Knowledge work and communication challenges in networked enterprises

A modern enterprise is a heavily wired and networked socio-technical system where multiple components play in symphony to yield a competitive position in the ear of digital economy. While the underling communication and interaction systems facilitate knowledge workers to carry out the enterprise mission and furnish service to the society, there are many other aspects that rather have adverse effects on the productivity of an enterprise and interruption of knowledge workers, which pose a serious scientific challenge. In this paper, we briefly discuss certain challenging aspects of knowledge work and communication processes in networked enterprises that require more profound scientific attention in networked enterprises. This paper introduces the problem, identifies some specific research challenges, and then briefly discusses emerging research that addresses some of these challenges.Multi Actor SystemsTechnology, Policy and Managemen

Groundwater as a Common Pool Resource: Modelling, Management and the Complicity Ethic in a Non-collective World

Sustainable development of the natural resources that support our current standards of living is arguably one the biggest challenges of the Anthropocene. Institutions and policies alone however cannot guarantee that the right decisions are made. In this chapter, we argue that sound decisions must overcome the ethical dilemmas that experts face when encapsulating hypotheses of the real-world into numerical models. Using groundwater as an example, we show how the so-called complicity ethic may unfold during the process of designing management and policy interventions, and subsequently recommend eight guiding principles (a charter) that can be followed to reduce the likelihood that this complicity ethic takes place. We then introduce The Collaborative Pathway—a mediated modelling activity that synergistically blends the eight guiding principles of our ethics charter into a practical decision-making process. This approach is designed to foster community engagement, to improve the way sectoral risks and trade-offs are evaluated, and to help stakeholders understand what might drive a particular sector towards best- and worst-case outcomes. If done right and with the right tools and strategies, The Collaborative Pathway can become a usefulframework to encode ethics, resilience, and sustainability in our decisions relating to the development and protection of any common-pool resource that maintains our humanity

The entity-process framework for integrated agent-based modeling of social-ecological systems

International audienceThe success of Integrated Assessment and Modeling of social-ecological systems (SESs) requires a framework allowing members of this process to share, organize and integrate their knowledge about the system under consideration. To meet this need and ease management of successful modeling processes, we present a conceptual framework for integrated agent-based modeling and simulation of SESs in the form of a formal “entity-process meta-model”, along with a distinction between three levels of models—conceptual, concrete and simulation—and characterization of the research question using indicators and scenarios. We then describe how to represent the structural and dynamic dimensions of SESs into conceptual and concrete models and to derive the simulation model from these two types of models. Finally, we discuss how our framework solves some of the challenges of integrated SES modeling: integration and sharing of heterogeneous knowledge, reliability of simulation results, expressiveness issues, and flexibility of the modeling process