Organisations- und Technologieoptionen des Geschäftsprozessmanagements aus der Perspektive des Web 2.0

Corporate operational systems are often highly dynamic, a fact which is only insufficiently taken into account by recent process management approaches. In contrast, the perspective of Web 2.0 opens up new options for action in process management. In this contribution, we will identify new organizational and technological options of process management using a design-oriented research approach. The analysis especially considers the aspects of self-organization and collective intelligence in process management. We conceptually develop options for action and illustrate them based on a prototype platform for process management. The results are completed by a presentation of real-world application scenarios in the construction industry and results of an evaluation of the design-oriented research approach.     

Action as a Fast and Frugal Heuristic

Decision making is usually viewed as involving a period of thought, while the decision maker assesses options, their likely consequences, and his or her preferences, and selects the preferred option. The process ends in a terminating action. In this view errors of thought will inevitably show up as errors of action; costs of thinking are to be balanced against costs of decision errors. Fast and frugal heuristics research has shown that, in some environments, modest thought can lead to excellent action. In this paper we extend this work to situations in which action is taken after little or no thought. We show that these `highly active' or `decision cycles' processes can lead to excellent results at the cost of almost no thought. The paper examines the settings in which this effectiveness is possible, and lists a number of environmental features that are required for decision cycles to work well. Several research directions for analytical, laboratory, and field-based research are identified.     

Grounded action research: a method for understanding IT in practice

This paper shows how the theory development portion of action research can be made more rigorous. The process of theory formulation is an essential part of action research, yet this process is not well understood. A case study demonstrates how units of analysis and techniques from grounded theory can be integrated into the action research cycle in order to add rigor and reliability to the theory formulation process.     

Information systems action research: Debunking myths and overcoming barriers

The relevance of action research as a research method in the information systems (IS) discipline is not disputed. Nevertheless, the extent to which action research is published in good journals is infrequent enough to indicate a serious problem. In this article, we explore the reasons underlying this situation and make recommendations aiming to increase both the practice and the publication of action research. To identify both the barriers to undertaking action research and potential ways of overcoming those barriers, we survey 218 authors of 120 articles demonstrating empirical action research published in 12 of our good journals during the period 1982–2016. We received 70 usable responses. We also surveyed 52 editors of selected IS journals and received 25 usable responses. Our findings are revealing as they indicate both genuine barriers associated with action research and some apparent barriers that are in reality misperceptions or myths. In reflecting on these, we emphasize the special qualities of action research. We also reflect on the critical role that action research plays in the IS field as a whole and its potential for further contributions to research and practice, given the strong and close connections with organizational problem contexts that action research requires. Finally, we make a number of recommendations that are designed to increase the incidence of action research in the IS discipline     

A research framework for building SPI proposals in small organizations: the COMPETISOFT experience

Establishing a research strategy that is suitable for undertaking research on software engineering is vital if we are to guarantee that research products are developed and validated following a systematic and coherent method. We took this into account as we carried out the COMPETISOFT research project, which investigated software process improvement (SPI) in the context of Latin American small companies. That experience has enabled us to develop a research strategy based on the integrated use of action research and case study methods. This paper introduces the proposed research strategy and provides extensive discussion of its application for: (1) developing the Methodological framework of COMPETISOFT for SPI, (2) putting this framework into practice in eight small software companies, and (3) refine the Methodological framework due to the practice feedback. The use of this research strategy allowed us to observe that it was suitable for developing, refining, improving, applying, and validating COMPETISOFT’s Methodology framework. Furthermore, having seen it applied, we believe that this strategy offers a successful integration of action research and case study, which can be useful for conducting research in other software engineering areas which address needs of small software companies.     

Reconciling global and local needs: a canonical action research project to deal with workarounds

This paper discusses how research with practitioners can help reconcile the top‐down requirements of headquarters with the bottom‐up local needs in the context of global information systems. Based on a 12‐month canonical action research project that took place at the Chinese branches of a French multinational corporation, our research revealed and addressed workarounds that the Chinese users of a company‐wide global enterprise resource planning system had put in place that were not expected nor desired by company headquarters. From the local users' point of view, they were necessary to deal with Chinese legislation and cultural practices, but from the French headquarters' point of view, they meant that many of the potential gains of global standards were lost. Activity theory was used as a focal theory to analyse each of these workarounds and business process management as an instrumental theory to design solutions to the workarounds. We describe in detail how we used canonical action research to successfully deal with exemplars of each of the three types of workaround identified (data adjustments, process adjustments and parallel‐system adjustments). Unusually, the research relates to post‐implementation change rather than to that looking at change occurring before and during implementation. We argue that canonical action research and the particular combination of activity theory and business process management are appropriate for dealing with workarounds and this has not been demonstrated previously. Further, our research – deemed successful by managers, users and researchers alike – took place in China where previous literature suggests only limited success with such global systems.     

