IT Consulting: Communication Skills Are Key

IT consultants are professionals who have joined an existing consultancy or have established a consulting business as a single individual or with colleagues. Regardless of their origin, IT consultants perform a variety of tasks, from idea generation to design to project management support. Chief among the success factors in IT consulting is effective communication - an idea that seems to have eluded most of the research purporting to help IT consultants. IT consultants must be proactive in opening communication lines with customers. Ensuring that expectations are clear is a major benefit of effective communication because it helps minimize the damage from an outcome in which the customer is unhappy     

Participatory design in OSS development: interpretive case studies in company and community OSS development contexts

This article examines distributed participatory design in open source software (OSS) development. User participation is becoming a relevant topic of research in the OSS development context. Though it has not been examined much to date, the OSS development context has been argued to advocate a particular type of participatory design, which can now be scrutinised in its natural setting as it evolves. Two interpretive case studies on user participation in OSS development are included in this article. The first examines a traditional community OSS development project; the second concentrates on the company OSS development context, the case being a software development unit of a global corporation involved in OSS development. Through analysis of the cases, different forms of participatory design (PD), especially of distributed PD, are identified. Distributed PD is interpreted to include gaining an understanding of users' current practices, redesigning them together with users and gathering feedback from users related to the solutions. Different kinds of roles are available to users, as well as to for intermediaries ‘representing users’. Especially, the importance of online forum-based and intermediary-driven PD is emphasised in this article. Implications for PD and OSS research and practice are considered.     

Organizational learning networks that can increase the productivity of IT consulting companies. A case study for ERP consultants

This paper considers the use of social learning networks to increase the productivity of IT consulting companies. We advocate that using a carefully designed social learning network can reduce the learning time for enterprise software developers and consultants. By viewing learning as a social act, a consulting company can increase its productivity. Increased productivity is based on hastening the learning process. The focus of this paper is to identify the ways in which social networks catalyze the process of knowledge sharing in order to increase the productivity in the enterprise resource planning (ERP) consulting sector. We present a set of detailed practical results that were obtained from experiments with an original knowledge sharing method that was applied to training young software developers to enable them to work for some of the world’s most demanding IT companies. The experimental data were collected from 2004 to 2011 during 12 training sessions conducted by an IBM partner in conjunction with the Computer Science Department of a large Eastern European University. The main results of this study were: (1) designed a learning community that reduced the time needed to insert junior consultants into ERP projects; and (2) statistical data were generated that measured the increase in productivity that an ERP consulting company could obtain by employing organizational learning networks. We also discuss the positive impacts of social networks that can be established between private companies and universities.     

Dialogue Design-With Mutual Learning as Guiding Principle

This article describes a large European research and development project on Multimedia and Network in Co-operative Research and Learning (MANICORAL) from the point of view of participating human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers. The project developed the methodology of dialogue design, drawing on two sources: participatory design (PD) and dialogue research (DR). Action research is understood as the historical basis for the two strands, where PD has focused on research in working life, and DR has focused on living conditions. However, dialogue design as a methodology differs in a number of aspects. In dialogue design, the carrying principal is mutual learning, focus is on working life of high resource groups, and users are themselves developing parts of the technologies. The techniques applied and the role of HCI researcher as mediator creating dialogues are introduced and reflected upon. Dialogue design is discussed within the theoretical concepts of communication and learning.     

Creating wheelchair-controlled video games: Challenges and opportunities when involving young people with mobility impairments and game design experts

Although participatory design (PD) is currently the most acceptable and respectful process we have for designing technology, recent discussions suggest that there may be two barriers to the successful application of PD to the design of digital games: First, the involvement of audiences with special needs can introduce new practical and ethical challenges to the design process. Second, the use of non-experts in game design roles has been criticised in that participants lack skills necessary to create games of appropriate quality. To explore how domain knowledge and user involvement influence game design, we present results from two projects that addressed the creation of movement-based wheelchair-controlled video games from different perspectives. The first project was carried out together with a local school that provides education for young people with special needs, where we invited students who use wheelchairs to take part in design sessions. The second project involved university students on a game development course, who do not use wheelchairs, taking on the role of expert designers. They were asked to design concepts for wheelchair-controlled games as part of a final-year course on game design. Our results show that concepts developed by both groups were generally suitable examples of wheelchair-controlled motion-based video games, but we observed differences regarding level of detail of game concepts, and ideas of disability. Additionally, our results show that the design exercise exposed vulnerabilities in both groups, outlining that the risk of practical and emotional vulnerability needs to be considered when working with the target audience as well as expert designers.     

