Dan Turk

The effectiveness of groups recognizing patterns

An experiment was conducted in which groups made resource allocation decisions while physically dispersed and supported with a shared virtual work surface (What You See Is What I See--WYSIWIS). The task required groups to recognize patterns of information and collaborate to allocate their resources appropriately. The experimental treatment involved the use of a tool specifically designed to minimize the cognitive effort required to recognize and share patterns among group members. Dependent measures included outcome quality, time-to-decision, consensus of pattern recognition, and the number of resource allocation moves required to reach consensus. All groups received significant financial rewards in direct proportion to their outcome quality. Groups supported with the patternsharing tool had significantly higher outcome quality and significantly less resource movements. These results extend the theory of Recognition-Primed Decision-Making by applying it to groups.

Towards the Model Driven Organization

Modern organizations are faced with the need to rapidly respond to frequent changes arising from external business pressures. The effect of such continuous evolution eventually leads to organizational misalignment, that is, situations in which sub-optimal configurations of underlying systems significantly reduce an organizations ability to meet its strategic goals. Ensuring alignment of an organizations systems and its goals has been a concern of researchers and practitioners in the enterprise architecture (EA) domain. Unfortunately, current approaches do not adequately address alignment problems that modern organizations face. In this paper we propose that alignment concerns can be better addressed by making models the primary entities that stakeholders within and outside of an organization use to interact with the organization. We call an organization that maintains and uses an integrated set of models to manage alignment concerns a Model Driven Organization (MDO). In this paper we characterize the alignment problem, discuss the shortcomings of current alignment management approaches and present our MDO vision.

Domain specific languages for the model driven organization

Modern organizations are faced with the need to rapidly respond to frequent changes arising from external business pressures. There has been little attempt to apply model driven principles to addressing these issues. We present a vision of a Model Driven Organisation (MDO) that is based on the use of modelling languages to provide usable abstractions for understanding business contexts and goals, through to specifying IT systems, and ultimately to adapting deployed systems. The paper motivates the problem, proposes the MDO and analyses its requirements for large numbers of tightly integrated domain specific languages.

Thoughts on Current and Future Research on Agile and Lean: Ensuring Relevance and Rigor

Over the past two decades, research in the area of agile and lean software development has mirrored the strong growth of the use of agile and lean methodologies. However, while these research streams have made a significant contribution in the use of agile and lean methodologies, much of the recent research lacks the rigor and relevance to make an impact in research and practice. For example, many of the studies have not measured the actual use of agile or lean methods nor had a significant theoretical grounding. Furthermore, agile research has not expanded to fully cover emerging opportunities and challenges. A deeper theoretical motivation on agile and lean software development can help demonstrate how the principles of, for example, agile software development, may be transferred to these other areas, and hence, broaden the research’s relevance. This paper provides commentary intended to help push the agile and lean research agenda forward, and outlines three key critieria that future researchers should consider when conducting research on the phenomenon of agile. The paper also provides an example for the use of the criteria, and presents several initial, open research questions that could help increase the use of agile, including the use of agile and lean concepts in other IT and non-IT contexts.