scholarly journals The Role and Impact of Descriptive Theories in Creating Knowledge in Design Science

Author(s):  
Antti Knutas ◽  
Zohreh Pourzolfaghar ◽  
Markus Helfert
Proceedings ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 9
Author(s):  
Birgul Kutlu ◽  
Yeliz Gunal Aggul ◽  
Idil Atasu ◽  
Zeynep Kaymaz

This meta-analysis examines the studies on groupware published between the years 2010 and 2020. Descriptive analysis was conducted to determine the distribution of studies in terms of publication year, time–space matrix category, targeted sectors, research methods, and the academic field of the journals that published these studies. Although groupware played a significant role in communication, collaboration, and coordination of users in various collaborative work conditions and sectors, the majority of studies focused on asynchronous and distributed collaborative work environments in the software engineering field, and the research method preferred was design science.


Author(s):  
Flávio Horita E.A. ◽  
Fabio Gomes Rocha ◽  
Layse Santos Souza ◽  
Gustavo R. Gonzales

Author(s):  
Jan vom Brocke ◽  
Marie-Sophie Baier ◽  
Theresa Schmiedel ◽  
Katharina Stelzl ◽  
Maximilian Röglinger ◽  
...  

AbstractContext awareness is essential for successful business process management (BPM). So far, research has covered relevant BPM context factors and context-aware process design, but little is known about how to assess and select BPM methods in a context-aware manner. As BPM methods are involved in all stages of the BPM lifecycle, it is key to apply appropriate methods to efficiently use organizational resources. Following the design science paradigm, the study at hand addresses this gap by developing and evaluating the Context-Aware BPM Method Assessment and Selection (CAMAS) Method. This method assists method engineers in assessing in which contexts their BPM methods can be applied and method users in selecting appropriate BPM methods for given contexts. The findings of this study call for more context awareness in BPM method design and for a stronger focus on explorative BPM. They also provide insights into the status quo of existing BPM methods.


Logistics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 37
Author(s):  
Serkan Alacam ◽  
Asli Sencer

In the global trucking industry, vertical collaboration between shippers and carriers is attained by intermediaries, called brokers. Brokers organize carriers for a shipper in accordance with its quality and price requirements, and support carriers to collaborate horizontally by sharing a large distribution order from a shipper. Brokers also act as trustees, preventing the passing of private information of any party to the others. Despite these benefits, intermediaries in the trucking industry are involved in several sustainability problems, including high costs, high levels of carbon emissions, high percentages of empty miles, low-capacity utilizations, and driver shortages. Several studies have acknowledged the importance of improving collaboration to address these problems. Obviously, the major concern of brokers is not collaboration, but rather to optimize their own gains. This paper investigates the potential of blockchain technology to improve collaboration in the trucking industry, by eliminating brokers while preserving their responsibilities as organizers and trustees. This paper extends the transportation control tower concept from the logistics literature, and presents a system architecture for its implementation through smart contracts on a blockchain network. In the proposed system, the scalability and privacy of trucking operations are ensured through integration with privacy-preserving off-chain computation and storage solutions (running outside of the blockchain). The potential of this design artifact for fostering collaboration in the trucking industry was evaluated by both blockchain technology experts and trucking industry professionals.


2011 ◽  
Vol 20 (06) ◽  
pp. 1127-1156 ◽  
Author(s):  
MAXIM DAVIDOVSKY ◽  
VADIM ERMOLAYEV ◽  
VYACHESLAV TOLOK

Ontology instance migration is one of the complex and not fully solved problems in knowledge management. A solution is required when the ontology schema evolves in the life cycle and the assertions have to be transferred to the newer version. The problem may become more complex in distributed settings when, for example, several autonomous software entities use and exchange partial assertional knowledge in a domain that is formalized by different though semantically overlapping descriptive theories. Such an exchange is essentially the migration of the assertional part of an ontology to other ontologies belonging to or used by different entities. The paper presents our method and tool for migrating instances between the ontologies that have structurally different but semantically overlapping schemas. The approach is based on the use of the manually coded transformation rules describing the changes between the input and the output ontologies. The tool is implemented as a plug-in for the ProjectNavigator prototype software framework. The article also reports the results of our three evaluation experiments. In these experiments we evaluated the degree of complexity in the structural changes to which our approach remains valid. We also chose the ontology sets in one of the experiments to make the results comparable with the ontology alignment software. Finally we checked how well our approach scales with the increase of the quantity of the migrated ontology instances to the numbers that are characteristic to industrial ontologies. In our opinion the evaluation results are satisfactory and suggest some directions for the future work.


2012 ◽  
Vol 2012 ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mona Riabacke ◽  
Mats Danielson ◽  
Love Ekenberg

Comparatively few of the vast amounts of decision analytical methods suggested have been widely spread in actual practice. Some approaches have nevertheless been more successful in this respect than others. Quantitative decision making has moved from the study of decision theory founded on a single criterion towards decision support for more realistic decision-making situations with multiple, often conflicting, criteria. Furthermore, the identified gap between normative and descriptive theories seems to suggest a shift to more prescriptive approaches. However, when decision analysis applications are used to aid prescriptive decision-making processes, additional demands are put on these applications to adapt to the users and the context. In particular, the issue of weight elicitation is crucial. There are several techniques for deriving criteria weights from preference statements. This is a cognitively demanding task, subject to different biases, and the elicited values can be heavily dependent on the method of assessment. There have been a number of methods suggested for assessing criteria weights, but these methods have properties which impact their applicability in practice. This paper provides a survey of state-of-the-art weight elicitation methods in a prescriptive setting.


2016 ◽  
Vol 138 (10) ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine K. Fu ◽  
Maria C. Yang ◽  
Kristin L. Wood

Design principles are created to codify and formalize design knowledge so that innovative, archival practices may be communicated and used to advance design science and solve future design problems, especially the pinnacle, wicked, and grand-challenge problems that face the world and cross-cutting markets. Principles are part of a family of knowledge explication, which also include guidelines, heuristics, rules of thumb, and strategic constructs. Definitions of a range of explications are explored from a number of seminal papers. Based on this analysis, the authors pose formalized definitions for the three most prevalent terms in the literature—principles, guidelines, and heuristics—and draw more definitive distinctions between the terms. Current research methods and practices with design principles are categorized and characterized. We further explore research methodologies, validation approaches, semantic principle composition through computational analysis, and a proposed formal approach to articulating principles. In analyzing the methodology for discovering, deriving, formulating, and validating design principles, the goal is to understand and advance the theoretical basis of design, the foundations of new tools and techniques, and the complex systems of the future. Suggestions for the future of design principles research methodology for added rigor and repeatability are proposed.


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