Professional Services Organizations and the Role of Consulting in the New Economy

An ever-demanding consumer and business world is continuing to force consultants to react to market forces faster and with deeper insight than ever before. the underpinning of individual knowledge roles by enabling technology is changing the consulting industry into newer forms. Consultants will have to be even more aware of their own, as well as their firms', role within such a business environment. the author provides a perspective on the role of consultants and consulting in a dynamic and ever-changing business world, where the consulting remit is being increasingly dictated by the convergence of mergers and acquisition activity, technology, globalization, and the opportunities presented by automated business process solutions for professional services.     

Experience to understand: a methodology for integrating users into the design for kitchen interactions

The kitchen is a place where many interactions happen every day. It is a place where new technologies and tradition meet. What makes a place a smart kitchen? This article describes our research over 29 months with a group representing typical users—we will call them the kitchen heroes. We involved them in a process of interaction design (IxD) for the kitchen following the tradition of participatory design (PD), to find out the potential of such a collaboration. We asked ourselves how could we, together with the intended users design for better, seamless interaction in the kitchen? Our research showed that designing for kitchen demands a high and consistent level of engagement of all the stakeholders if we are to design a truly smart and human-centred kitchen. How then, could we integrate them into the interaction design process? As an answer we developed a methodology for the integration of all the stakeholders into the whole design process. We focused on the early design phases and the ways to trigger engagement. The methodology we developed is named EPUI and consists of four parts: exploration, participation, understanding and integration. This article illustrates the EPUI methodology for successfully integrating kitchen users into the kitchen interaction design and fruitful participatory design. It is based on and combines benefits from methodologies such as PD, ADR, PADR, while in the article we explain how it also contributes to their flaws. Additionally, we present our lessons learned while implementing the EPUI methodology and offer tools to both seasoned and less-experienced researchers.     

BIM 正向设计存在的问题和思考

BIM 正向设计能够减少部分建模环节、降低劳动和信息交换成本,其优点得到业 界的广泛认同。随着国内BIM 技术的不断推广,现有的BIM 咨询模式已不能满足快速发展的 应用需求,正向设计在实际应用过程中也遇到了很多困难。通过工程经验和文献调研总结了正 向设计存在的问题,如：①缺乏与之适应的标准;②国内环境的制约;③技术链和产业链不够 成熟等,并对上述问题进行了思考与分析,得出以下结论：以出图为导向的正向设计是BIM 技 术应用的过渡性策略,需补充相适应的标准体系、加大国内BIM 软件和云平台体系的开发力度、 促进设计与施工管理一体化。正向设计的推广不仅需要有力的技术支持,更需要管理模式的不 断创新,为BIM 技术的应用和发展提供保障。     

Ensuring IT Consulting SERVQUAL and User Satisfaction: A Modified Measurement Tool

This paper provides the newly developed IT consulting SERVQUAL measurement tool. In an attempt to measure the IS customers' perceived quality of the consulting services they received, the researchers developed a diagnostic tool of SERVQUAL based on the solid theoretical background, which can specifically be applied to the IT consulting service sector. It is composed of 6 dimensions of reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy, process and education, and the former four are derived from IT SERVQUAL and the latter two are added to consider the characteristics of IT consulting service.To develop IT consulting SERVQUAL, 7 consultants having over the 10 years careers, 3 customers having much experienced of consulting service, and 2 professors majoring in MIS have examined the constructs and the items of questionnaires. And this research had been applied to 86 respondents of 42 different organizations that had received IT consulting services over 2 past years to ensure the validation of this tool. The correlation and the factor analyses were conducted for validation of the measurement tool.The results indicated that six different areas in the measurement tool are significantly related with level of the customer satisfaction in spite of their few problems in its validation and its application in the field will be helpful to identify their problems and make plans for advancement.     

Universal product design involving elderly users: a participatory design model

Recent studies have shown that people prefer to age in their familiar environments, thus guiding designers to provide a safe and functionally appropriate environment for ageing people, regardless of their physical conditions or limitations. Therefore, a participatory design model is proposed where human beings can improve their quality of life by promoting independence, as well as safety, useability and attractiveness of the residence. Brainstorming, scenario building, unstructured interviews, sketching and videotaping are used as techniques in the participatory design sessions. Quality deployment matrices are employed to find the relationships between the elderly user's requirements and design specifications. A case study was devised to apply and test the conceptual model phase of the proposed model.     

