The researcher's companion: enhanced library support for postgraduates

The British Library Research and Innovation Centre research study What makes a digital librarian?, completed in February 1998 by research partners University of Sunderland Information Services, Gateshead MBC Libraries and Arts and Education for Change Ltd., looked at critical success factors and barriers which underpin or inhibit the development of the networked digital library. The study focused on staff skills, knowledge and attributes, management culture and attitudes, through a series of qualitative research exercises in public and academic libraries. This article summarises the literature review and looks at what LIS commentators have to say about institutional culture, organisational structures and management styles, leadership, communications, staff attributes and individual attitudes, staff training and development, in the context of developing electronic and digital library services. The author is convinced of the value of a more rigorous application of organisational and management theory to the problems and complexities of the LIS sector, as ICT innovations are breaking down older structures. LIS commentators also seem to be out of tune with staff views on such issues as effective management styles, professional and non‐professional roles in electronic library environments and the influence of the library's parent organisation on development.     

Product creation: An appropriate coupling of human and artificial intelligence

Small batch manufacture dominates the manufacturing sector of a growing number of industrialised countries. The organisational structures and management methods currently adopted in such enterprises are firmly based upon historical developments which started with individual craftsmen. These structures and methods are primarily concerned with the co-ordination of human activities, rather than with the management of theknowledge process underlying the creation of products.This paper argues that it is the failure to understand this knowledge process and its effective integration at aKnowledge Level which presents the real barrier to increased flexibility, not, as is presently perceived, a lack of suitableInformation Level integration. Potential techniques and methodologies for achievingKnowledge Level integration are beginning to emerge from Artificial Intelligence research. Realisation of full Knowledge Level integration will not only require further research into the AI techniques and methodologies involved, but also an understanding of the wider human aspects of their application. Some questions concerning the effective coupling of human and artificial intelligence to achieve Knowledge Level integration of the product creation process are presented.     

Taking stock of organisations’ protection of privacy: categorising and assessing threats to personally identifiable information in the USA

Many organisations create, store, or purchase information that links individuals’ identities to other data. Termed personally identifiable information (PII), this information has become the lifeblood of many firms across the globe. As organisations accumulate their constituencies’ PII (e.g. customers’, students’, patients’, and employees’ data), individuals’ privacy will depend on the adequacy of organisations’ information privacy safeguards. Despite existing protections, many breaches still occur. For example, US organisations reported around 4,500 PII-breach events between 2005 and 2015. With such a high number of breaches, determining all threats to PII within organisations proves a burdensome task. In light of this difficulty, we utilise text-mining and cluster analysis techniques to create a taxonomy of various organisational PII breaches, which will help drive targeted research towards organisational PII protection. From an organisational systematics perspective, our classification system provides a foundation to explain the diversity among the myriad of threats. We identify eight major PII-breach types and provide initial literature reviews for each type of breach. We detail how US organisations differ regarding their exposure to these breaches, as well as how the level of severity (i.e. number of records affected) differs among these PII breaches. Finally, we offer several paths for future research.     

Bridging the TQ/CI Gap: The Case of Lucas Car Diesel Systems,Sudbury

This paper will focus on the link between organisational and individual learning in the Continuous Improvement (CI) process. It argues that the relationship between Total Quality management programmes and CI is best understood through a close examination of the management processes that capture individual and, hence, Organisation learning in order to ensure that small scale innovations can be sustained on a constant and company-wide basis. Through a longitudinal case study of Lucas Car Diesel Systems, and supported by research carried out by the CIRCA project at the University of Brighton¹, it looks at CI in three stages: before a decision is made to change the organisational structure, the “shock” stage that induces organisational change and the subsequent CI phase. It argues that a long term strategic goal of achieving CI is critical to engendering the necessary cultural changes that, in turn, are essential to creating an improvement based and innovative culture. The Lucas case study demonstrates that creating a pervasive CI ethos is fundamentally a question of managing small scale, sometimes non-pecuniary, innovations. But, as the case shows, it can be done through the effective management of communications and employee involvement.     

An empirical study on the integrative pre-implementation model of technology acceptance in a mandatory environment

Technology acceptance has been studied extensively within the IS discipline. Few, if any, have studied end users’ acceptance of newly implemented technologies within organisational contexts before end users start using the technology. Thus, by integrating variables from multiple relevant literature, this research attempts to answer this research question: will the introduction of a richer model for technology acceptance in a mandatory adoption environment, specifically in the pre-implementation phase, allow us to capture and account for the complexities of organisational technology implementations? The research model was tested in an organisational setting where a new content management system was being implemented. A total of 148 employees participated in this survey and partial least squares method was used to analyse the data to test the model. Implementation climate, valence, attitude, and perceived ease of use positively influence goal commitment to technology acceptance in a mandatory environment, and the model has displayed relatively large explanatory and predictive power. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed in the paper.     

