Anders G. Nilsson

Business services as communication patterns: a work practice approach for analyzing service encounters

In this paper, we describe an approach to business processes and services which views work practices as recurrent patterns of communication called genres. Although defining work practices in this way is unorthodox, it provides two major advantages. First, the communication resources employed by the parties engaging in a service transaction can be clearly described, understood, and communicated. Business processes and services can be differentiated on the basis of the structural and functional arrangement of their constituent genres. This provides a view of a business process or service that is technology-independent. Second, using this approach means that work practices are defined contextually—an important consideration when trying to understand how business processes and services will influence organizations. Because genres are represented using directed graphs, prototypes can be developed to assist during the analysis of existing services and the design of new ones. Structural and functional change of genres can be used to reveal how a specific service is evolving within an organization. This enables us to determine if business demands have changed, something that is difficult to achieve using conventional service engineering approaches.

Information Systems Development (ISD): Past, Present, Future Trends

By information systems development we mean analysis, design and implementation of useful IT systems to support some kind of business in organisations. By IT systems we mean the use of hardware and ...

Towards a New Concept for Supporting Needy Children in Developing Countries – ICT Centres Integrated with Social Rehabilitation

The presented concept for supporting needy children is based on experiences from our site visits to many children homes, schools and rehabilitation centres in various developing countries around the world. We have analysed the Swedish Model for social rehabilitation of children integrated with modern ICT centres as professional resources for development assistance. The standpoint taken is to strengthen the poor and exposed minority groups in the society. In this sense, we argue for the need to combine social action and ICT research in order to obtain the full potential of intended ventures in the developing world.

From Standard Application Packages to Enterprise Systems – A Matter of Opportunities

The purpose of this chapter is to make clearer the meaning behind the concepts of “standard application package” and “enterprise system.” There is today a confusion in our IS field about the connection between the two concepts and how they have appeared historically? The main idea is to contrast them against each other and in this sense to study which opportunities organizations and companies can achieve with these two different IT environments. This transparency will give business and IT people a better understanding for managing investments in information systems more professionally. The research approach is characterized as “consumable research” (Robey, and Markus, Information Resources Management Journal, 11(1): 7–15, 1998) based on theoretical knowledge integrated with business practice from the IS field. Our background is through working with practical methods for customer involvement (purchasing, implementation, maintenance) as well as performing vendor studies of the software application industry.

Enterprise Systems in a Service Science Context

By enterprise systems we here refer to large integrated standard application packages that fully cover the provision of information required in a company. They are made up of extensive administrative solutions for management accounting, human resource management, production, logistics and sales control. Most of the enterprise systems on the market have traditionally been designed with a focus on manufacturing companies, but during the past years the supply of various enterprise systems for service-oriented business organizations has gradually increased. This fact raises the issue to study enterprise systems from a service management perspective. Service science is an emerging discipline that studies value creation through services from technical, behavioural and social perspectives. Within service science it is therefore possible to use and apply a wide spectrum of engineering tools for development of business services in organizations. In this sense, enterprise systems represent an efficient tool for service innovations. The research interest in this chapter is focussed on how we can study enterprise systems in a service science context.

Change Work in Organisations

In change work we have the ambition to improve or enhance different activities within a specific situation or context. We can think of e.g. changes in society, in organisations or in family life. In this case the focus will be on change work in organisations; private companies as well as in public services. Change work implies a purposeful growth and development of organisations. This development work can be performed by operating in networks (inter-organisational change) or accomplished by undertaking individual measures (intra-organisational change). By information systems development (ISD) we mean analysis, design and implementation of useful IT systems in companies. ISD is nowadays regarded as an essential and vital part of change work in organisations. This paper presents ten lessons learned from working with information systems development in a change work context.