Computer consultants' views of user participation in the system development process

The form of user participation adopted in any system development process is commonly argued to be an important determinant of its outcome. This study investigated computer consultants' experiences and views of different forms of user participation in the system development process. Thirty-four consultants from 14 Swedish companies of three different sizes filled out a questionnaire (response rate 47%). The results indicated that the consultants viewed both external factors and their own roles as guiding the degree of user participation. The consultants reported that reference groups, seminars/meetings and user testing were common forms of user participation in projects introducing existing programs into organizations and that seminars/meetings, users in project groups and reference groups, were the most common user participation forms in projects developing new programs for an organization. In both contexts, user testing was reported to be most common in the operation/administration phase of the project. The majority of consultants considered union participation to be fairly unimportant. Further, it was found that questionnaires were seldom used for data collection in projects. Finally, the consultants did not appear to categorize development projects by the type of user participation employed in the projects.     

Exploiting domain knowledge in system-level MPSoC design space exploration

System-level design space exploration (DSE), which is performed early in the design process, is of eminent importance to the design of complex multi-processor embedded multimedia systems. During system-level DSE, system parameters like, e.g., the number and type of processors, and the mapping of application tasks to architectural resources, are considered. The number of design instances that need to be evaluated during such DSE to find good design candidates is large, making the DSE process time consuming. Therefore, pruning techniques are needed to optimize the DSE process, allowing the DSE search algorithms to either find the design candidates quicker or to spend the same amount of time to evaluate more design points and thus improve the chance of finding even better candidates. In this article, we study several novel approaches that exploit domain knowledge to optimize the DSE search process. To this end, we focus on DSE techniques based on genetic algorithms (GA) and introduce two new extensions to a GA to optimize its search behavior. Experimental results demonstrate that the extended GAs perform at least as well, but typically significantly better than a reference (non-optimized) GA.     

Multi-model driven collaborative development platform for service-oriented e-Business systems

Enterprises need to be responsive to meet dynamic businesses and requirements. Service-oriented architecture and Web services can improve e-Business systems to be integrated and flexible. This paper proposes a multi-model driven collaborative development platform for service-oriented e-Business systems. The platform provides engineers/consultants with three views, i.e., business view, process view, and service view to support service-oriented software engineering, top-down business design and bottom-up service composite and development. The views are kept consistent through model-driven translation mechanisms. The platform employs three models, i.e., service meta-model, process model and business model to implement the translation. On the platform, business and technical consultants/engineers can use the views designated for their roles to collaborate for a service-oriented e-Business system based at the distributed sites of, e.g., IT vendors and their clients. The collaboration is featured with visual development and rapid demonstration. Comparingly, most of the mainstream development environments focus on object-oriented application development other than service-oriented business process modeling. The platform has been developed and deployed in an innovation centre to be evaluated by visiting customers.     

A multicriteria approach for risks assessment in ERP maintenance

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems cannot remain static after their implementation, they need maintenance. ERP maintenance is a key process required by the rapidly changing business environment and the usual software maintenance needs. However, these projects are highly complex and risky. So, the risks management associated with ERP maintenance projects is crucial to attain a satisfactory performance. Unfortunately, ERP maintenance risks have not been studied in depth. For this reason, this paper presents a general risks taxonomy. It gathers together the risks affecting the performance of ERP maintenance. Moreover, the authors use the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) methodology to analyze the risks factors identified. It helps managers, vendors, consultants, auditors, users and IT staff to manage ERP maintenance better. Results suggest that the most critical stage in ERP maintenance is the first phase, which receives, identifies, classifies and ranks the software modification. The most important hazards in ERP maintenance are the cooperation and commitment of ERP users and managers.     

Action research in user-centred product development

Technological development and increased international competition have imposed a significant burden on the product development function of many companies. The growing complexity of products demands a larger product development team with people having various competencies. Simultaneously the importance of good quality, usability and customisation of products is growing, and many companies want to involve customers and users directly in the development work. Both the complexity and quality demand new ways of working that support collaboration between people with various competencies, interests and responsibilities both inside and outside the company. This paper reports experiences from using action research to introduce new user-centred work practices in two commercial product development projects. The interventions varied. In the first project it was found rewarding to engage customers and users in workshops based on participatory inquiry and collaborative design. The design process was iterative and the workshops took place several times involving concept through detailed design. In the second project, new design representations are introduced. The experiences highlight the importance of creating and reifying insights in design representations and using these to both support collaboration, and create continuity in the project. The paper ends with a discussion of scientific rigor in action research and what the new work practices imply for the development team.     

