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Developing complex engineered systems (CES) poses significant challenges for engineers, managers, designers, and businesspeople alike due to the inherent complexity of the systems and contexts involved. Furthermore, experts have expressed great interest in building a foundation of “theories” that describe the patterns underlying how development process qualities shape system outcomes. This article contributes to that foundation in two ways. First, it identifies the core elements of CES development processes (CESDPs) through a literature review. Then, it proposes the ComplEX System Integrated Utilities Model (CESIUM), a novel framework for exploring how numerous system and development process characteristics may affect the performance of CES. CESIUM creates abstract representations of a system architecture, the corresponding engineering organization, and the new product development process through which the organization designs the system. It does so by representing the system as a network of interdependent artifacts designed by agents. Simulated agents iteratively design their artifacts through optimization and share information with other agents, thereby advancing the CES toward a solution. Hence, this article makes it possible for researchers to compare how development process characteristics shape system outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many organizations have embraced agile methods. Studies show a trend of large-scale application of agile frameworks company-wide. Emergent architecture design as part of an agile approach is effective at the project level but causes issues when services need to interact seamlessly at the enterprise level. Enterprise architecture (EA) can provide such coherence. Combining the scaling agile methods with EA is challenging. However, such a combination could benefit from the flexibility that agile approaches offer and provide the consistency and long-term focus that EA pursues. This article uses the longitudinal case study research to explore how organizations can effectively govern Agile and EA in large-scale agile transformations. Our case analysis shows that methods for scaling Agile do not provide sufficient guidance to properly handle the transformation from existing EA practices to an Agile EA combination company-wide. We propose how EA can be applied effectively in large-scale agile transformations despite the two seemingly conflicting approaches of Agile and EA. Based on our findings, we propose a conceptual model for future research that incorporates factors that take EA into account in the governance of agile-scaling frameworks. Our findings extend current literature on coordination mechanisms between architects and agile teams in large-scale agile transformations, thereby balancing emergent and intentional architectures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research interest in agile innovation management (AIM) has increased due to its growing popularity. However, little is known about adaptability by small and medium enterprises (SMEs). This study examines the factors affecting intention to adopt AIM in SMEs. A conceptual framework is developed by combining internal and external environmental factors that influence adoption intention. Responses were received from 276 SMEs and analyzed using covariance-based structural equation modeling (SEM). The results confirmed that external environmental factors of mimetic isomorphism and normative isomorphism have a positive association with the intention to adopt AIM. Moreover, the internal environmental factors of top management championship, adhocracy culture, clan culture, and organizational readiness were confirmed to be positively associated with AIM adoption. This study provides one of the first empirical evidence of AIM for SMEs. In doing so, the study contributes both theoretically and practically toward understanding strategies that would enhance adoption by SMEs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first approaches to conceptualizing software ecosystems (SECO) appeared more than 15 years ago, and few studies have addressed proprietary SECO. In a proprietary SECO, organizations are concerned with keeping their assets protected by intellectual property. We first report on a longitudinal literature study to understand how the governance mechanisms work and organizations handle incidents in SECOs, updating a previous systematic literature review covering from 2006 to 2015 with new studies from 2016 to 2020. Next, we investigated the governance mechanisms in a proprietary SECO of a large international organization through a participative case study. Moreover, we gathered information on governance in practice and defined strategies to implement governance mechanisms measured by health metrics, as follows: 1) observation: analyzing the behavior of the participants in the face of problematic situations; 2) interviews: collecting participants’ information on the adoption of governance mechanisms; and 3) opinion survey: verifying the level of participants’ perception about the new strategies related to proprietary SECO governance mechanisms. Based on the results, we derived practical implications and contributions to provide a research agenda for academics and practitioners, such as workforce capacity planning in order to gain a competitive advantage in the market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) is a political and economic union of the Arab states, comprising some of the fastest growing economies in the world due to the prevalence of oil and gas industry and more recently due to significant investments in the digital economy. However, in recent years, rates of cybercrime and cyber-threats have risen significantly, posing challenges to the security and economic performance of the region. This article deals with the necessity to engage in transnational cooperation to counter the complex challenges posed by cybercrime across the GCC. Interviews were held with members of the GCC political elite who hold expertise in cybersecurity affairs. An analysis is presented of cybersecurity threats in the region, problems of strategic cooperation and lack of dialogue to tackle common challenges in the areas of cybercrime and cybersecurity. Finally, specific aspects of GCC cybersecurity policy are discussed: preventive and mitigation actions; potential intraregional and international cooperation avenues; and the formulation of effective strategy to enhance cybersecurity capabilities and resilience. Although grounded in the GCC as a regional bloc, the findings also carry implications for other contexts, especially other Middle East and North Africa countries and, thus, represent a promising avenue for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Innovation is seen today as an indispensable practice if an organization wishes to achieve competitive advantage and sustainable success in the marketplace. The development of new products and services and new technologies that enable those products and services seem to be the crown jewel of innovation. The management of these technologies, more specifically the process through which technologies are transferred, has been the focus of scholarly debates and studies for several decades. Currently, there are no quantitative, comprehensive, and easily applicable models in the literature that researchers and practitioners can use to assess organizations’ technology transfer capabilities. This article has sought to delineate important factors and perspectives applicable to technology transfer, and to use those in order to assess an organization's capabilities, through the application of a hierarchical decision modeling model to create a technology transfer score. The research model is applied to a utility company in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, and the results provide insights on how to measure and interpret technology transfer capabilities as well as a starting point for technology managers to improve those capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main purpose of this article is to study the impact of knowledge management practices (KMPs) on innovation performance of an Iranian leading private bank known as Bank Pasargad. To assess the impact of independent factor (KMP) on the dependent factor (innovation performance), a questionnaire containing 52 questions is designed and distributed among 237 experts and managers of the Iranian Bank Pasargad headquarters. