Distributed Work Display: A Representation for Analyzing Enacted Distributed Operational Work

Distributed work is becoming increasingly common, but existing approaches to supporting it focus almost entirely on routine, anticipated processes at the expense of understanding how human actors interact to resolve unanticipated obstacles and misunderstandings. This paper describes the Distributed Work Display, a representation of work as enacted that can support analysts and designers in creating the necessary support for effective distributed operational work. The tool emphasizes the information needed to understand the process of articulation (Corbin and Strauss 1993) or working things out. This representation makes explicit “who knows what, when, where, and how.” The use of DWD is illustrated with an example from logistics operations in the US Navy. DWD is compared to other display mechanisms used in practice: email listings, transcripts, and activity diagrams. Based on this comparison we identify the potential value of DWD for analysis of distributed work and design of systems to support that work

Management Commitments that Maximize Business Impact from IT

A long-standing question for both IT research and management practice has been: how can IT be used in organizations to increase firm performance? IT researchers have provided many candidate capabilities that impact business and financial performance, including enterprise architecture, IT governance, IT metrics, top management engagement, IT-business alignment, and business and IT unit capabilities. However, based on a series of case studies, we propose that a limited number of enterprise commitments are key to maximizing business value from IT. We demonstrate, via a survey of 221 respondents in publicly traded firms, that these commitments are positively correlated to Business Impact from IT, which in turn correlates with higher financial performance

Management Commitments that Maximize Business Impact from IT

As digitization becomes pervasive, many organizations struggle to drive value from the growing number of IT-related opportunities. We show how the drivers of IT value creation can be framed as firm-wide commitments to a set of IT capabilities. On the basis of 20 published case studies, we identify a small set of IT decisions that organizations must make to use IT to successfully enhance their impact. We group these decisions into a framework of four commitments. Making these commitments helps organizations reinforce what really matters over time, which in turn helps focus the attention of their employees. We demonstrate, via a survey of 210 publicly traded firms, that firms which are more effective in making these four commitments have higher business impact from IT, which in turn correlates with higher financial performance. We suggest the construct of commitment is a step toward unifying the IT value literature and creating an overarching concept that brings together many of the important management practices identified in previous work

Building a Better USMC Psychological Health System: Coordination Analysis and Design Recommendations

Department of Defens

PTSI Final Report: Transforming the Psychological Health System of Care in the US Military, Chapter 3: US Marine Corps: Building a comprehensive coordinated psychological health system

Department of Defens

PTSI Final Report: Transforming the Psychological Health System of Care in the US Military

This material is based on research sponsored by the USAMRMC (under the cooperative agreement number W81 XWH 12-2-0016) and a consortium of other government and industry members. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Governmental purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation thereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of the USAMRMC, the U.S. Government, or other consortium members.Department of Defens

PTSI Final Report Executive Summary: Transforming the Psychological Health System of Care in the US Military

Department of Defens

Model-Based Policy Analysis to Mitigate Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

A wide range of modeling methods have been used to inform health policies. In this chapter, we describe the use of three models for understanding the complexities of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a major mental disorder. The models are: 1) a qualitative model describing the social and psychological complexities of PTSD treatment; 2) a system dynamics model of a population of PTSD patients in the military and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA); and 3) a Monte Carlo simulation model of PTSD prevalence and clinical demand over time among the OEF/OIF population. These models have two characteristics in common. First, they take systems approaches. In all models, we set a large boundary and look at the whole system, incorporating both military personnel and veterans. Second, our models are informed by a wide range of qualitative and quantitative data. Model I is rooted in qualitative data, and models II and III are calibrated to several data sources. These models are used to analyze the effect of different policy alternatives, such as more screening, more resiliency, and better recruitment procedures, on PTSD prevalence. They also provide analysis of healthcare costs in the military and the VA for each policy. Overall, the developed models offer examples of modeling techniques that can utilize a wide range of data sources and inform policy makers in developing programs for mitigating PTSD