Agneta Nilsson

Managing IT implementation processes

The complexities and challenges involved in IT implementation are well documented. IT implementation processes are difficult to understand and to manage, with several barriers that hinder the achievement of the intended organisational impacts. We know, however, relatively little about how to improve the practice of managing such processes, both in general and in the particular context of healthcare institutions. This research reports from a case study focused on an IT implementation process in a large Swedish hospital. The study applies a documented model of IT implementation processes, based on the perspective of planned change, to interpret the experiences from the case. The study reveals how the model partially explains the process, while other key experiences could not be accounted for. On the basis of these findings, a modified model is proposed that more adequately explains the studied implementation process. This paper concludes by discussing implications for research and practice.

Assessing the effects of introducing a new software development process: a methodological description

In this article, we report from a 22-months long action research study in which we evaluate the usefulness of a set of software development tools in an industrial setting, a small software company. We focus on how developers in the industry use and adopt these tools, what expectations they have on them, how the tools can be improved, and how the adoption process itself can be improved. We describe these change processes from a methodological perspective, how we monitored the processes, how we reviewed the outcomes, and the strategies that we applied. We show how the processes evolved, intermediate results, and the steps that were taken along the way based on the outcomes. We believe that the described study may inspire other tool-developers and/or researchers to organize similar studies to further our understanding of the complex processes involved in the adoption of software development tools in industry.

Age care managers in residential facilities – aspects of competence

Purpose – The purpose of the research project was to study aspects of the competence of age care managers, and how they develop their leadership in residential facilities.Design/methodology/approach – The participants comprised 13 age care managers (ACMs) from 13 different residential facilities. Ten of the residential facilities were located in a large municipality and three in small municipalities. On average they had 19 years of experience of caring for old people. The ages of the respondents varied from 40 to 63 years. Individual, semi‐structured interviews were chosen. The data were subjected to content analysis. Two main categories and six subcategories were generated.Findings – The ACMs had different educational backgrounds and very few had university courses in management, implying an insufficient theoretical knowledge of leadership. There are several ways of learning leadership, for example model learning, collective learning, learning by experience and through theoretical education. Model learni...

Desituating context in ubiquitous computing : Exploring strategies for the use of remote diagnostic systems for maintenance work

Context awareness forms a core concern in ubiquitous computing and goes hand in hand with today’s extensive use of sensor technologies. This paper focuses on the use of sensors as part of remote di ...

Integrating User eXperience practices into software development processes: implications of the UX characteristics

User eXperience (UX) is a key factor in the success of software systems. Many software companies face challenges in their work with UX. Existing research does not analyze UX practices and challenges in relation to other software quality characteristics or, in particular, in relation to usability. A better understanding of these challenges can help researchers and practitioners better address them in the future. In this empirical study, we have interviewed 17 practitioners with different backgrounds and occupations from eight software development companies. Their responses are coded, and analyzed with thematic analysis. We report eight themes of challenges that practitioners face in their work with UX. While some of these challenges partly overlap with those reported in existing literature about usability or other software quality characteristics, the participants of our study either view many of the challenges as unique to UX, or more severe in the case of UX. Although at a superficial level challenges of UX and other quality characteristics overlap, we differentiate these challenges at a deeper level through the five main characteristics of UX: subjective, holistic, dynamic, context-dependent and worthwhile. In particular, we identified that these characteristics have at least 20 implications (i.e. additional difficulties) for day-to-day work of practitioners. We found that 11 of these implications have been previously reported in literature. However, to the best of our knowledge, the remaining nine implications are unique to our study. These implications can explain why practitioners perceive the challenges to be more severe than for other quality characteristics. Most importantly, they can explain the industry’s lopsided focus on the pragmatic aspect of UX. Our findings can be useful for researchers in identifying new and industry-relevant research areas and for practitioners to learn from empirically investigated challenges in UX work, and base their improvement efforts on such knowledge. Identifying and investigating the overlaps underlines the importance of these challenges, and can also help finding research areas not only for enhancing UX work but also software quality in general. It also makes it easier for practitioners to spot, better understand as well as find mitigation strategies for UX, through learning from past experiences and developments in the area of software quality.

On the role of cross-disciplinary research and SSE in addressing the challenges of the digitalization of society

Digitalization of society has increased its pace during the last decade. With the introduction of modern technologies (e.g. smartphones) the amount and types of information has increased bringing in both new opportunities and new challenges. In this paper we review the main opportunities and challenges stemming from the heavy use of digital technologies in society. We outline the needs for applying SSE principles and cross-disciplinary research for adequately addressing the challenges of digitalized society. Our position is that without taking a social view for system development and cross-disciplinary research we can only address partial problems related to the digitalization and that by integrating domain-specific disciplines (e.g. financing) with the technology related ones (e.g. software engineering) we could develop holistic solutions for the challenges identified in this paper.

From Technological Transitions to Service Transitions : A Study of Attenuation Effects in IT Service Provisioning

In a day and age when contemporary businesses are transformed, driven by a service-dominance logic and dependent upon IT, we need to understand how...

Translations in Network Configurations

This paper reports from an interpretive case study in a hospital of the replacement of paper based order forms for radiology examinations with web based order forms. The aim is to contribute with a better understanding about the implementation of networked technologies in healthcare. The case shows how the implementation of network technology imposes a configuration in the actor-network and illustrates the importance of small steps and translations involving many different actors in the process leading to a new stabilized configuration.

A Conceptual UX-Aware Model of Requirements

User eXperience (UX) is becoming increasingly important for success of software products. Yet, many companies still face various challenges in their work with UX. Part of these challenges relate to inadequate knowledge and awareness of UX and that current UX models are commonly not practical nor well integrated into existing Software Engineering (SE) models and concepts. Therefore, we present a conceptual UX-aware model of requirements for software development practitioners. This layered model shows the interrelation between UX and functional and quality requirements. The model is developed based on current models of UX and software quality characteristics. Through the model we highlight the main differences between various requirement types in particular essentially subjective and accidentally subjective quality requirements. We also present the result of an initial validation of the model through interviews with 12 practitioners and researchers. Our results show that the model can raise practitioners’ knowledge and awareness of UX in particular in relation to requirement and testing activities. It can also facilitate UX-related communication among stakeholders with different backgrounds.

The CIViT Model in a Nutshell: Visualizing Testing Activities to Support Continuous Integration

Nowadays, innovations in many products ranging from customer electronics to high-end industry electric/electronic components are driven by software. Thus, new or extended features to software and mechatronic products can be realized and deployed to the market much faster. While the use of software enables an enormous flexibility, mastering the ever-growing complexity of the resulting products to meet the quality goals required for the market is getting more and more challenging. Continuous development combined with continuous testing is a successful method that actively incorporates the customer to get feedback for the feature to be deployed early, and thus, product owners, developers, and testers can collaborate more effectively to meet the market’s needs. From literature, setting up such an agile development process is clear; the individual situation in terms of organization, processes, and development and test tooling however is depending on the company—many of the aforementioned aspects have grown over the years and cannot be easily changed. In this article, we present the CIViT model, which allows companies to get an explicit understanding and overview of their current testing and integration activities. With CIViT’s intuitive representation of the current status, companies are able to identify bottlenecks and derive actions points to evolve their processes, methods, and development and test tooling towards a more agile and continuous deployment-oriented organization. Thus, they will be able to develop, integrate, evaluate, and deploy new features faster to the end user, hence strengthening their own market position.