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses are used to analyze the research data. The proposed conceptual model of the research is studied using the structural equation modeling technique. Results obtained from testing the main hypothesis shows that KMPs positively and significantly affect innovation performance. Also, scrutiny of the subhypotheses revealed that KMP subconstructs, namely, top management measures, strategic knowledge management, knowledge-driven employment, knowledge-driven training, knowledge-driven performance evaluation based on IT, and knowledge sharing using IT, positively and significantly affect innovation performance in the surveyed bank. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Servitization by manufacturing firms has been a growing trend in recent years. However, the literature is unclear on whether servitization improves firm performance. Using survey data from 334 Chinese manufacturing firms, we examine how servitization affects firm performance. We also investigate the contingent role of platform-based innovation. Our results show that servitization enhances latent needs identification and worsens dominant logics conflict. Platform-based innovation is effective in mitigating harm from dominant logics conflict, but it also limits the transfer of latent customer needs. This article contributes to the literature by identifying underlying mediating effects between servitization and firm performance to explain how servitization affects firm performance. The findings also address the “service paradox.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SOTER,1 a cybersecurity incident management playbook, is developed to provide a comprehensive model to manage cybersecurity incidents, particularly for the cybersecurity operations center. The proposed playbook is adaptive, cross-sectorial, and process driven. Each key components of the incident management playbook are outlined and discussed. Furthermore, a lexicon based on equivalence mapping is developed and used to map existing cybersecurity incident vocabulary and taxonomy into a common and consistent lexicon to aid understanding among incident management stakeholder communities—national, government, and private sectors. A versatile workbook model has been explored, which proves to be adaptable to serve a wide range of cases for successfully managing government and private sector security operations center. Cybersecurity incident sharing partnership, formalism for metric and measurements of cybersecurity incident parameters, and cybersecurity incident classification and prioritization schemes are presented, and finally, cybersecurity incident “plays” and playbook templates are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this brief, a novel, energy-efficient hardware organization for a finite-field multiplier based on irreducible all-one polynomials (AOPs) is proposed. The proposed AOP multiplier organization deploys three distinct submodules, which constitute a left-shifting network (reduction), an AND network (multiplication), and a three-input XOR tree (accumulation). Previously reported state-of-the-art implementation distributes these operations to systolic arrays, which are elegant in layout but do not yield the most efficient solution. The advantages of the proposed organization compared with those reported in the literature include reduced cost and power dissipation for a given clock frequency constraint (or increased clock frequency for a given power constraint) and the absence of bypassing problems due to fewer pipeline stages. Both the previously reported and the proposed organizations have been implemented in Verilog for three different binary-field sizes using the TSMC 90 nm standard cell library and have been synthesized for three distinct frequency targets using Cadence Genus Synthesis tool. The proposed organization achieves 18%, 31%, and 19% reduction in average leakage, dynamic capacitance, and area, respectively, compared with state-of-the-art schemes and thus can be considered for energy-efficient, compact portable systems, including wireless sensors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Higher education institutions (HEIs) are investing in business intelligence (BI) to meet the increasing demand for information stemming from their operations. Information technology (IT) managers in higher education may turn to BI maturity models to evaluate the current state of HEIs' BI operation capabilities and evaluate the readiness for future improvements. However, generic BI maturity models do not have domain-specific attributes that ensure a high degree of compatibility with HEIs. This study's objective is to survey maturity models that could be used in HEIs and identify those used for BI to perform an analysis of their qualities and identify future avenues for research into HEI-specific BI maturity models. A systemic mapping was undertaken via both a keyword and snowball search of five indexing services, 6037 articles were processed using inclusion and exclusion criteria resulting in the identification of forty-one academic works regarding maturity model uses which were mapped to ten categories. The mapping reveals an increasing number of publications featuring maturity models for HEI, particularly since 2018, focused on e-learning and ICT. A single instance of a BI maturity model for HEI emerged in 2022 within the European HEI context. The HE-BIA MM has more dimensions than most other models identified, yet only a single co-occurrence of dimensions was identified in name only. We conclude that BI maturity models for HEI are emerging as a field of research with future directions for research including exploring co-occurrence of dimensions with existing maturity models, performing case studies, and validation of HE-BIA MM outside the European HEI context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is it possible to create a flexible project management system that can support both mandatory and optional improvements? The purpose of this study is to examine how well the lean six-sigma tools work when used to manage construction projects and whether they require any modifications. The data were gathered to investigate the six-sigma principles. Surveys were conducted to determine the issues that have the greatest impact on project management. Interviews were done to collect data for the case studies, which were used to evaluate the framework's applicability and to highlight its flaws. The findings of this article were that the project management could benefit from the data techniques and tools of lean six sigma in decision-making processes and will help us uncover and minimize problems early, which will improve the efficiency of construction project management and management systems, but that these tools would need to be modified to fit the project management system. Due to the nature of construction projects, which makes each one unique, unlike the manufacturing process, this is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Unlike