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This paper examines how the digitisation of the social network, and the resulting interplay between its online and offline components, has impacted the role of the technological gatekeeper in research and development (R&D) settings. Previous studies have firmly established the technological gatekeeper to be a key node in the innovation process – acquiring, translating and disseminating novel information throughout the R&D social network. Drawing on social network analysis and interview evidence from a software R&D group, we find that the gatekeeper role has undergone a division of labour. Theoretically, we contribute to the body of knowledge by developing an updated technological gatekeeper conceptual framework. For practitioners, we identify the competencies exhibited by the small number of communication specialists who are largely responsible for diffusing novel information. We then advise practitioners how to maximise the contribution of these ‘stars’ to the information flow network.

Green IS refers to the design and implementation of information systems that contribute to sustainable business processes. This article provides an introduction to core concept of Green Information Systems (Green IS) and their role within organizations. An example Green IS for energy management is discussed. The article concludes with highlights on future research challenges in Green IS. Keywords: green information systems; sustainable IT; green IT; sustainability; energy informatics; linked data

Customer/human-centered design can positively affect insight and idea generation in a natural and meaningful way by helping operations team members review chronic or open-ended problems with a new lens. Dell’s experience has been consistent with other organizations in that Design Thinking as a methodology can be applied to many problem spaces to generate innovative solutions. This paper examines cases studies of the application of Design Thinking in Dell in the context of current thinking in Design Thinking in the academic and practitioner communities.

Smart Cities has emerged as an important research challenge among IS researchers in recent years. The grand claims that have been done about the potential of Smart Cities are grounded in a wide range of IT-related artifacts that were designed in theory and/or implemented in practice. Today, due to the growth of the level of knowledge maturity in this context, IS research in this field is more focused on the development of a nascent Smart City theory. The key concepts introduced in literature were collected through an eight-steps systematic literature review [19] and analyzed using [20]’s concept definition matrix. Based on this, this paper aims at reflecting upon research methodologies for conducting IS research in this field, and demonstrates the suitability of Action Design Research [43]. A Smart City research project that successfully used this methodology is also described to further support this statement.

The panel on Green and Sustainable Information Systems at the 21st International Conference on Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE’11), held in London in June 2011, was held to discuss issues in Environmental Sustainability and Information Systems within the Information Systems Engineering research community. This panel report describes the panelists’ views on using information systems for improving sustainability and on improving the energy efficiency of the data centres on which information systems are based. The current topics of research, possible contributions of the IS community, and future directions are discussed.

In the effort to measure the business value and impact of Enterprise Architecture (EA), we need to adapt an appropriate form of information systems research in order to cope with the encountered challenges. For this purpose, we employed Design Science Research (DSR), a problem-driven approach to provide a solution represented as artifacts to provide the required utility to our stakeholders. The main contribution of this research is the detailed focus on how artifacts are actually conceived in an organizational context and the realization that a complex environment demands for more than just one artifact. Therefore, we are in need of a flexible research methodology. The DSR in this case is conducted within a well-known information systems research framework and follows widely accepted principles and guidelines. We explain the business need that arose from the current business practices in the course of a case study and describe the flexible research methodology we pursue and how we intend to solve the problems we identified as current DSR approaches lack the necessary flexibility we were looking for in practice. This flexibility greatly improves the management of our project in the organizational environment in terms of planning and implementation. Furthermore, we outline the evolutionary state of the artifacts during our adapted research process.

While adoption of agile software methods is high, little hard, rigorous evidence exists as to the success of these approaches. This paper describes the design science process that will be used to create a measure for productivity in agile development environments. We consider design science to be suitable because measuring performance in software development is laden with issues around measurability, ambiguity and imperfection. As a result, we need the rigor that design science brings while still maintaining relevance.