Factors affecting employees' knowledge-sharing behaviour in the virtual organisation from the perspectives of well-being and organisational behaviour

Drawing on the concept of organisational behaviour, this research augments the concepts of social capital theory and organisational culture with one pioneering precursor and mediator, the sense of well-being, to develop an integrative understanding of the factors affecting individuals' knowledge-sharing behaviour within the more complex context of the virtual organisation of Taiwanese Non-governmental Organisations (NGOs). A field survey of 131 employees from the selected virtual organisation was analysed using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to examine the outcomes empirically. Our research offers a persuasive body of evidence supporting the notion that increasing employees' sense of well-being can successfully form a bridge that can connect social capital tendency, organisational culture and employees' knowledge-sharing behaviour. Surprisingly, and contrary to common belief, the integrated model shows that social capital tendency seems to play a more important role than organisational culture in affecting employees' sense of well-being within the virtual organisation in a Chinese cultural context. Consequently, this research reveals the subtle interplay of employees' sense of well-being, social capital tendency, organisational culture and knowledge-sharing behaviour, while the in-depth analysis provides strong support for knowledge management research and practice.     

Organisational usability of mobile computing—Volatility and control in mobile foreign exchange trading

The past two decades have presented significant technological developments of mobile information and communication technology (ICT) such as portable technologies (e.g. mobile phones, notebook computers, personal digital assistants), and associated wireless infrastructures (e.g. wireless local area networks, mobile telecommunications infrastructures, bluetooth personal area networks). Mobile ICT offers a range of technical opportunities for organisations and their members to implement enterprise mobility. However, the challenges of unlocking the opportunities of enterprise mobility are not well understood. One of the key issues is to establish systems and associated working practices that are deemed usable by both individuals and the organisation. The aim of this paper is to show that the concept of organisational usability can enrich the understanding of mobile ICT in organisations. As an addition to the traditional understanding of individual usability, organisational usability emphasises the role of mobile ICT beyond individual support. A large-scale study of four different ways of organising foreign exchange trading in a Middle Eastern bank serves as the concrete foundation for the discussion. The empirical study showed how the final of the four attempts at establishing 24-h trading deployed mobile ICT to enable mobile trading and by providing a solution, which was deemed usable for both the organisation and the traders. The paper contributes to the understanding of how usability of mobile ICT critically depends on carefully balancing individual and organisational requirements. It also demonstrates the need for research in enterprise mobility to embrace both individual and organisational concerns in order to grasp the complexity of the phenomena.     

Managing Crises in the EU: Some Reflections of a Non‐EU Scholar

In recent years the EU has been increasingly involved in development and implementation of crisis policy as a component of its development and security policy. This process is seriously complicated by the EU architects, who had never conceived it as a crisis management institute. Therefore they failed to design built‐in organisational capacities into the Union to mitigate and respond to crises. In addition, the EU‐agreed overarching concept of crisis as such and EU crisis in particular is missing. Both issues remain a primary question on research and policy agendas. Provided below are some of the author's considerations and comments on these issues. It is argued that, despite the existing divergence in crisis interpretations in the EU, coherent conceptualisation is possible and approaches to this are introduced. Practical implications of generic crisis conceptualisation for EU crisis management policy are analysed. Within this context three major lessons from international experience, including that from the USA and Russia, are emphasised. These concern the issues of organisational flexibility, learning from earlier major crises and comprehensive training of crisis decision units critical for efficient crisis management policy.     

Proposing the control‐reactance compliance model (CRCM) to explain opposing motivations to comply with organisational information security policies

Organisations increasingly rely on information and related systems, which are also a source of risk. Unfortunately, employees represent the greatest risk to organisational information because they are the most frequent source of information security breaches. To address this ‘weak link’ in organisational security, most organisations have strict information security policies (ISPs) designed to thwart employee information abuses. Regrettably, these ISPs are only partially effective because employees often ignore them, circumvent them or even do the opposite of what management desires. Research on attempts to increase ISP compliance has produced similarly mixed results. Lack of compliance with ISPs is a widespread organisational issue that increasingly bears disproportionately large direct and qualitative costs that undermine strategy. Consequently, the purpose of our study was to contribute to the understanding of both motivations to comply with new ISPs and motivations to react negatively against them. To do so, we proposed an innovative model, the control‐reactance compliance model (CRCM), which combines organisational control theory – a model that explains ISP compliance – with reactance theory – a model used to explain ISP noncompliance. To test CRCM, we used a sample of 320 working professionals in a variety of industries to examine the likely organisational outcomes of the delivery of a new ISP to employees in the form of a typical memo sent throughout an organisation. We largely found support for CRCM, and this study concludes with an explanation of the model's contributions to research and practice related to organisational ISP compliance.     