Information systems strategizing,organizational sub-communities,and the emergence of a sustainability strategy

The realized strategy contents of information systems (IS) strategizing are a result of both deliberate and emergent patterns of action. In this paper, we focus on emergent patterns of action by studying the formation of strategies that build on local technology-mediated practices. This is done through case study research of the emergence of a sustainability strategy at a European automaker. Studying the practices of four organizational sub-communities, we develop a process perspective of sub-communities’ activity-based production of strategy contents. The process model explains the contextual conditions that make sub-communities initiate SI strategy contents production, the activity-based process of strategy contents production, and the IS strategy outcome. The process model, which draws on Jarzabkowski’s strategy-as-practice lens and Mintzberg’s strategy typology, contributes to the growing IS strategizing literature that examines local practices in IS efforts of strategic importance.     

Dragons, bats and evil knights: A three-layer design approach to character-based creative play

Creative play requires a fertile but well-defined design space. This paper describes a design process for creating three-dimensional virtual reality play spaces that allow the development and exploration of social interactions and relationships. The process was developed as part of a commercial research effort to create an interactive virtual reality entertainment system that allows children to engage in creative and constructive play within an established action/adventure framework. The effort centres on designing Al characters for aconstructive narrative. We claim that a behaviour-based architecture is an ideal starting point for developing agents for such a process, but that its full realization requires additional architectural structures and methodological support for the design process. In this paper, we describe a character architecture called Spark of Life (SoL). We also propose a three-layer design process for producing fertile and aesthetic constructive narratives. Finally, we describe our experience in implementing these ideals in an industrial setting.     

融合动作特征的多模态情绪识别

近年来,利用计算机技术实现基于多模态数据的情绪识别成为自然人机交互和人工智能领域重要 的研究方向之一。利用视觉模态信息的情绪识别工作通常都将重点放在脸部特征上,很少考虑动作特征以及融合 动作特征的多模态特征。虽然动作与情绪之间有着紧密的联系,但是从视觉模态中提取有效的动作信息用于情绪 识别的难度较大。以动作与情绪的关系作为出发点,在经典的 MELD 多模态情绪识别数据集中引入视觉模态的 动作数据,采用 ST-GCN 网络模型提取肢体动作特征,并利用该特征实现基于 LSTM 网络模型的单模态情绪识别。 进一步在 MELD 数据集文本特征和音频特征的基础上引入肢体动作特征,提升了基于 LSTM 网络融合模型的多 模态情绪识别准确率,并且结合文本特征和肢体动作特征提升了上下文记忆模型的文本单模态情绪识别准确率, 实验显示虽然肢体动作特征用于单模态情绪识别的准确度无法超越传统的文本特征和音频特征,但是该特征对于 多模态情绪识别具有重要作用。基于单模态和多模态特征的情绪识别实验验证了人体动作中含有情绪信息,利用 肢体动作特征实现多模态情绪识别具有重要的发展潜力。     

Increasing teacher candidates' ways of interaction and levels of learning through action research in a blended course

Within the scope of this research, efforts were exerted to increase teacher candidates' interaction ways through action research in a blended teaching profession course in higher education level. Teacher candidates participated in various blended learning activities during a semester-long course, and the problems related to learners' participation in blended learning activities and their interactions during learning process were solved via action decisions. Blended learning activities were developed according to Felder-Silverman Learning Style Model and the lessons learned from previous two pilot studies. In order to conduct the activities; face-to-face and synchronous virtual classroom sessions were combined with asynchronous from discussions and blog. At the beginning of the course, teacher candidates chosed activity sets according to learning style model and throughout a semester-long course, they participated in the activities. Throughout the action research process, the ways of interactions between students, students and instructor, and students and the content were examined as well as the levels of learning accomplished by students during the learning process. This study has revealed indicators pointing to an increase both in students’ interactions and levels of learning during the blended learning process.     

