, such endeavour has not yet been undertaken. Some approaches address the interdependency between interpretivism and critical research. However, a holistic framework, also taking into account also behavioural and design science is still missing. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to provide an integrated discussion of these different sets of paradigms and to provide novel perspectives for IS research on how to deal with the apparent diversity of approaches. We will furthermore point out why this discussion is of great importance to IS research especially in Europe

Health information portals: How can we improve the user\u27s search experience?

Health information portals (HIP) are now common place. Governments and other health agencies are using HIPs extensively to reduce costs and distribute information more effectively. Generally, HIPs are not very technically sophisticated specifically in terms of options for improving searching. There are many ways in which searching and retrieving relevant information can be improved. This paper presents an exploratory study which investigated five HIPs. Each HIP offered a range of features and functionality to assist with searching. Our research explored the features and functionality of each HIP. Through usability evaluations we compared the response of users to each HIP and identified users’ preferences for improved searching. We found that HIPs with improved search functionality and other features that assisted searching were better received by the users. Users regarded these portals as easier to understand, easier to use, required fewer steps in retrieving information and were more likely to say they would return. Comments from users are provided to illustrate further the importance of providing effective functionality. The paper concludes with recommendations for Health Information Portal builders on what is needed to improve the user search experience

Towards an IT Consumerization Theory:A Theory and Practice Review

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Resilience Analysis of Service Oriented Collaboration Process Management systems

Collaborative business process management allows for the automated coordination of processes involving human and computer actors. In modern economies it is increasingly needed for this coordination to be not only within organizations but also to cross organizational boundaries. The dependence on the performance of other organizations should however be limited, and the control over the own processes is required from a competitiveness perspective. The main objective of this work is to propose an evaluation model for measuring a resilience of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) collaborative process management system. In this paper, we have proposed resilience analysis perspectives of SOA collaborative process systems, i.e. overall system perspective, individual process model perspective, individual process instance perspective, service perspective, and resource perspective. A collaborative incident and maintenance notification process system is reviewed for illustrating our resilience analysis. This research contributes to extend SOA collaborative business process management systems with resilience support, not only looking at quantification and identification of resilience factors, but also considering ways of improving the resilience of SOA collaborative process systems through measures at design and run-time

Properties that influence business process management maturity and its effect on organizational performance

Abstract BPM maturity is a measure to evaluate how professionally an organization manages its business processes. Previous research provides evidence that higher BPM maturity leads to better performance of processes and of the organization as a whole. It also claims that different organizations should strive for different levels of maturity, depending on their properties. This paper presents an empirical investigation of these claims, based on a sample of 120 organizations and looking at a selection of organizational properties. Our results reveal that higher BPM maturity contributes to better performance, but only up to a point. Interestingly, it contradicts the popular belief that higher innovativeness is associated with lower BPM maturity, rather showing that higher innovativeness is associated with higher BPM maturity. In addition, the paper shows that companies in different regions have a different level of BPM maturity. These findings can be used as a benchmark and a motivation for organizations to increase their BPM maturity