Sérgio Assis Rodrigues

GCC: a knowledge management environment for research centers and universities

Research centers and universities are knowledge-intensive institutions, where the knowledge creation and distribution are constant – and this knowledge should be managed. In spite of it, scientific work had been known for being solitary work, in which human interaction happened only in small groups within a research domain. Nowadays, due to technology improvements, scientific data from different sources is available, communication between researchers is facilitated and scientific information creation and exchange is faster than in the past. However, the focus on information exchange is too limited to create systems that enable true cooperation and knowledge management in scientific environments. To facilitate a more expressive exchanging, sharing and dissemination of knowledge and its management, we create a scientific knowledge management environment in which researchers may share their data, experiences, ideas, process definition and execution, and obtain all the necessary information to execute their tasks, make decisions, learn and disseminate knowledge.

Leveraging the crowd collaboration to monitor the waiting time of day-to-day services

This work in progress proposes the use of vivid impressions of users to monitor the waiting and service time in the provision of public and private services. The solution consists of an environment in which users can report the time spent waiting for the provision of a particular service. For the strategy to be successful, this account should be done through a simplified interface, preferably mobile, that takes advantage of the users location knowledge. This approach uses the crowd collaboration to achieve some goal, and has been used in applications such as Waze.

Integrating web and mobile knowledge management tools to improve negotiations

One of the most essential problems during negotiations is to know what people aim to claim. Although it sounds strange, most professionals go into the negotiation table without enough preparation. Regarding preparation it is important to understand that this is the stage when professionals have to anticipate the counterparts interests, alternatives, concessions and possible changes in strategy. Experienced negotiators usually keep in their mind the whole negotiation and, most of the time, they still have personal notes about the deal. Indeed, people have memory limits and this may disrupt even the cleverest ones. Therefore, Negotiation Support Systems can help to store this information and also manipulate it in the future. In this direction, this work presents an environment focused on a negotiation preparation step, mainly considering knowledge management and mobile technologies. The article shows how these concepts may carry out the preparation stage, advantages to use it and available reports. Besides, some experiments and results will be also addressed in this work.

Designing for monitoring the waiting time of day-to-day services

The waiting time for customer services is a problem that affects most cultures and has been studied by the academic community for several decades from the standpoint of psychology, sociology, marketing and computer science. In this paper we present a review of the literature on the subject, and also propose a classification of approaches that deal with this problem. We also report our participatory effort in articulating requirements and functionalities of a design solution to address this problem. A series of interviews were conducted with stakeholders and other people involved in the problem of waiting time delays in customer services, allowing requirements to be posed and validated through a survey. Finally, we present the latest details of an application being developed to address this problem and the final conclusions.

EVALUATING RISKS IN SOFTWARE NEGOTIATIONS THROUGH FUZZY COGNITIVE MAPS

Risks are inevitably and permanently present in software negotiations and they can directly influence the success or failure of negotiations. Risks should be avoided when they represent a threat and encouraged when they denote an opportunity. This work examines the influence of some negotiation elements in the area of risk and cost estimation, which are both factors that directly influence software development negotiation. In this work, risk quantification is proposed to translate its impact to measurable values that may be taken into consideration during negotiations. The model proposed involves an assessment tool based on basic negotiation elements – namely relationship, interests, cost and time – quantifying the influences among each other, and makes use of Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs) for developing the associations around basic risk elements on one hand and attaining an innovative risk quantification model for improved software negotiations on the other. Indicative scenarios are presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed

Game Theory and Information Technology Professionals Behaviour Case Study, Experiments and Results

Game theory has been largely criticized for not being practical enough. Although game theory is compulsory in any economics, business and management course it is not widely accepted as a theory that has a practical application. Although the answer to this problem does not lie on the surface, a connection between game theory and negotiation support systems has revealed the use of the principles of game theory in simulating business negotiations for IT and non-IT people. The behavioural aspects of peoples actions during negotiations characterise their different strategies in various situations.

MANA: Identifying and Mining Unstructured Business Processes

The process mining field supports the discovery of process models using audit trails logged by information systems. Several mining techniques are able to deal with unstructured processes, mainly through cluster analysis. However, they assume the previous extraction of an event log containing related instances. This task is not trivial when the source system doesn’t provide a reliable separation of its processes and allows the input of data through free text fields. The identification of related instances should, in this case, be explorative and integrated into the process mining tool used in later stages of the analyst’s workflow. To this goal, the MANA approach was developed, allowing the explorative selection and grouping of instances through a canonical database.

Behavioral aspects of Information Technology negotiators

It has been known that Information Technology (IT) area has increasingly demanded more professionals over the years. In Brazil this reality is even more evident - this emerging and large country, the expanded search for IT professionals still faces difficulty in finding skilled labor. Moreover, this difficulty is accentuated during the definition of teams, due to the diversity of expertise of each professional. In this direction, this article focuses on how to discover and manage cognitive and behavioral aspects of IT professionals. Based on psychological questionnaires and negotiation games, this work aims at analyzing types of behavior (logically reasoning people, creative people, communicative people and organized people), aspects of collaborative and competitive issues elucidates how the predominance of a specific stereotype can influence negotiations among IT people. The results were obtained in a Brazilian context, involving technical and management staff, with IT people and non-IT people.

A Web Tool to Analyse Negotiation Behavior

Decision-making processes in any context usually require great effort in solving regular conflicts. One approach to handle conflicts is through negotiation, which requires a wide range of strategies and personal skills. Moreover, during crisis periods, enterprises tend to downsize and the remaining professionals have to improve their negotiation aptitudes in order to maintain the organization alive. Experienced negotiators assert that the preparation stage is vital to achieve successful deals, but one of the major issues faced by negotiators, especially beginners, is to realize when they are technically and emotionally ready. Regarding the psychological side, sometimes it is difficult to measure how professionals behave when initiating negotiation modeling. Under this scenario, a Web Tool has been designed to support professionals to find out their levels of proficiency and behavior trends while negotiating. Therefore, this paper aims at presenting features of this environment, which combines psychological tests, behavioral simulations and negotiation games to set the negotiator skills profile. In addition, some studies and results are presented.

W-NEG: A WORKFLOW NEGOTIATION SYSTEM

It has been claimed that there are different methods for solving conflict; however, the main one is to solve conflicts through negotiations. This paper addresses one of the Negotiation Support Systems developed, namely NK-Sys and a workflow approach titled W-Neg. Negotiators often attempt to resolve their conflict through the use of intrinsic activities and their own skills. In W-Neg, we suggest a set of workflow models to tackle issues that may be conflicting during the negotiation table. As any decision-making process, negotiations arise from some well known steps. Therefore, the management of activities realized from these steps can be considered an alternative to improve negotiator’s preparation. In this proposal, workflow’s technology is aligned with this alternative once the main goal of workflow systems is to provide better business processes management.