Christopher N. G. Dampney

Information technology in complex health services: organizational impediments to successful technology transfer and diffusion.

OBJECTIVE To identify impediments to the successful transfer and implementation of packaged information systems through large, divisionalized health services. DESIGN A case analysis of the failure of an implementation of a critical application in the Public Health System of the State of New South Wales, Australia, was carried out. This application had been proven in the United States environment. MEASUREMENTS Interviews involving over 60 staff at all levels of the service were undertaken by a team of three. The interviews were recorded and analyzed for key themes, and the results were shared and compared to enable a continuing critical assessment. RESULTS Two components of the transfer of the system were considered: the transfer from a different environment, and the diffusion throughout a large, divisionalized organization. The analyses were based on the Scott-Morton organizational fit framework. In relation to the first, it was found that there was a lack of fit in the business environments and strategies, organizational structures and strategy-structure pairing as well as the management process-roles pairing. The diffusion process experienced problems because of the lack of fit in the strategy-structure, strategy-structure-management processes, and strategy-structure-role relationships. CONCLUSION The large-scale developments of integrated health services present great challenges to the efficient and reliable implementation of information technology, especially in large, divisionalized organizations. There is a need to take a more sophisticated approach to understanding the complexities of organizational factors than has traditionally been the case.

On the Value of Commutative Diagrams in Information Modelling

Category theory has been widely used in computer science, but usually in a very sophisticated manner. This paper argues that elementary category theoretic notions can have important value in the “real world” of software engineering. Perhaps the most elementary categorical notion is that of commutative diagram. Drawing on experience from several applications of category theory to information modelling in major business enterprises we show how commutative diagrams have been used to develop new methodologies in ER-modelling, constraint specification and process modelling. They also suggest new but as yet untested techniques for information model partitioning and information system architecture. The methodologies described here have a firm theoretical basis using the recently isolated theory of lextensive categories and this basis is briefly outlined.

Category-theoretic fibration as an abstraction mechanism in information systems

Abstract. This paper examines the problem of establishing a formal relationship of abstraction and refinement between abstract enterprise models and the concrete information systems which implement them. It introduces and justifies a number of reasonableness requirements, which turn out to justify the use of category theoretic concepts, particularly fibrations, to precisely specify a semantics for enterprise models which enables them to be considered as abstractions of the conceptual models from which the implementing information systems are built. The category-theoretic concepts are developed towards the problem of testing whether a system satisfies the fibration axioms, and are applied to case studies to demonstrate their practicability.

An approach to ontology for institutional facts in the semantic web

Refinement in software engineering allows a specification to be developed in stages, with design decisions taken at earlier stages constraining the design at later stages. Refinement in complex data models is difficult due to lack of a way of defining constraints, which can be progressively maintained over increasingly detailed refinements. Category theory provides a way of stating wide scale constraints. These constraints lead to a set of design guidelines, which maintain the wide scale constraints under increasing detail. Previous methods of refinement are essentially local, and the proposed method does not interfere very much with these local methods. The result is particularly applicable to semantic web applications, where ontologies provide systems of more or less abstract constraints on systems, which must be implemented and therefore refined by participating systems. With the approach of this paper, the concept of committing to an ontology carries much more force.

Semantic correspondence in integrating CASE tool repository schemas

Abstract A specification of an information system using a particular computer-aided software engineering (CASE) method describes a particular system aspect. The specification can be represented as a population of a database schema in a repository supporting the CASE tool. Integrating several system aspects requires that their semantic correspondences also be determined. The technique presented uses a database schema language with deductive capability to capture the semantic correspondences. It promises to support multiple CASE tools covering several aspects. Semantic correspondence provides insight into why integrating CASE tools for large-scale enterprise modelling methods is proving difficult.

Version consistency and serializability in design databases

A database used by engineering or manufacturing applications for analysis and design purposes is called a design database. Here data items represent the actual physical structure of engineering parts and components. A design process can be thought of as starting with certain base data items or design objects, and deriving others from them. Several alternate designs may be tried from the same set of base objects. Designs with several sets of base objects may also be tried. Hence several versions of various data items may exist in the system simultaneously. Then “consistent” versions must be used in each derivation. Also a concurrency control mechanism for design database systems must allow keeping various versions until the end of the design process. In this paper we propose a formal definition of version consistency expressed in terms of transaction histories. This allows checking version consistency from a history graph constructed from transaction processing. The version consistency checking algorithm takes polynomial time. We also demonstrate that a notion called t*-serializability is an appropriate correctness criterion for concurrent executions in design databases. This is distinct from view-serializability which is accepted as the appropriate criterion for databases used for business and administrative transaction processing. We show that t*-serializability of a version consistent history can be checked in polynomial time. In contrast checking t*-serializability of a not necessarily version consistent history is NP-complete. It turns out that both version consistency and t*-serializability can be checked using the same history graph.

How before what—an exploration of the process of developing competencies for managing a “Central Selection, Local Ownership” diffusion policy to support organisational transformation

Diffusion of IT innovation studies have typically studied single technology innovations. For many organisations, diffusion is a policy by which IT is managed. One particular form of the policy seeks to achieve “central selection, local ownership” (CSLO). This paper explores the organisational development of the competencies to successfully operate a CSLO policy. It explores a single case history involving diffusion of three systems as part of an IT strategy in a divisionalised public health care organisation. It highlights (1) the need to develop relevant CSLO competencies through practice ahead of committing to a strategy; (2) the considerable time it takes to develop them; and (3) the current difficulty of recognising in advance whether an organisation has them.