BIM extension for the sustainability appraisal of conceptual steel design

Contemporary advancements in Information Technology and the efforts from various research initiatives in the AEC industry are showing evidence of progress with the emergence of building information modelling (BIM). BIM presents the opportunity of electronically modelling and managing the vast amount of information embedded in a building project, from its conception to end-of-life. Researchers have been looking at extensions to expand its scope. Sustainability is one such modelling extension that is in need of development. This is becoming pertinent for the structural engineer as recent design criteria have put great emphasis on the sustainability credentials in addition to the traditional criteria of structural integrity, constructability and cost. With the complexity of designs, there are now needs to provide decision support tools to aid in the assessment of the sustainability credentials of design solutions. Such tools would be most beneficial at the conceptual design stage so that sustainability is built into the design solution starting from its inception. The sustainability of buildings is related to life cycle and is measured using indicator-terms such as life cycle costing, ecological footprint and carbon footprint. This paper proposes a modelling framework combining these three indicators in providing sustainability assessments of alternative design solutions based on the economic and environmental sustainability pillars. It employs the principles of feature-based modelling to extract construction-specific information from product models for the purposes of sustainability analysis. A prototype system is implemented using .NET and linked to the BIM enabled software, Revit Structures™. The system appraises alternative design solutions using multi-criteria performance analysis. This work demonstrates that current process and data modelling techniques can be employed to model sustainability related information to inform decisions right from the early stages of structural design. It concludes that the utilized information modelling representations – in the form of a process model, implementation algorithms and object-based instantiations – can capture sustainability related information to inform decisions at the early stages of the structural design process.     

An impact-oriented maturity model for IT-based case management

Case management comprises various complex activities. Consequently, case managers have to balance very diverging requirements and needs, while at the same time facing increasingly complex decisions. Case management software systems (CMS) provide capabilities such as information assessment and handling, decision and collaboration management as well as flexible process guidance to support case managers. When introducing a CMS into an organization, a maturity model of IT-based case management helps in mastering different levels of technology adoption by exploiting technological benefits and carefully addressing associated risks. In this paper, we propose the C3M maturity model for IT-based case management that links maturity levels with sets of capabilities that are typical for case management in social work, health care, and the handling of complex claims in insurance. The model focuses on the impact of technology and is linked to a map of benefits and risks across five impact areas. Each impact area is characterized by six impact factors that we consider as especially important when managing IT technology adoption within case management.     

Predicting software future sustainability: A longitudinal perspective

Whereas today׳s organisations have embraced Open Source Software (OSS) applications because of the significant values that these products have to offer, the majority of OSS projects have difficulties sustaining their development activities, and hence experience failure. Even though many researchers have worked on uncovering the influence of the determinants of OSS projects׳ sustainability, there is a lack of research that investigates the longitudinal impact of a project׳s capabilities on its sustainability. Collecting data from 1409 OSS projects in a longitudinal fashion (over a period of 16 months), this paper develops and tests a research model that examines the influences of a project׳s capabilities on its development sustainability. The results demonstrated a temporal persistence in the relationship between sustainability and the speed of defect-removal and functionality-enhancement, whereas the effect that the defect-removal rate and functionality-enhancement rate have on development sustainability was discovered to significantly decrease as the project grows old. These findings have implications for both the OSS research community and OSS practitioners; these are derived and stated.     

Competition matters! Self-efficacy,effort, and performance in crowdsourcing teams

Advances in information technologies (IT) have enabled organizations to seek solutions for their business problems from beyond their own workforce through digital crowdsourcing platforms. In the most common form of crowdsourcing, teams that offer solutions compete for rewards. Thus, a question of interest is whether competition is a key crowdsourcing characteristic that influences how teams allocate their effort and achieve desired performance. Motivated by this question, we investigate how competition moderates the relationship between self-efficacy and effort using comprehensive, time-variant data collected from crowdsourcing teams that completed a project under competitive and non-competitive conditions. Under competitive conditions, self-efficacy shows a positive effect on effort, which in turn, affects performance positively. Whereas, under noncompetitive conditions, self-efficacy has a negative effect on effort and subsequently on performance. Our results also show a recursive relationship between self-efficacy and performance, in which performance subsequently affects self-efficacy positively. Thus, inducing a sense of competition through competitive reward structures and IT-based “gaming elements” helps improve team effort and subsequent performance. We also tested for mediation of team motivation in the self-efficacy and effort relationship, and we found that motivation partially mediates the relationship. Based on our findings, implications for both theory and practice are discussed.     