Using a grounded theory approach to study online collaboration behaviors

This paper discusses how an interpretive theory of action was explored and developed through iterative cycles of grounded theory generation. We establish our motivation for employing the grounded theory method in an area that is overflowing with theories of learning, then move on to the practicalities of generating an interpretive grounded theory by following the ‘vapor trails’ left by online learners. We describe how we incorporated the use of mixed methods into an interpretive grounded theory process, with a theoretical sampling strategy that used ‘complementary comparison’ to feed back into a new cycle of constant comparison. We discuss how constant comparison may be enhanced by researcher debate around emerging themes and categories, co-coding of data samples, coding of researcher theoretical memos, and reflection-in-action during explicit explanations of coding schemes to research assistants and the review of research process memos. Finally, we discuss how and why the substantive theory of action that was generated by this process provides an original contribution to theories of collaborative online learning by accounting for both visible and invisible learning strategies that explain the role of thought-leaders in a community of inquiry and account for vicarious learning.     

Organizational creativity‐innovation process and breakthrough under time constraints: Mid‐point transformation

Time, as a constraining resource, is an important factor in organizational creativity processes. Yet we know little about its role in influencing the creative‐innovative process. This paper uses a case study to integrate three process‐oriented theories concerning the importance of process mid‐points and breakthrough as time resources dissipate. The context we examine is the design process of an exhibition of industrial innovations at the Science Museum in Jerusalem. We argue that actors select a course of action at approximately the temporal mid‐point of a process and that this course of action is itself creative and leads to a breakthrough transformation. Two types of mid‐point creative breakthrough transformation are classified as recombining and pruning. We suggest a theoretical integration and further directions for research.     

Sensemaking,safety, and cooperative work in the intensive care unit

Making sense of circumstances and situations is critical to coordinate cooperative work. Especially in process control domains, we may expect that effective and reliable organizations will possess processes that develop, maintain, distribute, and, when necessary, repair this social understanding (sensemaking). Our research has focused on collective sensemaking process in an intensive care unit (ICU). Thus, sensemaking is most likely to be visible to researchers in high tempo, high uncertainty work settings such as hospital ICU, where complexity, criticality, and uncertainty are the main characteristics of the working activities and making sense of what is happening is one of the most important challenge of the team of physicians working in this context. The research demonstrates how workers create and distribute sense within small work groups and also how they use the results of these efforts to coordinate ongoing work activities. Practitioners tradeoff the opportunity costs of formal, collective sensemaking (sensemaking at intervals) against the value that this preparation provides to sensemaking during high tempo work (sensemaking on-the-fly). Further study of this dynamic balance will provide insight about how practitioners construct platforms for action during future, uncertain, high stakes work.     

Process algebra with action dependencies

In this paper, we present a process algebra with a minimal form of semantics for actions given by dependencies. Action dependencies are interpreted in the Mazurkiewicz sense: independent actions should be able to commute, or (from a different perspective) should be unordered, whereas dependent actions are always ordered. In this approach, the process algebra operators are used to describe the conceptual behavioural structure of the system, and the action dependencies determine the minimal necessary orderings and thereby the additionally possible parallelism within this structure. In previous work on the semantics of specifications using Mazurkiewicz dependencies, the main interest has been on linear time. We present in this paper a branching time semantics, both operationally and denotationally. For this purpose, we introduce a process algebra that incorporates, besides some standard operators, also an operator for action refinement. For interpreting the operators in the presence of action dependencies, a new concept of partial termination has to be developed. We show consistency of the operational and denotational semantics; furthermore, we give a axiomatisation of bisimilarity, which is complete for finite terms. Some small examples demonstrate the flexibility of this process algebra in the design of distributed reactive systems. Received: 19 November 1998 / 18 July 2001     

基于流形学习的人体动作识别

目的 提出了一个基于流形学习的动作识别框架,用来识别深度图像序列中的人体行为。方法 从Kinect设备获得的深度信息中评估出人体的关节点信息,并用相对关节点位置差作为人体特征表达。在训练阶段,利用LE（Lalpacian eigenmaps）流形学习对高维空间下的训练集进行降维,得到低维隐空间下的运动模型。在识别阶段,用最近邻差值方法将测试序列映射到低维流形空间中去,然后进行匹配计算。在匹配过程中,通过使用改进的Hausdorff距离对低维空间下测试序列和训练运动集的吻合度和相似度进行度量。结果 用Kinect设备捕获的数据进行了实验,取得了良好的效果;同时也在MSR Action3D数据库上进行了测试,结果表明在训练样本较多情况下,本文方法识别效果优于以往方法。结论 实验结果表明本文方法适用于基于深度图像序列的人体动作识别。     