prior articles, the findings of this one advocate utilizing lean six sigma as a troubleshooting system to help solve project management issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to investigate the impact of blockchain on global supply chain operational and managerial processes. This article reviews and classifies the existing empirical evidence of blockchain applications in the global suppbly chain. We utilize the Mooney et al. framework to organize this evidence into operational and managerial business value processes and the effects—automational, informational, and transformational. Our findings indicate that blockchain is not following the Mooney et al. stage model proposed in 1996 since the empirical evidence is evenly spread between the three effect categories. In addition, we have identified possible reasons why blockchain is not following the Mooney et al. stage model. Our study concludes with nine propositions as a guide on how to facilitate blockchain deployment and future research. Limitations of this article concerning blockchain are the lack of consistency and understanding of standards and the lack of information on blockchain implementation, which is referred to as the “grey space.” Blockchain today is where radio-frequency identification (RFID) was in 2002 and the bar code was in 1980. Therefore, future research work could be expanded to investigate case studies of blockchain implementations as they become available across the global supply chain. For practitioners, the empirical evidence presented in this article can help identify applications and implementation steps for building the business case where blockchain can have a greater impact on the organization. This article fills a void in the literature by providing practitioners and academics with a better understanding of blockchain and its applications for implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we aim to address the following research question: How can a construction organization reduce and contain errors in its projects and mitigate rework and failures? We adopt an organizing sense-making perspective to acquire a sense of order of quality (e.g., rework) and to understand its relationship with safety (e.g., unsafe behavior) in construction. We undertook semistructured interviews from a range of employees involved with delivering a construction organization's projects. Also, documentary sources were accessed to supplement the rework and safety incidents that were referenced during the interviewing process. We found that the construction organization's prevailing culture focused on error prevention, which stymied its ability to learn and reduce rework in projects. The organization consciously enacted a trade-off between quality and safety. The upshot of this either/or framing of competing values was the suppression by senior management of nonconformances, which then led to deviant behavior manifesting in projects. We also revealed that safety incidents tended to arise when people engaged in unsafe behaviors while performing rework. The empirical evidence supports our call for construction organizations to engage in error management so that they can cultivate mindfulness where individuals and project teams can improvise and better handle errors, so they are not repeated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies on ISO 9001 have been focused on the motivation, the implementation process, and the outcomes of the implementation of the standard. This article seeks to advance the knowledge on ISO 9001 implementation by examining two research issues. First, we investigate the relationship between external auditors, certification bodies, and the operational and market-oriented outcomes from the ISO 9001 certification. Second, we study the different roles played by external auditors and certification bodies in affecting the outcomes achieved from the quality of implementation of the standard. Using a dataset comprising 537 firms from Australia and New Zealand that are ISO 9001 certified, our findings show that the quality of external auditors enhances operational outcomes as well as strengthens the relationship between ISO 9001 implementation and operational outcomes. This affirms the role of external auditors in the implementation of the standard. On the other hand, the reputation of certification bodies has a positive direct effect on market-oriented outcome, and its effect is strengthened by the quality of ISO 9001 implementation. The findings, therefore, show the contrasting roles between external auditors and certification bodies in enhancing different outcomes of ISO 9001 adoption in terms of operational and market-oriented ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices produce massive amounts of data, which are especially valuable when shared between businesses. However, adoption of platforms that facilitate IoT data sharing is still low. Generic literature on interorganizational systems suggests a plethora of adoption factors, but typically focuses on data sharing between pairs of organizations. In a context of ecosystems, data governance becomes important, but its relative importance as an adoption factor is yet unclear. In this article, we examine the perception of IoT data providers regarding the relative importance of ecosystem data governance as an adoption factor, in comparison with generic adoption factors. Our study is situated in the horticulture domain, where data sharing is potentially is highly valuable. We conduct a multicriteria decision-analysis survey using the best-worst method, complemented with interviews for interpreting findings. We find that businesses consider a large variety of factors equally important. Ecosystem data governance is in the middle-range, whereas factors like benefits and readiness are most important. At the same time, out of all adoption factors that platform providers can control directly, ecosystem data governance ranks among the highest. Our findings are important for informing data platform operators on what design issues to consider, in order to attract data owners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contribution: This study contributes to efforts to diversify the field of engineering by studying the influence of co-curricular activities on African American students’ development of key nontechnical professional skills. Background: The 21st Century workforce requires significant collaboration and communication. For engineering graduates to meet workforce challenges, they must graduate with nontechnical skills. This study operationalized these skills using traits identified in the National Academy of Engineering’s (NAE) “Engineer of 2020” report. The NAE also points to the urgent need for the United States to diversify its workforce; broadening the participation of African American engineers is key to doing so. Co-curricular activities help students develop nontechnical professional skills and are particularly important to African Americans at predominantly White institutions (PWIs). Research Question: How do African American engineering students attending PWIs in the United States develop nontechnical professional skills through participation in ethnic-specific co-curricular activities? Methodology: This qualitative study explored the lived experiences of 16 participants from one of six engineering disciplines. Each participant was a member of at least one of the following organizations: a Black fraternity or sorority (termed Black Greek Letter organizations), their campus student chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers, or an institution-sponsored program for racially underrepresented students such as a minority engineering program. Findings: Data analysis revealed significant evidence that