Collaborative Planning with Confidentiality

Collaboration among organizations or individuals is common.While these participants are often unwilling to share all their information with each other, some information sharing is unavoidable when achieving a common goal. The need to share information and the desire to keep it confidential are two competing notions which affect the outcome of a collaboration. This paper proposes a formal model of collaboration which addresses confidentiality concerns. We draw on the notion of a plan which originates in the AI literature. We use data confidentiality policies to assess confidentiality in transition systems whose actions have an equal number of predicates in their pre- and post-conditions. Under two natural notions of policy compliance, we show that it is PSPACE-complete to schedule a plan leading from a given initial state to a desired goal state while simultaneously deciding compliance with respect to the agents?? policies.     

Enhancing Organizational Resilience Through Emergency Planning: Learnings from Cross‐Sectoral Lessons

After every emergency exercise or actual incident, reports are circulated that usually identify lessons that have been learned from the event. This paper identifies recurring themes from the lessons learned that can be widely applied across sectors. Typically, lessons are expressed in a form that is specific to the actual event that has transpired, the sector in which it has occurred, and the aims of the reporting organization. Reports relating to seven incidents that have occurred in the United Kingdom and internationally, from a range of sectors and with varying parameters, have been reviewed. It is concluded that organizations can become wiser by looking at incidents outside their own sector and by using these recurring themes to explore the resilience of their emergency plans. Recommendations are also made for best practices to improve the learning of lessons within organizations.     

Supporting continuous learning in a large organization: the role of group and organizational perspectives

Many organizations recognize the need to continuously adapt and learn in order to survive and remain competitive. Learning and therefore change in organizations is driven in two ways. First, there is strategically driven learning, motivated by high-level factors such as market changes, company mergers and newly emerging approaches to organizational management and workplace learning. These changes reveal themselves in the introduction of new training programmes, recruitment strategies and knowledge management methodologies. Second, there is local, continuous learning occurring from the ground up. This is revealed as workers become more adept at their job through experience and collaboration with colleagues. Continuous learning is more gradual and requires local autonomy. This paper describes an experiment in supporting local, continuous learning, and its dissemination, but driven by a strategic initiative of the organization. This work raised many issues concerning the difficulty of integrating local and global organizational influences on learning. We outline lessons learned and suggestions as to the extent to which it is possible to align continuous learning with a company-wide perspective.     

Argumentation in a changing world

Critical reasoning has been recognized as a valuable educational goal since the end of the nineteenth century. However, the educational programs to reach this goal have changed dramatically during the twentieth century and moved to a dialogic approach. The shift to dialogism in programs to promote critical reasoning brings challenges concerning evaluation. We depict such a program here. This program is based on the use of graphic tools for argumentation in e-discussions. We focus on one history teacher who implemented the program in his class during a period of 7 months. In a design-based research cycle, we investigate the process of finding proper criteria to evaluate the program and to improve it. We show that the criteria of coherence, decisiveness and openness are appropriate for evaluating the program as they stem from pedagogical principles (autonomy, collaboration, commitment to reasoning, ethical communication, procedural mediation, etc.) that are central to a dialogic approach for critical reasoning education. We show that the history course was successful according to those criteria, but not successful according to other more traditional criteria. We discuss whether these differential performances suggest new standards for critical reasoning, actions to improve the program, or both.     

Cultivation and engineering of a software metrics program

Abstract. This paper reports from a case study of an organization that implements a software metrics program to measure the effects of its improvement efforts. The program measures key indicators of all completed projects and summarizes progress information in a quarterly management report. The implementation turns out to be long and complex, as the organization is confronted with dilemmas based on contradictory demands and value conflicts. The process is interpreted as a combination of a rational engineering process in which a metrics program is constructed and put into use, and an evolutionary cultivation process in which basic values of the software organization are confronted and transformed. The analysis exemplifies the difficulties and challenges that software organizations face when bringing known principles for software metrics programs into practical use. The article discusses the insights gained from the case in six lessons that may be used by Software Process Improvement managers in implementing a successful metrics program.     

Intelligent lessons learned systems

Lessons learned processes have been deployed in commercial, government, and military organizations since the late 1980s to capture, store, disseminate, and share experiential working knowledge. However, recent studies have shown that software systems for supporting lesson dissemination do not effectively promote knowledge sharing. We found that the problems with these systems are related to their textual representation for lessons and that they are not incorporated into the processes they are intended to support. In this article, we survey lessons learned processes and systems, detail their capabilities and limitations, examine lessons learned system design issues, and identify how artificial intelligence technologies can contribute to knowledge management solutions for these systems.     