Book chapter Sustainable ICT (SICT) can develop solutions that offer benefits both internally in IT and across the extended enterprise. However, because the field is new and evolving, few guidelines and best practices are available. There is a need to improve the SICT behaviours, practices and processes within organizations to deliver greater value from SICT. To address the issue, a consortium of leading organizations from industry, the nonprofits sector, and academia decided to develop a framework for systematically assessing and improving SICT capabilities. The SICT Capability Maturity Framework (SICT-CMF) gives organizations a vital tool to manage their sustainability capability. The framework provides a comprehensive value-based model for organizing, evaluating, planning, and managing SICT capabilities. Using the framework, organizations can assess the maturity of their SICT capability and systematically improve capabilities in a measurable way to meet the sustainability objectives including reducing environmental impacts and increasing profitability. The core of SICT-CMF is a maturity model for SICT which provides a management system with associated improvement roadmaps that guide senior IT and business management in selecting strategies to continuously improve, develop, and manage the sustainable IT capability. This chapter describes the SICT-CMF and the use of it to determine the maturity of sustainable IT capability within a number of leading organisations. The chapter highlights the challenges in managing SICT and motivates the benefit of maturity models. The development process for the SICT-CMF is discussed and the role of Design Science in the development cycle is explored. The application of the resulting model and its use to measure SICT maturity is discussed together with an analysis of the average results for organisations using the model. The chapter concludes with practical insights gained from the assessments.

What is the relationship between design science research and innovation? Our industry-academic collaboration poses this intriguing question and suggests a context and an experimental design for its study. We wish to understand the synergies between the active research areas of DSR and innovation by exploring their overlapping concepts and identifying unique ideas in each that have the potential to inform the other. We present a case study of an actual innovation process in Chevron as a source of empirical data for the exploration and subsequent analysis of how the application of DSR guidelines might inform the practical implementation of innovation processes.

The implementation of a viable statistical circuit design methodology requiring detailed knowledge of the vari- abilities of, and correlations among, the circuit simulator model parameters utilized by designers, and the determination of the important relationships between these CAD model parameter variabilities and the process variabilities causing them is pre- sented. This work addresses the above requirements by detailing a new framework which was adopted for a 2-pm CMOS technol- ogy to enable realistic statistical circuit performance prediction prior to manufacture. Issues relating to MOSFET modeling, the derivation of fast “direct” parameter extraction methodologies suitable for rapid parameter generation, the employment of mul- tivariate statistical techniques to analyze statistical parametric data, and the ling of the CAD model parameter variations to variabilities in process quantities are discussed. In this approach the correlated set of model parameters is reduced to a smaller and more manageable set of uncorrelated process-related factors. The ensuing construction and validation of realistic statistical circuit performance procedures is also discussed. Comparisons between measured and simulated variabilities of device characteristics is utilized to demonstrate the accuracy of the techniques described. The advantages of the proposed approach over more traditional “worst case” design methodologies are demonstrated.

Green IT is a hot topic: to be glib, it has warmed in tandem with the planet. It is seen as a potent tool in the fight against global warming. However, despite the promise of technology to deliver planetary solutions, the employment of IT has been beset by a number of paradoxes. For example the „paperless office‟ was buried in paper; the clean world of high tech was built on piles of toxic waste; and educational laptops for the developing countries ended up as second or third netbooks for the wealthy. Sometimes IT has done more to compound problems than create sustainable solutions. However to date the discussion of Green IT has either focused at the level of information technology or at the level of information systems. In this chapter we explore Green IT by focusing on a third, and neglected level information technology: information views, or „ways of thinking’. We suggest that it is this ignored conceptual level that has, in part, contributed to the paradox of IT. Specifically we differentiate instrumental from emergent thinking about technology, and identify three paradigms of sustainability which suggest very different uses of information technology to achieve the goal of a viable planet.

This chapter describes the development of a prototype knowledge discovery portal (KDP) for energy informatics. The research domain is Ireland which is increasingly challenged to achieve energy efficiency targets and to implement renewable energy systems (RES). The reason for undertaking this research is to provide a mechanism to disseminate information on energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies to a number of sectors: community, educational, industrial and research. The prototype KDP was developed using design-science methodology. This chapter integrates information both in the horizontal and vertical axes. In the horizontal plane, it provides information to community users, educational bodies and industrial companies. In the vertical plane, it allows deeper access depending on the requirements of the user: from technological overviews to detailed data from the energy system (solar collectors, heat pump and wind turbine). Future work will involve further development of the portal and extending the KDP for energy to other technologies and sectors.

The objective of this panel is to discuss how firms can operate both an open and agile innovation process. In an era of unprecedented changes, companies need to be open and agile in order to adapt rapidly and maximize their innovation processes. Proponents of agile methods claim that one of the main distinctions between agile methods and their traditional bureaucratic counterparts is their drive toward creativity and innovation. However, agile methods are rarely adopted in their textbook, “vanilla” format, and are usually adopted in part or are tailored or modified to suit the organization. While we are aware that this happens, there is still limited understanding of what is actually happening in practice. Using innovation adoption theory, this panel will discuss the issues and challenges surrounding the successful adoption of agile practices. In addition, this panel will report on the obstacles and benefits reported by over 20 industrial partners engaged in a pan-European research project into agile practices between 2006 and 2009.

