Posts Tagged paper
The Experience Factory
During the literature study of my Ph.D. thesis I came across an interesting concept, which I would like to briefly write about here. Even before the term knowledge management became popular, Victor R. Basili presented his experience factory [1].
The principle behind that is that a software developing organization should gather the gained experience and make it accessible to learn from it in the future. To archive that, the whole idea builds upon a division of responsibilities. On the one hand there is the project organization, which covers the project work and tasks. On the other hand is the experience factory, which encapsulates the whole experience recording and leveraging for the whole organization.
In the experience factory all kinds of experience that can be externalized and made available are analysed and synthesised. That includes the outcome of project reviews or documentation. This is then taken and bundled into standardized packages, in order to make the experience easier to access. Developers can thus access these experience packages in the experience base, once they feel the need for further input. At the end of every learning process, the developer has to feed the gained insights back into the experience base, to make it richer. The methodology thus applies the two basic activities in knowledge management: collecting experience and learning to improve.
The experience factory is a widely known concept and implemented in different organizations. The most famous one is the Software Engineering Laboratory at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, which documents a dramatic increase of reuse across different projects [2]. It can be seen though, that it is difficult to implement and contains a huge organizational overhead. But the principles applied make a lot of sense. It is worth thinking about it, I suppose.
[1] Victor R. Basili. »Software Development: A Paradigm for the Future«, Proceedings of the 13th Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC 89), 1989.
[2] Victor R. Basili and Gianluigi Caldiera. »Improve Software Quality by Reusing Knowledge and Experience«, Sloan Management Review, Fall 1995.
Engaged Scholarship
During the summer school and the conference I recently attended, the topic was engaged scholarship. Since Van de Ven published his book [1] in 2007, this topic has been broadly discussed, especially in the Scandinavia information systems community. Reason enough for me to take a closer look at the book and a brief explanation, why it makes a lot of noise in northern Europe.
Any researcher’s target is to advance the body of knowledge, but also to enlighten practice of a profession. The gap between theory and practice is a sign that this did not always work satisfactorily. With engaged scholarship Van de Ven describes an approach that should help this dilemma. He wants to support the collaboration between researchers and practitioners. Engaged scholarship does not understand research as a solitary exercise, but as a combined effort.
the more complex the problem or the bigger the research question, the greater the level of engagement is required of researchers from different disciplines and practitioners with different functional experiences.
Page 18
Four research activities should take part during a research, according to his ideas: problem formulation, theory building, research design and problem solving. He points out that these are not held in any specific order. Sometimes, it even makes sense to have a two in parallel. Additionally it can be beneficial or even required to conduct several iterations and revisions of the research activities.
As space is very limited here, I can only provide a brief overview and point out to read the book. It’s worth it!
Problem Formulation. To describe the problem properly is a vital part of every research. The target of any problem formulation should be the research question. It provides the implications for the next steps and can be used later to evaluate the work. Not only is this commonly the first task in the engaged scholarship process, but also influences it the following ones strongly.
Theory Building. As the theory in engaged scholarship has to be connected to reality, it is very important to choose a fitting one. This usually involves three activities: Conceiving or creating a theory, constructing or elaborating a theory and justifying or evaluating a theory.
Research Design. It is important to understand, that the theory is not the same as the model. A research model instead acts like an instrument to link data with the theory. As theory cannot be observed directly, a research model is designed instead. Dependent on the research question two basic epistemologies can be used. One is the variance model, which is outcome-driven, and the other one is the process model, which is event-driven.
Problem Solving. The researcher’s present is organized that every research leads to a form of written and/or presentation. It is assumed that work will be used, if it is good/influential enough. It can be observed, that much research is hardly used by other researchers (low citations is common) and in practice (difficulties to find and to adopt). The important thing is thus to find appropriate ways to communicate the findings of a research by engaging the intended audience.
