Taking Responsibility for Industrial Digitalization: Navigating Organizational Challenges

In this article, an employee perspective has been applied in aiming to explore how organizations face challenges and take responsibility for industrial digitalization, thus extending the research on the human-centric perspective in relation to Industry 4.0 technologies. To give emphasis to the human-centric perspective, the co-workership wheel was applied to identify and analyze data. The findings of an explorative longitudinal qualitative case study consisting of 35 in-depth interviews with informants from a manufacturing company were used. Additional data collection consisted of documents and project meetings. By applying a human-centric perspective, llessons learned from this case study show that taking responsibility for industrial digitalization is challenging and the importance of an adaptive organizational culture and a focus on learning and competence are crucial. We argue that the findings give useful implications for manufacturing organizations navigating the challenges of industrial digitalization to sense and seize the benefits of Industry 4.0 technologies.

Key HRM Challenges and Benefits

Whilst HRM is responding to organizational challenges, HRM tutors have to deal with avoiding labour imposition (Mather et al., 2007) and ensuring that their students are well prepared for society. The chapter's findings involve linkages between people, HR systems and the workplace in an HR Scaffolding that is argued to contribute to resolving the challenges caused by ‘the black box' of organizational performance (Becker & Huselid, 2006). Four steps of research extrapolate lessons to be learnt.

Auditing an Agile Development Operations Ecosystem

In an enterprise software development, DevOps is a practice of integrating development and operations to deliver cost-efficient, improved quality solutions to the customer by automating the existing processes to achieve “continuous delivery.” In the current dynamic IT Ecosystem where there is a rising need to prove a competitive edge to maximize profitability, it is pivotal to drive business value with profound emphasis on quality. Agile enables us to take calculated risks during development whereas its affinity to adopting DevOps will promote continuous delivery with reduced friction to improve business efficiency. As this approach requires a change in people, process, technology, culture, usage of right tools and techniques, the early involvement of IT Auditors during the process of transformation could aid to build effective Risk Management strategies to handle organizational challenges. This article aims to present a risk-based audit approach to effectively use audit tools and techniques in an Agile-DevOps transformation environment to achieve maximum business value.

Leadership as an Implementation Driver: Identifying Best Practices to Support Organizational Change

This article explores implementation science with a focus on the strategies leaders use to address organizational challenges. Part of a larger study, we employed a qualitative multiple case study design of 20 charter schools to contribute to an evidence base about how leadership at the charter school and charter management organization levels can influence their school communities regarding commitment to students with disabilities. From our exploratory research, key themes emerged that align with effective leadership strategies for implementation demonstrating the positive influence of leaders who prioritize students with disabilities by maintaining a clear vision and strong sense of purpose, creating a safe environment where diversity of perspectives is encouraged, and making sure all voices are heard and valued. Public schools across the nation can leverage lessons learned from the charter sector, as leaders work to ensure that their school practices and policies support success for students with disabilities. By ensuring that school leaders are trained and supported to use effective leadership strategies, policymakers, and schools of higher education can influence the adoption and advancement of innovative and effective practices.

A Novel Framework for Efficient Multiple Signature on Certificate with Database Security

PKI gives undeniable degree of safety by transferring the key pair framework among the clients. By constructing, a PKI we combine digital identities with the digital signatures, which give an end-to-end trust model. Basically, PKI is an attempt, which can simulate the real-world human analyzation of identity and reliability in a computerized fashion. In any case, the existing applications are centered on a tight trust model which makes them inadequate as an overall device for trust examination. After years of research, development and deployment, PKI still facing strong technical and organizational challenges such as attacks against Certificate Authorities (CA). CAs are the primitive component of PKIs which plays powerful role in the PKI model. CA must be diligent, creditable and legitimate. In any case, a technocrat who picks up control on a CA can use CA's certificate to issue bogus certificate and impersonate any site, such as - DigiNotar, GobalSign, Comodo and DigiCert Malaysia. In this paper we proposed an approach to reduce the damage of compromised CA/CA’s key by imposing Multiple Signatures (MS) after verifying/authenticating user’s information. One single compromised CA is not able to issue a certificate to any domain as multiple signatures are required. Private key and other perceptive information are stored in the form of object/blob. Without knowing the structure of class no one can access the object and object output stream. Proposed MS achieve better performance over existing MS schemes and control fraudulent certificate issuance with more database security. The proposed scheme also avoids MITM attack against CA who is issuing certificate to whom which is using the following parameters such as identity of Sender, Receiver, Timestamp and Aadhar number.