Digitally enabled affordances for community‐driven environmental movement in rural Malaysia

The immense environmental challenges facing society today have necessitated a research effort toward exploring digitally enabled solutions for environmental problems. Only limited research exists today to inform our understanding on how technology could assist groups of individuals in cultivating collective commitment and engaging in actions for environmental sustainability. By presenting an in‐depth case study of a social media‐enabled grassroots environmental movement in rural Malaysia, this paper aims to illuminate and understand an underresearched phenomenon of community‐driven environmental sustainability. This study makes 2 contributions: (1) we draw on the perspective of technology affordances to shed light on both the enabling power and unintended consequences of social media in the pursuit of environmental sustainability; and on that account, (2) we contribute rich, empirically informed insights toward understanding the underresearched phenomenon of digitally enabled, community‐driven environmental sustainability.     

Compliance with institutional imperatives on environmental sustainability: Building theory on the role of Green IS

Addressing the complexity of the growing number of regulatory imperatives from global institutional environments has prompted firms in the IT sector to leverage the enabling effects of IT-based systems to help manage environmental compliance and related organisational risks. Thus, a new breed of IS—Green IS—emerged in recent years. This paper presents an integrative theoretical model that: (1) employs institutional theory to help explain how a range of exogenous regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive factors from the institutional environment and the organisational field influence IT manufacturers’ decisions on the design and manufacture of environmentally sustainable products; and (2) uses organisational theory to describe the strategic endogenous arrangements that organisations institute using Green IS in order to support sense-making, decision making and knowledge creation around environmental sustainability. The paper employs the findings of a case study of Compliance and Risks’ Ltd. Compliance-to-Product (C2P) application and its implementation in two US-based Fortune 500 IT manufacturers to help validate and refine the a priori theoretical model. The paper therefore makes a significant contribution to theory building on the phenomenon of Green IS, through its articulation of empirically-based theoretical propositions which employ conceptual mechanisms to explain how Green IS can support organisational sense-making, decision making and knowledge sharing and creation around the design and manufacture of Green IT.     

基于虚拟现实技术的数字图书馆服务研究

数字图书馆是一个现代化的理念,是基于虚拟现实技术基础上对传统图书馆的一种改良与发展,它代表了现代科技的发展水平,也充分展现了当代人们对于全面信息技术化生活的信赖与需求,对文化、教育、科学领域的进一步发展带来帮助。本文以数字图书馆和虚拟现实技术为切入点,对两者之间的关系进行探讨,阐明了将两者结合的必要性。并通过进一步分析其中存在的问题,归纳提出相应的解决方案,充分肯定网络信息时代下数字图书馆产生的必要性及发展前景,使基于虚拟信息技术的数字图书馆得到进一步的发展。     

The role of industry infrastructure in telehealth innovations: a multi-level analysis of a telestroke program

The information-intensive nature of the healthcare industry and the potential of information technology (IT) to reduce costs and improve quality of services have increased the focus on IT-based innovations. Yet, our ability to understand and manage how IT-based innovations unfold in the context of healthcare is still limited. In this paper, we apply Van de Ven's industry infrastructure framework to investigate a telehealth innovation that provides remote medical assistance to stroke patients in a network of collaborating hospitals. The resulting multi-level analysis contributes to understanding the innovation by revealing a highly complex process of interactions between key stakeholders and healthcare industry infrastructure. Despite the innovation's strong potential, the process is mainly push-driven with minimal pull from potential adopters. Moreover, the push is created by a small group of medical innovators with limited technological and financial resources and little infrastructural support. The study contributes with contextual insights into the telehealth innovation, suggesting complementary explanations of why the healthcare industry despite considerable investments continues to lag behind other industries in adoption of IT-based innovations. The study also adapts Van de Ven's framework by applying it to a single case of innovation rather than as originally conceived to several instances of an innovation within an industry. The analysis shows how some of the components of the framework were adapted to and interpreted in the context of telehealth innovations.     

Effect of knowledge sharing visibility on incentive-based relationship in Electronic Knowledge Management Systems: An empirical investigation

Previous studies have confirmed the knowledge sharing visibility (KSV) may ensure the incentive-sharing relationship within traditional organizations. However, considering high loafing tendency in IT-based and distributed environments, this effect should be re-examined. This study examines how KSV impacts on incentive-based relationship in IT-based knowledge management systems. The data were collected from real KM systems in an innovative service company. The results show that, in distributed environment, KSV was still a critical moderators in the prediction of employee’s knowledge sharing behaviors. In the electronic KMS environment, the positive relationship between incentive and KS is stronger when employees’ perceived KSV is higher. This research contributes theoretically to KS literature in examing the KSV as the three-way moderators on incentive-based relationship in IT-based environment, from real organizational samples.     