While the kind of research that Van de Ven describes as engaged scholarship might be a bit revolutionary for the American information systems research community, this is actually common practice in Scandinavia. Lars Mathiassen and Peter Axel Nielsen analyzed the articles in the Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems (SJIS) and compare their research process to the engaged scholarship process [2]. They found that the Scandinavian IS research tradition is in line with engaged scholarship and many papers applied its values and principles long before the book was published. For further information I would like to refer to the author and his blog entry.
Personally, I enjoyed reading the book. Not only because I noticed to be in an engaged scholarship myself, but also because Van de Ven describes the details of conducting the process in depth and comprehensive.
[1] Andrew H. Van de Ven. »Engaged Scholarship: A Guide for Organizational and Social Research«, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
[2] Lars Mathiassen and Peter Axel Nielsen. »Engaged Scholarship in IS Research«, Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, Vol. 20, No. 2, Pages 3-20, 2008.
EuroSPI 2010
Last week (September 1 – 3, 2010) I have been in Grenoble, France. That was the location for the 17th Conference of European Systems & Software Process Improvement and Innovation (EuroSPI² 2010). The organizers focus on embracing industry, with speakers and audience equally being researchers and practitioners (Keynotes by Ivar Jacobson, Andreas Riel and Cristina Romcea).
At this conference I presented a paper that I wrote together with my supervisor: Codified vs. Personalized – A Vertical Approach to the Dilemma of the Knowledge Management Strategies.
We introduce the principle and a prototype (based on KiWi) to make use of both knowledge management strategies in the same company, but each on different vertical organizational layers. While the top management level follows a codified knowledge management strategy is the development team able to apply a personalized approach [1].
It was my very first paper, so I was a bit nervous. This might also be the reason why I unintendedly extended the scheduled ten minutes for the presentation (see the slides below) slightly. The 32 people audience however seemed very interested and we had a nice discussion about the feasibility of a Wiki in a professional context afterwards.
The conference in general was a success for me. Not only gained I important experience of my first paper presentation for my PhD, but I also got to know many interesting people and had a number of fruitful discussions. Plus I had the opportunity to see the sun again.
[1] Karsten Jahn & Peter Axel Nielsen. »Codified vs. Personalized – A Vertical Approach to the Dilemma of the Knowledge Management Strategies«, 17th EuroSPI² Conference Industrial Proceedings, pages 3.11 – 3.20. Delta, 2010.
SCIS & IRIS 2010
The last few days (August 20 – 24, 2010) I spent participating the Scandinavian Conference of IS & IRIS Seminar in Rebild, a few kilometers outside Aalborg, Denmark. The time was divided into two parts, the first two days were the 1st Scandinavian Conference of IS (SCIS 2010), while the rest of the time was the 33rd IRIS Seminar (IRIS 2010). Even though many people participated both, the two parts were quite different in many aspects.
SCIS
The 1st Scandinavian Conference of Information Systems had the focus on engaged scholarship and was held in single track. Keynote speeches (by Brian Fitzgerald and Jan Pries-Heje), a panel discussion and paper presentations. For each presentation there was an opponent, that prepared comments and a discussion. Papers.
IRIS
The 33rd Seminar for Information Systems Research in Scandinavia (IRIS) was divided into workgroups. Each participant had a paper handed in which was then discussed in the groups, consisting of one (or more) senior and the authors of six papers. Each paper was then discussed by a main opponent followed by a group discussion. Additionally, there were the experiences of recent PhDs presented. These provided a great insight into the doctoral-studies from the other side of the big deadline.
Proceedings.
Personally, I really appreciated the combination of a conference and a workshop like done here. As a junior researcher, that needs a lot of feedback, but also new input from different topics and views, I could obtain both, from the same community and in a short period of time. These four days were filled with interesting input, discussions and views. I got to know many interesting researchers from across Scandinavia and beyond, gained many new insights to and on the field of information systems and received a lot of feedback on my work.