involvement in one or more of the studied ethnic-specific co-curricular activities enhanced African American engineering students’ educational experiences by providing resources and opportunities to help them develop professional skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Standard compliance in system of systems (SoS) means complying with standards, laws, and regulations that apply to services from several sources and different levels. Compliance is a major challenge in many organizations because any violation will lead to financial penalties, lawsuits fines, or revocation of licenses to operate within specific industrial market. To support the business lifecycle, organizations also need to monitor the actual processes during run time and not only in their design time. Standard compliance verification is important in the lifecycle for reasons, such as detection of noncompliance as well as operational decisions of running processes. With the promotion of connectivity of systems, existing and new security standards can be employed but there are important aspects, such as technically measurable indicators, in the standards and automation of compliance verification that need to be addressed. This article presents an automated and continuous standard compliance verification framework used to check devices, systems, and services for standard compliance during secure onboarding and run time. In addition, a case study for the Eclipse Arrowhead framework is used to demonstrate the functionality of the standard compliance verification in SoS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the face of increasing competition, an organization's capacity to acquire knowledge from the outside has become fundamental for new product development. Pertinent extant literature has stressed how an organization should practice social product development, allowing for the inclusion of all types of stakeholders in idea generation, selection, validation, and commercialization. This article investigates how organizations can acquire, maintain, and use different sources of knowledge via ambidextrous habits of exploitation and exploration to sustain social product development. A case study based on 27 semistructured interviews and field observations at a leading, large-size, Dutch food-service company has been carried out. The findings illustrate the organizational processes and mechanisms that the company has adopted to address and combine practice- and research-based knowledge, as well as the main barriers limiting the accumulation and usage of this knowledge inside organizational boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Errors cannot be always prevented as they are a normal part of any work routine. Performing rework due to an error can significantly increase construction costs in transport mega-projects. Moreover, rework results in productivity loss, schedule delays, injuries and accidents, pollution, and contamination in projects and tarnish an organization's reputation. Drawing on our empirical research examining error culture and rework, we suggest that developing an error mastery mindset based on seven fundamental principles provides the much-needed ingredients to contain (i.e., enhance detection and recovery from errors as well as minimize adverse consequences) and reduce (i.e., limit is occurrence) error and build resilience in mega-transport projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Originally developed for strategic planning and foresight of technological development, roadmapping techniques are increasingly being used to support strategy development for other functional activities of innovation systems (e.g., the development of skills, infrastructure, and standards). While the conventional technology roadmaps focus on innovation pathways for technology development, considering other functions as contextual factors explored in less detail, the functional roadmaps dedicated to certain innovation functions (e.g., standardization) give these functions centrality and greater granularity within the roadmapping architecture. Because different functional roadmaps are developed by different communities of stakeholders with different interests, often using different languages, it is challenging to share information and manage knowledge between them. This can result in disconnected and misaligned strategies for complementary innovation efforts which, in turn, increase the potential risks of inefficient use of resources and missed opportunities to capture greater value from technology R&D. In order to address these challenges, this article introduces the concept of integrated innovation roadmapping, which is designed to support the systematic integration and alignment of multiple functional roadmaps. It does so by exploring recent efforts by multiorganizational networks to develop complementary roadmaps for diverse innovation functions beyond just technology R&D. By identifying challenges associated with their integration and practical steps to address them, the article provides guidance on how integrated innovation roadmapping processes can be structured and organized to ensure effective knowledge management and alignment among multiple functional roadmaps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2006, the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) Technology Innovation (TI) Office has applied roadmapping processes to help articulate the federal wholesale electric utility's technology research agenda. The TI Office team has evolved its tools, templates, and process steps considerably over the years in response to implementation challenges, shortcomings in deliverables derived from the process, and maturation opportunities enabled by data management and visualization software. Practioners within the TI Office have sustained their commitment to roadmapping during an era of significant evolution of the practice within industry and academia. The practice came out of product manufacturing environments in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Increasingly since the early 2000s, roadmapping has been applied outside this “traditional” realm, requiring trial, iteration, and customization of processes, tools, and deliverables to meet different requirements. The TI Office's use of roadmapping is one “nontraditional” variant because the agency is not in the business of generating profits by creating products in response to market demands. Instead, the TI Office has used roadmapping to communicate the agency's technology research, development, and demonstration agenda to the broader community—national laboratories, universities, manufacturers, etc.