Smart urban freight transport: tools for planning and optimising delivery operations

Delivery bay availability for loading and unloading operations is critical to reduce times and costs of logistics operations, as well as for improving city sustainability and liveability. Beyond defining the appropriate number and location of such bays, urban sustainability and liveability can be improved with telematics tools which enable real-time bay reservation and monitoring, integrating such information within freight routing solutions. This paper presents an architecture for such tools along with methodology integrating delivery bay planning with transportation demand modelling through simulation, allowing computation of performance indicators to be used for ex-ante assessment in planning delivery scenarios. The results were validated through a simulation-based approach on Rome's limited traffic zone.     

Developing a framework for sustainability management in engineering SMEs

Sustainability issues in manufacturing and production are growing exponentially. Initially referring to environmental considerations, sustainability now also encompasses social, ethical and economical responsibilities. This paper focuses on engineering and manufacturing SMEs and outlines a regional study undertaken on a small number of these companies which have succeeded in developing appropriate tools and strategies to satisfy the current ISO 14001 standard. Their experiences, strategies and solutions are used to devise and develop a framework for sustainability management, taking an incremental approach in moving from environmental management, using ISO 14001 as a foundation, to sustainability management which will contribute to an annual sustainability report which is currently only undertaken by large corporations. The framework consists of two levels, with the first focusing on ISO 14001 and the second aimed towards managing all social, environmental and economical aspects within an engineering SME. Key results from the regional study of ISO 14001 certified engineering SMEs highlight the importance of environmental and sustainability awareness programs for top management, eliciting and obtaining their full support and commitment.     

Governance lessons from the experience of telecentres in Kerala

Telecentres are seen as essential components of governance reform in the international development community and great optimism has been expressed in academic and policy literature regarding their developmental potential. The scope of our paper is to move beyond the confines of conventional governance ideology and to propose a broader conceptual lens through which to study the complexity of issues that need to be addressed in order to make telecentres sustainable. Following several years of experience with these projects, evidence shows that their long-term survival depends upon how interactions are managed between a host of players including the government, private entrepreneurs, international donors, telecommunications suppliers, local companies, civil society organisations and individual community members. This paper proposes that the sociology of governance approach is highly relevant for a study of telecentre sustainability. This theoretical approach is used as a lens through which to investigate issues regarding the sustainability of the Akshaya telecentre project in Kerala in terms of interactions between various groups of players. We adopt a practical reflexive-interpretive methodological approach to encourage the development and reshaping of theoretical ideas about governance through our empirical data. We identify five critical issues currently affecting sustainability of the Akshaya project focusing on how relations and exchanges have been managed over time. Our analysis has important theoretical and policy implications for the Akshaya project and more generally for telecentre initiatives launched as part of governance reform in developing countries.     

Sustainability management and its software support in selected Italian enterprises

Sustainability is a very important factor in long-term entrepreneurial success. Company-wide sustainability management is mandatory and requires software support if it is to be conducted efficiently. This paper aims to investigate the approaches and instruments that selected Italian enterprises have implemented for company-wide sustainability management. We conducted a multiple-case study of 30 selected companies. The results show that the selection and deployment of sustainability instruments differ from enterprise to enterprise. However, all of the enterprises studied exhibited substantial uncertainty about the extent of possible future governmental regulations that would necessitate adaptations to existing systems, causing high costs and requiring large resource deployments. This is why software support of sustainability instruments is often managed using Excel-based solutions. The absence of governmental regulations is clearly constraining the technological development and enhancement of enterprise-wide software support for sustainability management instruments.     

The canonical expression of the drama product manufacturing processes

As the broadcast industry is evolving toward IT-based facilities, the production workflows and their associated production metadata should similarly take advantage of IT commodities. This paper presents a manufacturing system for the production of drama television and motion picture programmes, constructed using IT-based technologies in a file-based media environment. This drama production facility implements a production workflow based on common industrial manufacturing processes and extensively models the individual aspects of the drama production process. We aim to show that the different processes contained in this manufacturing workflow can be expressed in terms of elementary building blocks, the canonical processes of media production. By identifying recurring and canonical functionality, process implementations can be simplified and input and output from different processes can be coordinated for better integration with external systems.     