Investigating ERP systems procurement practice: Hong Kong and Australian experiences

ContextIntegration of information systems is now commonly recognized to be a powerful strategic weapon that sharpens the competitive edge of a firm in today’s highly volatile business environment. Such integration can be achieved by replacing the disconnected and incompatible legacy applications by enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Along with the remarkable growth of the ERP market, we have seen a number of failure cases of ERP adoption. Such failure cases indicate that not all firms know how to adopt an ERP solution effectively.ObjectiveTo explore and identify crucial practices from real experiences in the Asia–Pacific region that may explain a firm’s success in ERP procurement, with an overt intention toward the formulation of useful lessons that inform practitioners and contribution to advances in software development practices in organizations.MethodA multiple-case design involving three Chinese firms based in Hong Kong and a local firm in Australia was employed. We collected, verified, and analyzed the information about the ERP procurement practice in each subject firm by means of semi-structured interviews, archive reviews, and member checks.ResultsWe summarized our results in the form of 10 lessons learned, together with observations of how culture seems to have played a part in shaping the practice.ConclusionOur results offer practical guidelines originated from real cases that are of use for practitioners to improve the ERP procurement process.     

Supporting Distributed Spatial Collaboration: An Investigation of Navigation and Radar View Techniques

Spatial collaboration is a complex problem where people work together within the context of a large, physical place. Our work investigates ways to support distributed, synchronous, spatial collaboration activities. We have conducted an experiment to examine techniques for supporting individual navigation and providing awareness information to the distributed users. Using a collaborative, two-dimensional map interface, we examined continuous and discrete styles of navigation as well as traditional and novel radar view techniques. The results revealed the advantages of continuous navigation, the issues inherent with discrete navigation, and the potential for novel radar view designs. We present the lessons learned from this study as well as some of the issues to consider in designing a spatial collaboration application.     

Lessons learned in building a corporate metrics program

The achievements of the Contel Technology Center's software-metrics project, which brought metrics use from concept to standard operating procedure throughout the corporation, are reviewed. Metrics and process maturity pilot projects, metrics tools, metric databases, and metric data analysis are discussed. The lessons learned from the project, which could help metrics programs in other large, diverse organizations, are also discussed     

Hidden in plain sight: low-literacy adults in a developed country overcoming social and educational challenges through mobile learning support tools

Illiteracy is often associated with people in developing countries. However, an estimated 50 % of adults in a developed country such as Canada lack the literacy skills required to cope with the challenges of today’s society; for them, tasks such as reading, understanding, basic arithmetic, and using everyday items are a challenge. Many community-based organizations offer resources and support for these adults, yet overall functional literacy rates are not improving. This is due to a wide range of factors, such as poor retention of adult learners in literacy programs, obstacles in transferring the acquired skills from the classroom to the real life, personal attitudes toward learning, and the stigma of functional illiteracy. In our research we examined the opportunities afforded by personal mobile devices in providing learning and functional support to low-literacy adults. We present the findings of an exploratory study aimed at investigating the reception and adoption of a technological solution for adult learners. ALEX^© is a mobile application designed for use both in the classroom and in daily life in order to help low-literacy adults become increasingly literate and independent. Such a solution complements literacy programs by increasing users’ motivation and interest in learning, and raising their confidence levels both in their education pursuits and in facing the challenges of their daily lives. We also reflect on the challenges we faced in designing and conducting our research with two user groups (adults enrolled in literacy classes and in an essential skills program) and contrast the educational impact and attitudes toward such technology between these. Our conclusions present the lessons learned from our evaluations and the impact of the studies’ specific challenges on the outcome and uptake of such mobile assistive technologies in providing practical support to low-literacy adults in conjunction with literacy and essential skills training.     

Participatory Design of a Hybrid Kinect Game to Promote Collaboration between Autistic Players and Their Peers

ABSTRACT

We report on the participatory design of a hybrid two-player Kinect game to encourage complex emotion recognition and collaboration between autistic people and their peers. From its inception, autistic college students have been involved in an iterative process to design, evaluate, and redesign the game. The emotion recognition game has two playing phases. In the first phase, the players independently assemble pieces in a digital puzzle. In the second phase, players communicate in-person to agree on the appropriate emotion for the context and construct the emotional face for the body they have assembled together. We also designed collaborative reward games that require the two players to cooperate and one that encourages players to look at each other. In order to assess the level of in-game cooperation, we added a face tracking component that automatically quantifies collaboration and can replace time-consuming hand-coded evaluations. We report on how this game was designed and built by a team of autistic students, their peer mentors, a psychologist, computer scientists, and a graphic artist. Preliminary observations show that modeling of emotion recognition and collaboration by peers with stronger social skills is emerging as a central aspect of the effectiveness of our game. The participatory process has led to several design changes including one that dramatically increased player collaboration. We share insights and lessons learned that can guide others working in participatory design.     

An ergonomics action research demonstration: integrating human factors into assembly design processes

In action research (AR), the researcher participates ‘in’ the actions in an organisation, while simultaneously reflecting ‘on’ the actions to promote learning for both the organisation and the researchers. This paper demonstrates a longitudinal AR collaboration with an electronics manufacturing firm where the goal was to improve the organisation's ability to integrate human factors (HF) proactively into their design processes. During the three-year collaboration, all meetings, workshops, interviews and reflections were digitally recorded and qualitatively analysed to inform new ‘actions’. By the end of the collaboration, HF tools with targets and sign-off by the HF specialist were integrated into several stages of the design process, and engineers were held accountable for meeting the HF targets. We conclude that the AR approach combined with targeting multiple initiatives at different stages of the design process helped the organisation find ways to integrate HF into their processes in a sustainable way.