Development of Consultancy skills for future IT professionals via group working

Organisations face an increasingly competitive and uncertain global environment, after recent experience of unparalleled technological advances and political shifts. Increased dependence on Information Technology (IT) will require appropriate human resource strategies, to develop individuals who will be capable of operating successfully within new organisational structures, with reduced management layers and a requirement for teamworking. This paper presents a university-industry based partnership, revolving around a final year Group Consultancy project, in which undergraduate students work with an external client on a live problem. The project involves the use ofaction research methodology, where academic ideas are applied in the ‘real’ world of business. This is described in the context of group projects, which examine thelegacy system problems faced by three multi-national organisations. Revans, the unsung hero of Action Learning, who showed me that the best learning happens in real life with real problems and real people, and not in classrooms with know-all teachersCharles Handy The Age of Unreason, p45     

Information Security management: A human challenge?

This paper considers to what extent the management of Information Security is a human challenge. It suggests that the human challenge lies in accepting that individuals in the organisation have not only an identity conferred by their role but also a personal and social identity that they bring with them to work. The challenge that faces organisations is to manage this while trying to achieve the optimum configuration of resources in order to meet business objectives. The paper considers the challenges for Information Security from an organisational perspective and develops an argument that builds on research from the fields of management and organisational behaviour. It concludes that the human challenge of Information Security management has largely been neglected and suggests that to address the issue we need to look at the skills needed to change organisational culture, the identity of the Information Security Manager and effective communication between Information Security Managers, end users and Senior Managers.     

Lower bound analysis of H ∞ performance achievable via decentralized LTI controllers

This paper is concerned with the decentralized H _∞ controller synthesis problem for discrete‐time LTI systems. Despite of intensive research efforts over the last several decades, this problem is believed to be nonconvex and still outstanding in general. Therefore, most of existing approaches resort to heuristic optimization algorithms that do not allow us to draw any definite conclusion on the quality of the designed controllers. To get around this difficulty, in this paper, we propose convex optimization procedures for computing lower bounds of the H _∞ performance that is achievable via decentralized LTI controllers of any order. In particular, we will show that sharpened lower bounds can be obtained by making good use of structures of the LTI plant typically observed in the decentralized control setting. We illustrate via numerical examples that these lower bounds are indeed useful to ensure the good quality of decentralized controllers designed by a heuristic optimization. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Organisational learning—a critical systems thinking discipline

This paper deals with the application of critical systems thinking in the domain of organisational learning and knowledge management. Its viewpoint is that deep organisational learning only takes place when the business systems' stakeholders reflect on their actions and thus inquire about their purpose(s) in relation to the business system and the other stakeholders they perceive to exist. This is done by reflecting both on the sources of motivation and/or deception that are contained in their purpose, and also on the sources of collective motivation and/or deception that are contained in the business system's purpose. The development of an organisational information system that captures, manages and institutionalises meaningful information—a knowledge management system—cannot be separated from organisational learning practices, since it should be the result of these very practices. Although Senge's five disciplines provide a useful starting-point in looking at organisational learning, we argue for a critical systems approach, instead of an uncritical Systems Dynamics one that concentrates only on the organisational learning practices.We proceed to outline a methodology called Business Systems Purpose Analysis (BSPA) that offers a participatory structure for team and organisational learning, upon which the stakeholders can take legitimate action that is based on the force of the better argument. In addition, the organisational learning process in BSPA leads to the development of an intrinsically motivated information organisational system that allows for the institutionalisation of the learning process itself in the form of an organisational knowledge management system. This could be a specific application, or something as wide-ranging as an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation. Examples of the use of BSPA in two ERP implementations are presented.     

Understanding knowledge sharing between IT professionals – an integration of social cognitive and social exchange theory

The research includes various constructs based on social exchange theory and social cognitive theory. This study mainly explored the relationships among organisational justice, trust, commitment and knowledge-sharing cognition and verified their mediating effects through two variables of trust and commitment. A survey utilising a questionnaire was used with 252 IT professionals from IT companies and departments in Taiwan. Structural equation modelling was used to analyse the data and to evaluate the research model. The results showed that the research model fitted the data well, and the main determinant of knowledge-sharing intention was the building of organisational justice between knowledge intensive workers, confirming our hypotheses that trust and commitment foster organisational commitment. In turn, organisational commitment will help to build individual knowledge-sharing self-efficacy and both directly and indirectly affect intentions to share knowledge.     