—so these external organizations can respond with proposals delivering products with the desired technology characteristics. These products, in turn, enable BPA to continue to fulfill its public service mission as an electric utility and government entity in providing safe, cost-effective, and reliable electricity throughout the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies emphasized the importance of balancing exploitation and exploration to achieve sustainable success in organizations in terms of organizational learning and adaptation. These studies also attach great importance to the antecedent and moderate, mediating, and control variables of innovation ambidexterity. However, only few researchers addressed the mechanisms or criteria of resource allocation for establishing a balance between exploitation and exploration. Previous studies showed that the allocation proportion of enterprise resources is associated with performance gap between the targeted performance and actual performance. These studies also showed that exploitative innovation and exploratory innovation can increase the level of knowledge and promote performance development. On the basis of the behavioral theory of the firm and resource-based view, this article investigates that resource allocation is affected by the relative performance rather than absolute levels of performance and how firm performance evolves from the creativity revelation processes through knowledge by balancing exploration and exploitation for established firms. A simulation is conducted. The result shows that exploratory innovation-oriented firms have better long-term performance than exploitative innovation-oriented firms. For exploratory innovation-oriented firms, the more sensitive on the performance gap, the better long-term performance, but for exploitative innovation-oriented firms, the less sensitive on the performance gap, the better long-term performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizational agility is the ability of an organization to transform its capabilities and resources to innovate new values or protect existing values that provide high return. Several studies have investigated the impact of organizational agility on the performance of organizations. However, few studies have explored the impact of the organizational agility of new product development (NPD) teams during the process of NPD on the performance of new products. Additionally, the process of increasing the effectiveness of organizational agility with innovativeness during the NPD process lacks empirical examination. Based on the concept of dynamic capabilities, this article presents a framework to explain the antecedents and consequences of the mediator (organizational agility of product development teams). The moderating role of innovativeness in the NPD process is also proposed. The findings reveal that the organizational agility is important to the firm's successful product innovation because it improves the effectiveness of the fuzzy front end (FFE) in the NPD process. The agility of the development team can be increased by top management support and learning organization. In addition, innovativeness positively moderates the effect of organizational agility on managing FFE. Altogether, these findings provide implications for proficiently managing FFE in the NPD process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: More than 30 years ago, Harmon distinguished developmental research articles (RAs), which propose a solution to a problem, from experimental RAs, but the developmental format has received little attention. Literature review: Genre analysis of RAs has been largely restricted to articles following the standard experimental/Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion (IMRD) format, thereby excluding many developmental engineering articles. Recently, a textbook proposed Introduction, Process, Testing, Conclusion (IPTC) as a prototypical format for electrical engineering RAs, but this format has not yet been demonstrated from a corpus. Research questions: 1. What is the macrostructure of electrical engineering RAs? 2. What are the characteristic features of each division of electrical engineering RAs? Methodology: Section headings, wordcount, and notable features were analyzed for 75 RAs from 15 electrical engineering journals and compared with both IPTC and Harmon's developmental structure. Results: Only one article, a case study, followed IMRD. Sixty-seven developmental RAs followed the IPTC format. These are distinguished by the second division (P), where the new solution is described, written in extended style, comprising several sections with headings specific to the research. A paragraph at the end of the Introduction describing the organization of the paper, the location of the theoretical framework and testing methods, and a ubiquitous Conclusion also differ from IMRD. Seven developmental RAs exhibited a hybrid format with the well-known IMRD section headings superimposed on an IPTC structure. Conclusions: Most electrical engineering articles are developmental and follow IPTC format. This can inform future genre analysis research and has pedagogical implications for teaching engineering writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Roadmapping supports innovation, technology, and strategic planning in a structured manner. However, its flexible and adaptable characteristics pose challenges to organizational implementation. We consider how one company, QinetiQ Group plc, a leading British multinational defense technology company, implemented roadmapping. Key dimensions we observed for effective roadmapping implementation and challenges are summarized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Technical Committee on Biological and Medical Measurements (TC-25) aims at establishing, developing, promoting and supporting cooperation among researchers in the different fields of biological and medical measurements. Sensors for the measurement of clinical and/ or biological parameters, instrument and procedure characterization, instrument interoperability and interconnection, and data processing are some of the topics of interest to the TC-25. To those aims, the technical committee designs and realizes joint activities, like study groups aimed at standardization, such as the Subcommittee on Blood Pressure Measurement (SCOBPM); conferences or special sessions, such as the IEEE International Symposium on Medical Measurements and Applications (MeMeA); and several special sessions during the annual IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Technical Conferences. TC-25 is also continuously engaged to maintain liaisons with other committees, groups, societies and organizations working on topics related to the TC scope. This paper presents the latest updates about the main activities of the TC-25. Some information about the TC-25 activities and targets is briefly presented, then the objectives and the efforts of the SCOBPM are summarized, and finally, the history and latest updates of our main conference, the MeMeA Symposium, are reported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advanced persistent threat (APT) for cyber espionage poses a great threat to modern organizations. In order to mitigate the impact of APT on an organization, all the compromised systems in the organization must be quarantined and recovered in a timely and effective way. This article focuses on the problem of customizing a dynamic quarantine and recovery (QAR) scheme for an organization so that the APT impact is minimized. Based on a novel node-level epidemic model characterizing the effect of the QAR scheme on the expected state of the underlying network, we estimate the expected impact of APT under a QAR scheme. On this basis, we model the original problem as an optimal control problem. By use of optimal control theory, we derive the optimality system for the optimal control problem and thereby introduce the concept of normal potential optimal (NPO) control. Next, through comparative experiments, we find that the NPO control outperforms a set of heuristic controls. Hence, the QAR scheme associated with the NPO control is satisfactory in terms of the effectiveness of defending against APT. Finally, we examine the effect of some factors on the expected APT impact under the NPO control. This article would be helpful to the defense against APT for cyber espionage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Higher education institutions (HEIs) are investing in business intelligence (BI) to meet the increasing demand for information stemming from their operations. Information technology (IT) managers in higher education may turn to BI maturity models to evaluate the current state of HEIs’ BI operation capabilities and evaluate the readiness for future improvements. However, generic BI maturity models do not have