Practitioner Summary: Researchers acted as a catalyst to help integrate HF into the engineering design process in a sustainable way. This paper demonstrates how an AR approach can help achieve HF integration, the benefits of using a reflective stance and one method for reporting an AR study.     

Mentoring object-oriented projects

In mentoring, an experienced person (the mentor) undertakes to guide a less experienced person (the “mentee”) in the same or similar field. Mentoring can effectively bring an organization up to speed with new technology. What loosely distinguishes mentoring from training is that the latter is something often associated with a classroom. With mentoring, the learning happens on the job: a mentor educates by continuously hand-holding the mentee on the latter's tasks. Of course, in any real situation the education process must involve a judicious and inseparable mix of training and mentoring, with the same person often performing both roles. You can apply mentoring to people in your organization or even in a customer organization; the article focuses on the former. Mentors are particularly crucial for an organization learning object orientation. The author presents lessons learned from his experiences as a mentor on object oriented application development projects. He attempts to generalize his observations and present them as succinct, shop-usable advice, not just for the mentor but for the mentee as well     

Reducing Internet-based intrusions: Effective security patch management

The Software Productivity Consortium (the Consortium) has been investigating methods for improving and measuring four essential defenses against Internet-based threats: security patch management, system and application hardening, network reconnaissance and enumeration, and tools against malicious software. These defenses increasingly are critical to an organization's information security posture and should be implemented in an effective, systematic, and repeatable fashion. Senior-level managers or executives should review process measurement data regularly to ensure that these defenses are being performed properly and to provide an objective basis for organizational improvement. This article focuses on lessons learned implementing improvements in the first of these defenses, security patch management, and is derived largely from pilot projects conducted in collaboration with Consortium members. The need for improved security patch management figured prominently in the recent draft cyber security strategy issued by the White House. The practices examined in this article can assist organizations in substantially reducing the risk from Internet-based compromises.     

Lessons learned from developing a mission-critical expert system with multiple experts through rapid prototyping

The expert systems technology is ubiquitous among the mission-critical tasks in the defense area. Knowledge compiled through the military applications can serve as a remarkable source of learning opportunities for those in the civilian sector. In this paper, we describe the process of developing one such mission-critical military application, which contains an embedded expert system. A large number of experts simultaneously participated in numerous knowledge acquisition sessions to provide their expertise in air combat planning. The rapid prototyping methodology was employed as a vehicle to facilitate the knowledge acquisition process. By recounting the development process, we intend to share the lessons learned from this experience. These lessons are presented from three different perspectives, i.e. the knowledge engineers, the experts, and regarding the rapid prototyping methodology.     

采用教学辅助软件,开展启发式教学 ——以图像信息处理课为例

随着社会的进步,关于人类认知能力的研究深入开展,建构主义理论是认知领域一项重要的成果。根据建构主义理论,人们不断探索教育教学的新方法,提高教学质量。本文在建构主义理论指导下,结合图像信息处理课的长期教学经验,探索通过设计教学辅助软件开展启发式教学的方法,培养学生自主学习的兴趣与激情,并以"空域锐化滤波"子模块为例,介绍开展启发式教学的方法。结果表明,教学辅助软件有助于引导启发式教学的过程,带领学生深入探究和思考,实现知识内化。     

Tailoring Cleanroom for industrial use

In a pilot process improvement program to move from CMM level 3 to level 5, a Raytheon group working on real-time embedded software decided to focus on Cleanroom software engineering technology. The article shares the group's encouraging lessons learned from tailoring Cleanroom to their specific needs. The author provides evidence to support their claims of success, but cautions readers who want to employ the same approach to their own organizations because concerns, issues, and barriers do exist     

What Is Learning? A Review of the Safety Literature to Define Learning from Incidents,Accidents and Disasters

Learning from incidents, accidents and disasters contributes to improvement of safety and the prevention of unwanted events. In this review, literature on learning from safety incidents within organizations is studied and compared with the organizational learning theory of Argyris and Schön. Sub‐processes, such as learning lessons, sharing, storing and applying lessons, are described, and factors that influence these processes are listed, such as trust, the severity of the consequences of an incident and the people involved in learning. In comparison with the theory of Argyris and Schön, aspects about the information to learn from, i.e., the incident and analysis, are much more specified in the safety literature. However, the organizational learning theory gives more details about the earlier mentioned sub‐processes.     

Design measurement: some lessons learned

The author extracts from several measurement projects some of the important lessons he has learned about measurement in general and design measurement in particular. He synthesizes from these lessons a design-measurement framework in an attempt to communicate his personal measurement experience to other software engineers. The lessons he has learned fall into three areas: (1) how measurement must be applied in individual experiments or case studies; (2) how measurement can help continuously improve an organization's state of the practice; and (3) why measurement requires automated support.<>