Assessing the ‘insider–outsider threat’ duality in the context of the development of public–private partnerships delivering ‘choice’ in healthcare services: A sociomaterial critique

Containing the ‘outsider’ threat to the information systems of organisations as well as recognising the disruptive potential of ‘insiders’ are fundamentals of security management. However, the recent development of public–private partnerships in the UK requires a reassessment of the continuing utility of such dualities. This paper draws upon a sociological understanding of the complexities of organisational practices as well as a grounded case study of the implementation of the NHS ‘Choose and book’ service across both public and private healthcare organisations in order to challenge these essentialist forms of sociotechnical analysis. The paper proposes a sociomaterial understanding of information systems and organisational dynamics that does not seek to separate out distinct ‘human’ and ‘technical’ information security risks. Rather, it asserts that the organisational outcomes of the introduction of new information systems are necessarily emergent and contingent, and it is with these indeterminate realities that security analysts have to engage.     

‘What a waste of time’: An examination of cybersecurity legitimacy

Managers who oversee cybersecurity policies commonly rely on managerial encouragement (e.g., rewards) and employee characteristics (e.g., attitude) to drive compliant behaviour. However, whereas some cybersecurity initiatives are perceived as reasonable by employees, others are viewed as a ‘waste of time’. This research introduces employee judgements of cybersecurity legitimacy as a new angle for understanding employee compliance with cybersecurity policies over time. Drawing on theory from the organisational legitimacy and cybersecurity literature, we conduct a three-wave survey of 529 employees and find that, for each separate wave, negative legitimacy judgements mediate the relationship between management support and compliance, as well as between cybersecurity inconvenience and compliance. Our results provide support for cybersecurity legitimacy as an important influence on employee compliance with cybersecurity initiatives. This is significant because it highlights to managers the importance of not simply expecting compliant employee behaviour to follow from the introduction of cybersecurity initiatives, but that employees need to be convinced that the initiatives are fair and reasonable. Interestingly, we did not find sufficient support for our expectation that the increased likelihood of a cybersecurity incident will moderate the legitimacy-policy compliance relationship. This result suggests that the legitimacy perceptions of employees are unyielding to differences in the risk characteristics of the cybersecurity incidents facing organisations.     

Development of a knowledge-based self-assessment system for measuring organisational performance

Effective performance measurement is an important task in the discipline of engineering management. With the support of City University of Hong Kong, a research project was initiated to develop a knowledge-based expert self-assessment (KES) training toolkit on measuring and assessing organisational performance based on the evaluation criteria of a renowned Business Excellence Model—the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA). This paper explains the development of and elaborates the system framework, requirements, design and validation of the toolkit. The project results shows that the toolkit could facilitate the teaching of students of engineering management courses by providing a stimulating learning environment and practical experiences in measuring and assessing enterprise performance. Incorporating the KES model and toolkit into the engineering management curriculum can provide students and industrial users with hands-on experience and insights of organisational PM.     

An institutional perspective on sources of ERP package–organisation misalignments

Organisations often appear to be unaware of fundamental differences that exist between their organisational context and that which is assumed by ERP package developers. This has undermined expected benefits from ERP implementation, and in extreme cases of package-organisational misalignment, has led to project and even organisational failure.In this study, we explain package-organisational misalignments as the result of differences between the structures embedded in the package and those embedded in the organisation. These differences reflect the different institutional context of the package developers and implementing organisation. Some organisational structures are imposed while other structures are voluntarily adopted. The organisation has less control in the case of imposed structures and misalignments associated with imposed structures are therefore more likely to be resolved through package customization.We apply the framework to three hospitals implementing the same ERP package, identify the structural sources of the misalignments, and analyze the relationship to the type of resolution (package customization or organisational adaptation). We found that imposed structures were indeed overwhelmingly resolved through package customization, while most voluntarily acquired structures were resolved via organisational adaptation. We identified the different context specific sources for these structural differences and contribute to the research on ERP implementation, institutional theory, as well as draw implications for practice in managing package–organisation misalignments.     

The dynamics of culture, organisational culture and change

The interface between cultural anthropology, cross-cultural psychology, cultural psychology and indigenous psychology provides a rich context for examining recent developments within the field of organisational culture, both from a societal (national) and a cross-cultural perspective. It is argued in this paper that cultural patterns in society impact deeply on cultural patterns in organisations. In other words, organisational culture reflects the way in which the societal context shapes the organisational context, which in turn moulds the beliefs, attitudes and behaviour of its members — individuals and groups. It is further posited that organisational cultural and societal culture recursively mirror one another. The complexity of the interdependence between societal culture and organisational culture will be traced, drawing on the evolving nature of the construct culture within the traditions of anthropology, cross-cultural psychology, indigenous psychology and organisational psychology. The hidden source of cultural elements embedded in the organisational domain will be examined from the perspective of an appreciation of diversity and a recognition of the need to support and encourage the variations that add to our creativity as well astosystem/organisational effectiveness.