Managing the requirements engineering process

Process management is a crucial issue in developing information or computer systems. Theories of software development process management suggest that the process should be supported and managed based on what the process really is. However, our learning from an action research study reveals that the requirements engineering (RE) process differs significantly from that which the current literature tends to describe. The process is not a systematic, smooth and incremental evolution of the requirements model, but involves occasional simplification and restructuring of the requirements model. This revised understanding of the RE process suggests a new challenge to both the academic and industrial communities, demanding new process management approaches. In this paper, we present our understanding of the RE process and its implications for process management.     

Cooperative method development

The development of methods tools and process improvements is best to be based on the understanding of the development practice to be supported. Qualitative research has been proposed as a method for understanding the social and cooperative aspects of software development. However, qualitative research is not easily combined with the improvement orientation of an engineering discipline. During the last 6 years, we have applied an approach we call ‘cooperative method development’, which combines qualitative social science fieldwork, with problem-oriented method, technique and process improvement. The action research based approach focusing on shop floor software development practices allows an understanding of how contextual contingencies influence the deployment and applicability of methods, processes and techniques. This article summarizes the experiences and discusses the further development of this approach based on several research projects in cooperation with industrial partners.

基于PLC的装煤车自动控制系统设计

对装煤车的自动控制系统进行研究,实现装煤车的无人操作。在装煤车系统工作控制设计中,应用了S7-300PLC。首先确定了PLC的输入量和输出量,以及系统中每个动作完成后系统状态发生的变化;对系统过程控制的逻辑关系进行了研究,并编制了系统控制程序,结合所编制的程序对系统的工作性能作了进一步的分析。重点讨论了以下几个问题：装煤车的行车、定位;揭盖机的前进,后退,上升,下降;装煤下料、电磁打盖等,以及装煤车动作之间的衔接和实现。     

Individuals’ Innovation Response Behaviour: A Framework of Antecedents and Opportunities for Future Research

Innovation response behaviour is defined as individuals’ novelty‐supporting or novelty‐impeding action when navigating innovation initiatives through the organization. A typology of innovation response behaviour is developed, distinguishing between active and passive modes of conduct for novelty‐supporting and novelty‐impeding behaviour, respectively. The antecedents of innovation response behaviour are delineated based on West and Farr's five‐factor model of individual innovation. Moreover, we argue that within organizational contexts, individuals often fail to implement their ideas due to innovation barriers, perceived as factors that are beyond their control. Based on the theory of planned behaviour, we reveal how these barriers influence individuals’ intentional and exhibited innovation response behaviour. Propositions about proximal and distal antecedents of individuals’ innovation response behaviour are derived. Proposing a research framework to study the organizational process of innovation from an actor‐based perspective, this paper intends to link existing research on individual innovation with the process of innovation at the organizational level, explicitly accounting for the socio‐political dynamics and arising managerial problems associated with successful innovation implementation within organizational realities. Implications for research in innovation management are discussed and avenues for future research outlined.     

A macro model of online information quality perceptions: A review and synthesis of the literature

Online information quality (IQ) plays a critical role in influencing the quality of consumers' experience and decisions in the online environment. Much research has been conducted in the literature to understand the impact of consumers’ perceptions of online IQ on various factors that define the online user experience. This article reviews this existing research and provides a holistic view of this literature culminating in a macro model of online IQ that outlines the current status of research in this area and highlights under-researched areas worthy of future research. Through this comprehensive analysis of 452 articles, we draw several overarching contributions. First, we find that most online IQ research employs an explaining & predicting approach (i.e., explain what is occurring and provide testable predictions with causal relationships) as opposed to a design & action approach (i.e., design tools or frameworks for online IQ assessment). Second, our review reveals that a large proportion of papers have focused on the U.S. and student segments. Third, this review reveals that online IQ research focuses largely on online IQ consequences, with few studies focusing on perceived online IQ antecedents. Based on these findings, we suggest that future studies in this area: (i) Focus more on design &action research; (ii) Use a diversity of sampling populations; and (iii) Focus on the antecedents of the IQ construct as well as moderators for the relations between perceived online IQ and relevant factors.