Resilient Leadership. Qualitative Study on Factors Influencing Organizational Resilience and Adaptive Response to Adversity

Given the turbulent environment that govern­ments and citizens across the globe faced in the last two years (due to the COVID-19 pandemic), one concept seems to stand out as extremely valuable in this context: resilience. Resilience, understood as the capacity of a sys­tem to bounce back from adversity, becomes a key component in the equation of post-pandemic evo­lution and recovery. Resilient leadership is just one of the multiple derived applications of the general resilience concept, referring (in an institutional set­ting) to the capacity of leaders to turn out positive results despite adverse conditions. Based on quali­tative research consisting of 10 interviews conduct­ed with women leaders (from the private and non­profit sectors) during the last 18 months, our results show that governmental response (regulation and support) and financial pressures have been the ma­jor organizational challenges no matter the sector, while organizational dimension seems to have an influence on the capacity to adapt and respond to adversity. Gender does not seem to play a role in the response provided to the crisis.

Hybrid Classroom – The Experience оf the 107th Khan Krum Primary School in Sofia, Bulgaria

The COVID-19 pandemic imposed a quick introduction of distance learning for many students. In Bulgaria, the Ministry of Education and Science obliged schools to work synchronously with their pupils using video conference rooms. After the easing of the containment measures, regular classroom education was restored. However, the problems with quarantined students persisted. School principals had to solve new organizational challenges. The hardest and most frequent issue was the split of a given class into students present in school, and students learning online. The article introduces an organizational model of a hybrid classroom where teaching is carried out in a physical and an online classroom at the same time. The authors describe their experience with specific hardware and software used for the first time in Bulgaria for educational purposes. They also show their experience with the organization of traineeships for university students as primary school IT teachers using a hybrid classroom.

Opportunities and Barriers of Telemedicine in Rheumatology: A Participatory, Mixed-Methods Study

Despite all its promises, telemedicine is still not widely implemented in the care of rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases (RMDs). The aim of this study is to investigate opportunities, barriers, acceptance, and preferences concerning telemedicine among RMD patients and professional stakeholders. From November 2017 to December 2019, a participatory, mixed-methods study was conducted, consisting of (1) expert interviews (n = 27) with RMD patients and professional stakeholders, (2) a national paper-based patient survey (n = 766), and (3) focus groups (n = 2) with patient representatives and rheumatologists. The qualitative findings indicate that patients equate personal contact with physical face-to-face contact, which could be reduced by implementing telemedicine, thus negatively influencing the patient–doctor relationship. Correspondingly “no personal contact with the doctor” is the main reason (64%) why 38% of the surveyed patients refuse to try telemedicine. Professional stakeholders expect telemedicine to contribute to the effective allocation of scarce resources in rheumatology care. The main barriers reported by stakeholders were the scarcity of time resources in RMD care, the absence of physical examinations, and organizational challenges associated with the implementation of telemedicine in RMD care. While the exact integration of telemedicine into routine care has yet to be found, the consequences on the patient-physician relationship must be permanently considered.

The digital transition of social security in Finland. Frontrunner experiencing headwinds?

Digitalization transforms our societies in a profound way. Public administrations and social security institutions are at different stages in this process. Digitalization poses technological, legal, and organizational challenges. Finland has typically been a frontrunner in the adaptation of ICT technology. This case study critically assesses the current state-of-the-art in the field of digitalization in Finnish social security. The text singles out the projects that are on-going and those that are planned for the immediate future. The article shows that Finnish social security institutions have integrated digital processes into their operations, but legal and ethical challenges exist, especially in the use of artificial intelligence and automatic decision-making in social security.

Human-Centered Leadership Development: A Communication-Based Approach for Promoting Authentic and Transformational Leadership

Leadership development (LD) has been shown to deliver significant value in both professional and academic settings. However, scholars of leadership communication and LD have argued for a need to recognize LD as a highly social, co-creative, and communicative process in which followership and larger organizational and social contexts play a significant role. Recent research has also argued for self-directed and experiential learning approaches to promote learning mindsets and psychological resources for long-term growth. The present study addresses these challenges by developing a holistic theoretical model and an applied design for LD comprised of evidence-based communication interventions that address intrapersonal, interpersonal, and strategic communication contexts in order to promote both authentic leadership and transformational leadership capacities. The model employs human-centered design methods to complement established experiential learning models and facilitate co-creative engagement with situated organizational challenges.