domain-specific attributes that ensure a high degree of compatibility with HEIs. This study’s objective is to survey maturity models that could be used in HEIs and identify those used for BI to perform an analysis of their qualities and identify future avenues for research into HEI-specific BI maturity models. A systemic mapping was undertaken via both a keyword and snowball search of five indexing services, 6037 articles were processed using inclusion and exclusion criteria resulting in the identification of forty-one academic works regarding maturity model uses which were mapped to ten categories. The mapping reveals an increasing number of publications featuring maturity models for HEI, particularly since 2018, focused on e-learning and ICT. A single instance of a BI maturity model for HEI emerged in 2022 within the European HEI context. The HE-BIA MM has more dimensions than most other models identified, yet only a single co-occurrence of dimensions was identified in name only. We conclude that BI maturity models for HEI are emerging as a field of research with future directions for research including exploring co-occurrence of dimensions with existing maturity models, performing case studies, and validation of HE-BIA MM outside the European HEI context.

Literature defines two main streams in project management: mechanistic and organic. Mechanistic reflects the traditional waterfall approach and organic reflects a more adaptive approach. The organic approach became known by the awareness of dynamic project environment and changing requirements. The organic approach is characterized by flexibility. Accordingly, scholars and practitioners tried to define flexibility and find ways to make project management more flexible. However, scientific literature about practitioners’ perspectives on making project management flexible is lacking. Therefore, this paper explores practitioners’ perspectives on project management flexibility by the use of Q-methodology. The scope of the paper was narrowed down to the front-end phase of infrastructure projects. Two types of organizations were targeted: client and consultancy organizations. Data were gathered from 43 respondents from six organizations (three client and three consultancy organizations) in The Netherlands. The results of the study reveal three distinct perspectives on flexibility for both organization types (client and consultant): flexibility by trust, flexibility by scope management, and flexibility by proactive management. These perspectives partly support defined flexibility categories in literature. Further research could focus on exploring the perspectives in different project phases, operationalizing the perspectives in practice, and team composition taking into account these perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Workflow management technology has become a key means to improve enterprise productivity. More and more workflow systems are crossing organizational boundaries and may involve multiple interacting organizations. This article focuses on a type of loosely coupled workflow architecture with collaborative tasks, i.e., each business partner owns its private business process and is able to operate independently, and all involved organizations need to be synchronized at a certain point to complete certain public tasks. Because of each organization’s privacy consideration, they are unwilling to share the business details with others. In this way, traditional correctness verification approaches via reachability analysis are not practical as a global business process model is unavailable for privacy preservation. To ensure its globally correct execution, this work establishes a correctness verification approach for the cross-organizational workflow with task synchronization patterns. Its core idea is to use local correctness of each suborganizational workflow process to guarantee its global correctness. We prove that the proposed approach can be used to investigate the behavioral property preservation when synthesizing suborganizational workflows via collaborative tasks. A medical diagnosis running case is used to illustrate the applicability of the proposed approaches. Note to Practitioners—Cross-organizational workflow verification techniques play an increasingly important role in ensuring the correct execution of collaborative enterprise businesses. This work addresses the issue of correctness verification for loosely coupled interactive workflows with collaborative tasks. To ensure the globally correct execution, a behavioral correctness verification approach is established. All proposed concepts and techniques are supported by open-source tools, and evaluation over a medical diagnosis process case has shown their applicability. The proposed methodology is readily applicable to industrial-size workflow correctness verification problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identifying neologisms is important for natural language processing of social web text when informal language is standard and youth slang is common. For example, failing to identify neologisms can reduce the accuracy of the lexical sentiment analysis if opinions are frequently expressed in words that are too new to be in the sentiment dictionary. This article proposes a method based on orthographic pleonasm to identify emotion-related neologisms in the social web: finding words with the most different letter repetition spelling variations. For this method, nondictionary words are extracted from a large social web corpus, spelling standardization is applied, and then words are ranked in a decreasing order of spelling variation frequency. Words with the most spelling variations are then keyword-in-context-analyzed for semantic context. Applied to a collection of comments on YouTube influencers, this method founds neologisms such as slay and early as positive terms, mixed with traditional sentiment words, exclamations, and nouns. Although orthographic pleonasm was originally used to express the speaker's rhythm and tone of voice, it is also used for initialisms in a way that is difficult to vocalize. The method is, therefore, a practical way to identify new sentiment slang, including both normal words and initialisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, the Network Slicing technology is massively addressed by the research community. However, Network Slice (NS) modelling details from Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs) are not yet well considered for End-to-End (E2E) NS implementations. In addition, each SDO develops standards targeting only a specific part of the NS architecture. Therefore, based on a profound analysis of the major existing works, this article explains first (i) a general architecture that clarifies the basic E2E network slicing functionality before diving deep into domain-specific visions. Then, (ii) it focuses at providing a survey stitching together the NS modelling works in Radio Access Networks (RAN), Core Networks (CN) and also Transport Networks (TN). The end goal is to clarify the E2E Network Slicing process from the service order request to the NS deployment and life-cycle management. Last, as there is no consensus on a specific information model in the Transport network domains (iii) we provide our vision on how several data models, developed by IETF working groups, can be integrated together in the context of the ACTN architecture in order to provision and manage Transport NSs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization has been a main driver for firms’ entry into standard-setting organizations (SSOs). These global multifirm settings have caught attention due to tensions arising from simultaneous collaboration and competition among firms as well as due to the increasing geographical complexity of the standardization process. SSOs present one form of a multifirm environment, where companies proactively and voluntarily collaborate to develop a new standard. Although a growing body of literature has tried to understand firms’ underlying rationales for engaging in SSOs, we know little about firm-level characteristics influencing the propensity to enter a standard-setting organization. For this purpose, data of the Community Innovation Survey 2011 for Germany are merged with data of companies’ participation at technical committees of the German Institute for Standardization (DIN) between 2010 and 2013. Using these unique data, we can observe the moment when firms enter a technical committee of a formal SSO and, hence, tackle the problem of simultaneity. Our results show that the likelihood to enter a technical committee of an SSO increases for firms that introduce new products or services into the market, while absorptive capacity does not have a significant positive influence. Finally, the protection of innovations by patents further enhances the likelihood to enter a technical committee of an SSO. