Unpacking the Evolution of Big Data and Organizing: An Illustrative Case Study

In the last decade we have witnessed the growth of emerging technologies like big data that have challenged our understanding on how we carry out work and processes in organizations. I have collected over 10 years of data containing over 1.6 million comments from a popular big data community to understand how organizations resolve the tensions between the moving parts of the firm and big data technologies. As big data technologies are complex, organizations can struggle in terms of transitioning to big data systems unlike the traditional IT systems, hence I plan on conducting a qualitative study by analyzing the comments to understand the evolution process of big data technologies. I plan on using the routine lens to study this phenomenon as it can shed light into the mechanisms through which organizations resolve tensions while implementing big data systems. Specifically, the proposed research study has two goals. First, I wish to develop a formal process theory about the adoption of big data innovations and organizing using grounded theory approach. Second, through this study I would like to unpack how organizations resolve tensions between while implementing big data technologies

Quality in Requirements Engineering (RE) Explained Using Distributed Cognition: A Case of Open Source Development

Requirements have been the culprits for budget overruns and failures in software development projects. Fixing the requirements in the early stages of a project can dramatically reduce recurring costs. Past research has focused on linear sequential requirements activities as a means to fix the requirement problems. This line of thinking has led researchers to overlook the possible solutions to requirement problems in social, cognitive, and organizational factors. We probe the success of open source software development and its implications for the linear approach to requirements activity. Despite a wide scale distribution of requirements knowledge among people and artifacts, open source projects have been able to manage and evolve requirements in an organic way leading to high quality outcomes. Even though such efforts include little emphasis on explicit quality in RE practices, these projects often come up with software that meets high quality requirements. In order to understand this anomaly in open source software development, we apply the theory of distributed cognition to understand how social, structural, and temporal dimension impacts the quality of the requirements

Unpacking Agile Enterprise Architecture Innovation work practices: A Qualitative Case Study of a Railroad Company

Agile EA is the process for managing enterprise architecture modeling and redesign efforts with principles of agile methods. However, very little work has been done till date on how organizations adopt these methodological innovations such as integration of agile methods with enterprise architecture. This is problematic, because we know that organizations face stiff challenges in bringing new innovations that fundamentally disrupt their enterprise architecture. Hence we ask: How does agile EA get adopted in practice and what are the underlying mechanisms through which teams self-organize and adapt? To this end, we studied a large-scale agile EA development effort to modernize the legacy systems at a top railroad company referred to as “Alpha” (a pseudonym). Our qualitative analysis shows how multi-teams self-organize and adjust the pace of the development efforts by strategically (1) choosing different type of agile methods and (2) embedding resources across teams for increasing communications

Crossing the Chasm of Agile Enterprise Architecture Innovation: A Case Study of Service Modernization at a Railroad Company

Agile EA is the process for managing enterprise architecture modeling and redesign efforts with principles of agile methods such as iterations, lean thinking, pair programming etc., for faster development times. However, very little work has been done till date on how organizations adopt these methodological innovations such as integration of agile methods with enterprise architecture. This is problematic, because we know that organizations face stiff challenges in bringing new innovations that fundamentally disrupt their enterprise architecture. It is for this reason organizations rely on external consultants to internalize the concepts that are non-native to its actors. Hence we ask: What factors affect the adoption process of agile EA in organizations? If so what is the adoption rate over time? And what is the role of internal and external change agents in adoption process? To address this questions, we plan on conducting a field study in a top railroad company referred to as “Alpha” (a pseudonym) for exploring the variations in routines to understand the agile EA adoption process. Specifically, the proposed research study has two goals. First, we wish to develop a formal process theory about the adoption of agile enterprise architecture innovations using grounded theory approach. Second, through this study we would like to provide design guidelines for crossing the chasm of agile EA

A sequence analytics approach for detecting handoff patterns in workflows: an exploratory case study on the Volvo IT incident management process

In this study, we analyze the activity logs of fully resolved incident management tickets in the Volvo IT department to understand the handoff patterns i.e., how actors pass work from one to another using a sequence analytic approach (a method for studying activity patterns from event log sequences). A generic actor pattern here describes the sequence in which actors participate in the resolution of an incident. We classify actor handoff patterns as straight, loop and ping-pong. Then we analyze the patterns by frequency and duration to draw insights about how actor patterns affect the incident resolution time. The results are quite surprising. In particular, we find that certain loop and ping-pong patterns outperform straight patterns even though more steps are involved in them. Our results have implications for resource allocation in organizations. They suggest that handoff patterns should be another factor to be considered while allocating work to actors along with position, role, experience, skill, preferences, etc