An integrated approach for sustainable supply chain planning

This paper proposes an integrated approach for transposing sustainable development principles to supply chain planning models. Inspired by research on performance measurement, we designed a method that links sustainability performance to supply chain decisions, and allows setting coherent performance measures. By transposing this method to a multi-objective mathematical programming, the supply chain planning is optimized while the economic, environmental and social performances are all coherently integrated into the model. To illustrate our approach, we applied it to a Canadian lumber industry case. We solved the mathematical model by using the weighted goal programming technique, which results in a set of “compromise” solutions allowing the decision maker to choose the alternative that reflects the balance he/she wishes to make regarding the three dimensions of sustainability.     

Sustainability of Open Source software communities beyond a fork: How and why has the LibreOffice project evolved?

Many organisations are dependent upon long-term sustainable software systems and associated communities. In this paper we consider long-term sustainability of Open Source software communities in Open Source software projects involving a fork. There is currently a lack of studies in the literature that address how specific Open Source software communities are affected by a fork. We report from a study aiming to investigate the developer community around the LibreOffice project, which is a fork from the OpenOffice.org project. In so doing, our analysis also covers the OpenOffice.org project and the related Apache OpenOffice project. The results strongly suggest a long-term sustainable LibreOffice community and that there are no signs of stagnation in the LibreOffice project 33 months after the fork. Our analysis provides details on developer communities for the LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice projects and specifically concerning how they have evolved from the OpenOffice.org community with respect to project activity, developer commitment, and retention of committers over time. Further, we present results from an analysis of first hand experiences from contributors in the LibreOffice community. Findings from our analysis show that Open Source software communities can outlive Open Source software projects and that LibreOffice is perceived by its community as supportive, diversified, and independent. The study contributes new insights concerning challenges related to long-term sustainability of Open Source software communities.     

Sustainability decision support system based on collaborative control theory

Industries nowadays have more insight into corporate environmental, social and economic sustainability than ever before. Sustainability issues in various industries are all about choices – finding ways to be more strategic and reducing waste and energy, while benefiting the bottom line. Because of the complexity of sustainability decisions and strategies, these insights call for applying advanced control techniques. In this article we review the concepts of sustainability and its practical issues, specifically focusing on the issues of supply networks. Sustainability issues are usually complex because beyond their inherent challenges, there are conflicts among stakeholders within organizations and between organizations; hence, more useful methods are required for effective solutions. We consider Decision Support Systems (DSSs) to help optimize solutions related with sustainability issues, and review their concepts and usefulness based on previous work. We also suggest strategies applying the Collaborative Control Theory (CCT) principles to augment DSS by a new Sustainability – Decision Support Protocol (S-DSP) in order to overcome certain weaknesses. To model and illustrate the benefit of S-DSP as a control protocol, two practical supply delivery/production problems are analyzed. The results highlight how better collaborative solutions can be achieved to maximize the sustainability of supply networks. It is envisioned that sustainability decision support by such cyber-supported collaboration protocols will contribute to overcome the emerging challenges of sustainability planning and control.     

Designing and assessing everyday objects: Impact of externalisation tools and judges’ backgrounds

Professional designers increasingly rely on IT-based systems in the course of their work. It is therefore crucial to know how such systems, especially computer-aided design (CAD) systems, influence both the design process and the final design, compared with the use of manual design methods. The objective of this paper is twofold: to address this issue and to suggest ways of improving IT-based systems specifically developed to support designers’ activities. In the first phase of a two-phase study, we investigated how the use of different tools can affect the design process. In the second phase, we conducted two complementary analyses to determine how the use of different tools affects the assessment of final designs, as well as the effect of the judges’ backgrounds on their assessments. We began by comparing the activities of two groups of designers: one group working with a CAD system, the other carrying out manual modelling. The results of this first phase revealed significant differences in the designers’ activities (changing the viewpoint, switching tools, correcting errors) according to the design method they used. We then asked judges from four different backgrounds (professional designers, design teachers, retailers and users), to assess the final designs according to specific assessment criteria (aesthetics, originality, functionality, marketability). The results of this second phase revealed a significant preference for objects designed with a CAD system. Furthermore, the judges attributed different levels of importance to each of the assessment criteria, depending on their background. This last result underscored differences in the mental models constructed by different groups of audiences involved in product development and marketing. In addition, it allowed us to identify their specific expectations about final designs. Based on the results of our analyses, we suggest ways of improving IT-based systems with a view to integrating design assessment more fully into CAD environments.