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) poses multiple challenges to traditional standardization, due to the complexity, dynamics, and accelerating speed of technological progress. The need for a timely availability of standards calls for new approaches and tools to enhance standardization processes for smart manufacturing. Industry and standards development organizations worldwide are seeking new solutions. Testbeds have been acknowledged in innovation policy as a powerful tool for knowledge transfer and the further development of emerging technologies. Lately, they have also attracted increasing attention from the standardization perspective as a promising tool for a more agile standards development process. Proponents of such testbeds expect them to support standardization by providing validated solutions and accelerating the processes to meet the growing demands for faster standardization without any detriment to quality. In an explorative, qualitative approach this article is the first to investigate the operation and impact of testbeds in standardization processes based on a multiple case study on testbeds implemented worldwide in the context of the IIoT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the light of digitalization and recent EU policy initiatives, information is an important asset that organizations of all sizes and from all sectors should secure. However, in order to provide common requirements for the implementation of an information security management system, the internationally well-accepted ISO/IEC 27001 standard has not shown the expected growth rate since its publication more than a decade ago. In this article, we apply web mining to explore the adoption of ISO/IEC 27001 through a series of 2664 out of more than 900 000 German firms from the Mannheim Enterprise Panel dataset that refers to this standard on their websites. As a result, we present a ‘‘landscape’’ of ISO/IEC 27001 in Germany, which shows that firms not only seek certifications themselves but often refer on their websites to partners who are certified instead. Consequently, we estimate a probit model and find that larger and more innovative firms are more likely to be certified to ISO/IEC 27001 and that almost half of all certified firms belong to the information and communications technology (ICT) service sector. Based on our findings, we derive implications for policy makers and management and critically assess the suitability of web mining to explore the adoption of management system standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Now it's time, I think, to encourage all of the CS program boards to experiment with creating STCs across two or more program boards. Many have a publications committee, with the CS, ACM, and ICS publications committees being academic/research based. REISMAN: Aside from the formal CS and IEEE committee and board structures, we have informal categories of membership focus and programs to address them. 16 CO M P UT E R P U B L ISH ED BY T H E I EEE COM P U T ER S OC I E T Y 0 0 18- 9 1 6 2 / 2 1 © 2 0 2 1 I E E E VIRTUAL ROUNDTABLE A pproximately 10 years ago, the four authors of this article (see "Roundtable Panelists") realized the need to improve the way how the IEEE Computer Society (CS) members organize. [Extracted from the article]

The performance of lossy data-center networks (DCNs) may degrade due to packet dropping (and possible retransmission) under congestion. In this article, we propose and evaluate a solution to deal with congestion in lossy DCNs, based on the same approach as the dynamic virtual lanes technique, previously proposed for lossless DCNs. This approach consists of isolating congesting flows in special queues, so that they do not share queues with noncongesting ones. This reduces the probability of standard queues becoming congested, thus reducing the dropping (and retransmission) of noncongesting packets and improving network performance. The experiment results confirm that these benefits are achieved by adding just a single special queue per switch port. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The IEEE Smart Cities Initiative brings together IEEE's broad array of technical societies and organizations to advance the state of the art for smart city technologies for the benefit of society and set the global standard in this regard by serving as a neutral broker of information among industry, academic, and government stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) and digital transformation (DT), the Internet-of-Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) have become valuable tools in the oil/gas industry. DT in oil/gas requires the marrying of physical technologies, such as smart sensors, and digital technologies, such as AI, edge computing/cloud-based platforms, which forms the basis for the IoT. The overall strategy for achieving DT in the drilling sector is to set a clear direction for change by not only requiring communication and coordination between the research and development (R&D) units but also aligning with drilling engineering/operational stakeholder requirements. Drilling organizations stand to benefit from DT since a set of interlinked technologies, such as IoT, is not simply concerned with the cost savings due to its implementation, but more with the tremendous potential these technologies have in the future to significantly increase revenue generation efficiency and profits by performing tasks differently across a traditional industry such as drilling; laying platforms for integrating future technologies, and the ability to seamlessly connect and coordinate across silos. Implementing IoT has the potential to increase operational drilling efficiency by 5% and cut upstream operating expenditure by 20%–30%; both significant values in a multibillion-dollar industry. Moreover, the economic value creation in the oil/gas industry in the next seven years is projected to be trillions of dollars, and analysts at Nomura, a large Japanese financial holding company, believe the IoT could make oil/gas companies more profitable at $ 70/barrel than they were previously at $ 100/barrel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Supply chain literature has long recognized the benefits of information sharing. Researchers and practitioners see high potential for improving processes, enabling new replenishment policies, and enhancing supply chain integration. Even though information technology represents a vital role as a driver and a success factor for implementing information sharing, established technologies still do not reflect the highly decentralized and fragmented