Remko Helms

PLM roadmap: stepwise PLM implementation based on the concepts of maturity and alignment

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is increasingly important for organisations acting in dynamic and competitive markets. In practice however, companies struggle with implementing PLM. Because PLM is rather a concept than a system, as its main premises are to improve sustainable advantage through agility and innovation. The concept implies structural, cross-functional and long-term cooperation between actors in- and outside the firm. This complexity hampers the achievement of successfully implementing PLM that truly integrates all organisational aspects and levels. The central aim of this paper is to develop a PLM framework to assess and guide PLM implementations. This framework builds upon insights from capability maturity and business/IT-alignment. The results of a first empirical assessment of 23 Dutch organisations are presented, which were used to empirically validate the framework and to provide benchmark data. Based on the framework and benchmark organisations can develop their own PLM Roadmap to increase the success of their PLM implementation.

Web 2.0 in the CRM domain: defining social CRM

Businesses are becoming more customer-centric and see a need to address customers more individually. An opportunity is identified in Web 2.0 technologies. Both CRM and Web 2.0 have been researched broadly in the past years, but not their potentially successful combination, which we call ‘social CRM’. It is a CRM strategy which encourages customer collaboration and involvement. Based on empirical research we found that Web 2.0 services add value in every domain of the CRM environment, depending on the type of service at hand. Most value is added in the marketing domain of CRM. Social networks, blogs, and multimedia sharing add most value across all domains. This research defines social CRM and presents a new model that depicts the fundamental aspects of social CRM in four layers. We conclude with suggestions for further research in this emerging research domain.

Reviewing Enterprise Content Management: a functional framework

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) focuses on managing all types of content being used in organizations. It is a convergence of previous approaches that focus on managing only particular types of content, as for example documents or web pages. In this paper, we present an overview of previous research by categorizing the existing literature. We show that scientific literature on ECM is limited and there is no consensus on the definition of ECM. Therefore, the literature review surfaced several ECM definitions that we merge into a more consistent and comprehensive definition of ECM. The Functional ECM Framework (FEF) provides an overview of the potential functionalities of ECM systems (ECMSs). We apply the FEF in three case studies. The FEF can serve to communicate about ECMSs, to understand them and to direct future research. It can also be the basis for a more formal reference architecture and it can be used as an assessment tool by practitioners for comparing the functionalities provided by existing ECMSs.

Knowledge Network Analysis: A Technique to Analyze Knowledge Management Bottlenecks in Organizations

Before companies can improve their knowledge management they should have a clear picture of the bottlenecks. The knowledge network analysis technique presented in this paper provides companies with an aid to construct this picture in a structured way. It approaches knowledge management from a network perspective. In the first phase, the main actors, including their roles and expertise level, in a specific knowledge area are identified. Consequently, the knowledge transfer between the actors is analyzed using the concept of velocity and viscosity of the knowledge transfer. The result is push and a pull knowledge network graph that show the potential bottlenecks

Developing a Reference Method for Knowledge Auditing

Knowledge management was regarded as the discipline of the 21 st century but it has yet to bear all of its fruits. The expectations are high but a number of barriers limit the effects of knowledge management initiatives. A serious problem is the lack of measures to prepare the ground for the successful implementation of knowledge management initiatives. A promising solution to this problem is the area of auditing knowledge. But the theory and the techniques behind it are not yet mature. The following paper is presenting the development of a complete knowledge audit method that could serve as a standardized method for auditing knowledge. The proposed method was constructed by comparing/integrating 13 knowledge and information audit methods. The analysis of the existing methods was based on the notion of method engineering and the new method was applied and validated in a Dutch telecommunications company.

The role of domain knowledge and cross-functional communication in socio-technical coordination

Software projects involve diverse roles and artifacts that have dependencies to requirements. Project team members in different roles need to coordinate but their coordination is affected by the availability of domain knowledge, which is distributed among different project members, and organizational structures that control cross-functional communication. Our study examines how information flowed between different roles in two software projects that had contrasting distributions of domain knowledge and different communication structures. Using observations, interviews, and surveys, we examined how diverse roles working on requirements and their related artifacts coordinated along task dependencies. We found that communication only partially matched task dependencies and that team members that are boundary spanners have extensive domain knowledge and hold key positions in the control structure. These findings have implications on how organizational structures interfere with task assignments and influence communication in the project, suggesting how practitioners can adjust team configuration and communication structures.

Patterns of continuous requirements clarification

In software projects involving large and often distributed teams, requirements evolve through the collaboration of many stakeholders, supported by online tools such as mailing lists, bug tracking systems, or online discussion forums. In this collaboration, requirements typically evolve from initial ideas, through clarification, to the implementation of a stable requirement. Deviations from this expected course might indicate requirements that are poorly understood, need further negotiation, or better alignment with project goals. If not addressed timely, such problems can surface late in the development cycle with negative consequences such as rework, missed schedules, or overrun budget. This paper presents an approach that provides project managers’ with timely awareness of such requirements-related risks, based on automatic analysis of stakeholders’ online requirement communication. We describe a clarification classifier that automatically analyzes requirements communication in a project and detects clarification events, a catalog of clarification patterns, and a pattern matcher that suggests communication patterns based on our pattern catalog. Our approach has been empirically constructed and evaluated in a case study in the

Benchmarking the Customer Configuration Updating Practices of Product Software Vendors

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