Involving users in the wild—Participatory product development in and with online communities

In its traditional stance, participatory design (PD) is centred on certain work/application settings and is concerned with the involvement of representative users from these contexts. Nevertheless, current web technologies enable new forms of distributed participation which might allow PD processes to be implemented in a broader and flexible way, but may at the same time raise new issues in relation to participation. In this paper, we report on a Participatory Product Development project, using social technologies, where new issues were raised—a large population of heterogeneous and globally distributed users; a range of personal and institutional purposes, and the use of these technologies in a largely untested environment. We will reflect on insights that we gathered by through observation of and participation in a software development process driven and influenced by members of an existing online community. By means of participatory observation, analysis of the use of online tools and through semi- structured interviews we identified issues around different notions of timeliness and of process structures that are related to different roles, responsibilities and levels of experience. Our results indicate that the involvement of heterogeneous users in such a context needs to be handled carefully, for the reasons we set out. The role of user representatives acting for a broader online community can become crucial when managing heterogeneity, formulating acceptable compromises and- perhaps most crucially- dealing with different professional and ‘hobbyist’ worldviews. Additionally, we found that the use of standard web technologies only partly support online participation processes. PD ‘in the wild’ needs to be better embedded in use situations and environments (e.g., by linking discussion and design space, using feedback tools, continuous reflection of the current state of development) rather than refining participatory design as a meta-process separate from use.     

Design process excludes users: the co-creation activities between user and designer

User needs are a fundamental element of design. If the design process does not properly reflect user needs, the design will be severely compromised. Therefore, it is worthwhile to investigate how the user is, and user needs are, understood in the design process. In this article, three accepted linear process models for web site and interactive media design are reviewed in terms of the designer and user participation. The article then proposes a user-evolving collaborative design process which is built on co-creation activities between designer and user. Co-creation activities across the entire design process structurally and ontologically reposition the users, and user needs, centrally, which allows the designers to holistically approach to the user needs through building a partnership with the users. Co-creation creates an equal evolving participatory process between user and designer towards sharing values and knowledge and creating new domains of collective creativity.     

软件开发项目风险模型分析

随着产业的发展和软件规模的提高,软件项目开发和使用过程中超支、延时、技术缺陷等现象越来越严重。如何在项目实施的过程中进行有效地评估和预防这些风险,以达到识别和消除不利因素对软件开发的影响,都属于软件项目风险管理问题。该文着重讨论了集中软件开发项目风险模型并对其进行了相关分析。     

Increasing the Usability of Online Information for Older Users: A Case Study in Participatory Design

This article describes one of the first documented participatory design (PD) efforts specifically aimed at older users. The goal of the project was to make an existing World Wide Web (WWW) site more user-friendly for older users, specifically in terms of display format issues. A PD team was assembled from a group of community-dwelling older adults and developers from a university research lab. After the developers established the trust and confidence of the participants and developed a conceptual user model (based on a survey and previous literature), the PD team evaluated the original design. Prototypes were iteratively developed and tested by the PD team to improve problems found in the original design. Specific design improvements and general design guidelines for older WWW users are discussed.     

simVar: A Similarity-Influenced Question Selection Criterion for e-Sales Dialogs

Even though AI technologies like CBR have proved their strengths for intelligent sales support in EC applications, on-line customers often encounter e-sales systems that are hard to use. Before a search process is started, they either have to answer many annoying or irrelevant questions or they are faced with technical jargon of manufacturers they are not able to understand. On-line customers want personalised advice and adequate product offerings. Gaining sufficient information from the customer but also providing her with information at the right place is the key. Resulting from this fact, an automated communication process is needed that simulates the sales dialog between customers and human sales persons. This article proposes a method for question selection in e-sales dialogs based on the variance of the CBR system's inherent similarities. The method uses a similarity-influenced measure to reduce the number of questions required to find satisfactory products. Additionally, it is shown how questions can be selected on the level of abstraction appropriate to the customer's knowledge.