characteristics of complex and often global supply chains. Early research shows that blockchain might be an enabler for the supply chain management. However, little is known about how blockchain might improve information sharing for complex, multitier supply chains. Therefore, this article aims at analyzing how and to what extent blockchain can facilitate information sharing for vendor managed inventory by designing a software prototype based on Hyperledger Fabric using the design science research approach. This research took place in close cooperation with a leading German healthcare technology manufacturer, which allowed us to base our study both on literature and practical insights. With our results, we contribute to the supply chain knowledge base by introducing the decentralized information hub model, describing how companies utilize decentralized technologies, such as blockchain, to facilitate information sharing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compliance programs help protect organizations' intellectual property and valuable resources through mandated security controls; however, organizations often conflate compliance with strong security. Understanding the security gaps that place fully compliant organizations at risk is essential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Healthcare enterprises are starting to adopt cloud computing due to its numerous advantages over traditional infrastructures. This has become a necessity because of the increased volume, velocity and variety of healthcare data, and the need to facilitate data correlation and large-scale analysis. Cloud computing infrastructures have the power to offer continuous acquisition of data from multiple heterogeneous sources, efficient data integration, and big data analysis. At the same time, security, availability, and disaster recovery are critical factors aiding towards the adoption of cloud computing. However, the migration of healthcare workloads to cloud is not straightforward due to the vagueness in healthcare data standards, heterogeneity and sensitive nature of healthcare data, and many regulations that govern its usage. This paper highlights the need for providing healthcare data acquisition using cloud infrastructures and presents the challenges, requirements, use-cases, and best practices for building a state-of-the-art healthcare data ingestion service on cloud. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizations are increasingly subject to many types of disruptions and catastrophes, with little or no predictability, and with increasing frequency and high impact. In response to these, organizational risk management has been pursued broadly in two different ways. One approach has been to adopt procedures like business continuity management (BCM), enterprise risk management (ERM), and related approaches. On the other hand, operations management and supply chain professionals have focused their efforts on cultivating various types of flexibility, agility, and resilience to cope with increasingly volatile business conditions. The first set of approaches has tended to be more structured, reflected by the emergence of standards like ISO 22301. Currently, there is a critical need to reconcile and synthesize both approaches, which forms the main objective of this article. We first provide a summary of BCM methods, followed by a description of the disparate risk management attempts of supply chain professionals. A framework for business continuity management for supply chain risk management is developed based on the structure provided by ISO 22301, and drawing on the strengths of both approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pathway enrichment analysis models (PEM) are the premier methods for interpreting gene expression profiles from high-throughput experiments. PEM often use a priori background knowledge to infer the underlying biological functions and mechanisms. A shortcoming of standard PEM is their disregarding of interactions for simplicity, which potentially results in partial and inaccurate inference. In this study, we introduce a graph-based PEM, namely Causal Disturbance Analysis (CADIA), that leverages gene interactions to quantify the topological importance of genes' expression profiles in pathways organizations. In particular, CADIA uses a novel graph centrality model, namely Source/Sink, to measure the topological importance. Source/Sink Centrality quantifies a gene's importance as a receiver and a sender of biological information, which allows for prioritizing the genes that are more likely to disturb a pathways functionality. CADIA infers an enrichment score for a pathway by deriving statistical evidence from Source/Sink centrality of the differentially expressed genes and combines it with classical over-representation analysis. Through real-world experimental and synthetic data evaluations, we show that CADIA can uniquely infer critical pathway enrichments that are not observable through other PEM. Our results indicate that CADIA is sensitive towards topologically central gene-level changes that and provides an informative framework for interpreting high-throughput data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Future project teams will consist of both humans and nonhumans as organizations’ internal and external landscapes are becoming more connected during the fourth Industrial Revolution. This paper explores the competencies project team members should require and what the impact is on the project management of these teams. The impact of Industry 4.0 is felt in various industries. Research on the impact of Industry 4.0 focuses mostly on future factories and the integration of technologies. Little or no research has been done on the impact of Industry 4.0 on project management or, for that matter, project teams. This paper focuses on the demands of Industry 4.0 to determine what future demands there will be on team members as well as the competencies that team members need to exhibit to cope with and meet these demands. The results imply that four categories of competencies are required of future project team members, in particular critical thinking and problem-solving skills. The composition of future project teams will also drastically change with the introduction of artificially intelligent robots as team members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Six Sigma has been one of the most popular initiatives to improve management processes over the past few decades. Amidst the success stories on the Six Sigma, there exist some literature studies on the criticisms of Six Sigma. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the existing literature on the criticisms of Six Sigma through a systematic literature review. The criticisms need to be analyzed so that there is growth in the knowledge and understanding of Six Sigma. This paper analyzes literature through various electronic databases such as Academic Source Premier (EBSCO), Google Scholar, Business Source Premier (EBSCO), Emerald Insight, IEEE Xplore Digital Library, JSTOR, ProQuest, Science Direct, Taylor & Francis, PubMed, Wiley, Inderscience, Scopus, and World Public Library. Sixty-one relevant articles are found and analyzed in depth. This paper finds 12 major themes of criticisms on Six Sigma. Based on the findings, 16 research directions are offered. Amidst the plethora of literature review on the success of Six Sigma, this is the first comprehensive systematic literature review on the criticisms of Six Sigma. The authors firmly believe that such criticisms will help the academicians as well as the practitioners to understand some of the rudimentary gaps in implementing Six Sigma as a business improvement strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]