The IT-Capability Maturity Model [IT-CMF] is a high-level process capability maturity framework for managing the IT function within an organization The purpose of this paper is to explore and explain the IT-CMF as a “ method meta-model” for IT management, emphasizing the novel approach to addressing the application of design processes and design artifacts by means of a very structured use of engaged scholarship and open innovation techniques to the ongoing challenge of managing organization's IT capability.

This paper focuses on the communication concerns that unfolded in a company as it endeavored to move from its existing waterfall model to an agile environment. A task team was established to adopt an agile practice and to trial it on a customer specific project. The team was given the freedom to be innovative and adopt whatever agile practices they wished. Early enthusiasm was evident however management had concerns about viability of this new approach. Management did not see the project plans and corresponding documentation trail of the waterfall model, and from their perspective it lacked structure. Trust between management and engineers weakened primarily due to a lack of communication and a reduction in the ability to work together, resulting in the waterfall model being reinstated.

This paper examines the implications for research into the diffusion of innovations (DOI) arising from a growing body of literature in two related fields. The first area concerns the debate on the role of regional and national systems of innovation (NSI) in the innovation process. The second area deals with the argument that enterprises must move from a “closed innovation” to an “open innovation” paradigm. The review is presented in the context of a case study being undertaken in a subsidiary of American Power Conversion (APC) located in the West of Ireland. Based on the preliminary stages of our work, we present a conceptual 3-D model of Rogers’ innovation-decision process and suggest a series of propositions to stimulate future research efforts. Yes

peer-reviewed This paper addresses a ???challenge in practice??? by describing the initial stage of an information systems development (ISD) project to support the management of innovation within a subsidiary of APC-MGE. To begin with, a review is presented of relevant literature on the management of innovation and on information systems development. The background of the case study is outlined and the advantages of a dialogical action research approach to ISD are discussed. Then the development of a conceptual model using the organizational analysis approach of Multiview2 is described. The work proposes to make a contribution in a number of areas. Firstly it provides empirical evidence of the role of innovation in an organ-izational transformation and the challenge of designing an information system to support this objective. Secondly it presents an example of using dialogical action research, recently intro-duced to the MIS discipline by M??rtensson & Lee, to develop an information system. Future work will involve tracking the implementation of the concept in order to evaluate its impact on the organization.

In today's competitive and turbulent environment companies engaged in new product development (NPD) need to have a sophisticated understanding of the types of knowledge critical to the each phase of the NPD process. This types of knowledge is used in so-called "stage-gate" NPD processes. This work will describe a typical NPD stage-gate process and indicate the critical knowledge types needed at the different stages. The identification of the critical knowledge used at each stage was done by combining knowledge of the literature and practical experience of running NPD processes in an industrial setting. The different types of knowledge required at different stages of the development process will be described and elaborated on. When providing knowledge management systems to support the NPD process, one needs to consider providing a system that can cater for knowledge that may take Different forms. This research contributes to our understanding of the nature of those knowledge forms.

This paper will describe the process by which realistic nominal and worst-case DC MOSFET model parameter sets were determined and validated for a 2 /spl mu/m CMOS technology. The steps involved in this task, which will be detailed, ranged from the definition of a suitable circuit simulator model, through the collection of statistical parametric data, to the generation and verification of the worst-case model sets obtained from this data. >

International audience; Simulation models can be used as decision support tools for smart city design and planning. They allow to evaluate the possible consequences of projects, before their implementation in the real world. Decision makers could benefit from replicable ones that can be relevant and easily transferable from one territory to another so solutions can be compared and re-use of model components can save time. In this paper we consider the case of citizen’s mobility flow simulation. However, most of such simulation models are designed to be suitable for a specific kind of territory. Some of them are reusable, but in a context that does not differ much from the original one for which they were designed, or require lots of changes to be relevant in another context. We classify those contexts into urban and insular and we show that despite their difference, they could be complementary. We demonstrate that testing a simulation model designed for an urban context, in a context with strong constraints can help in its consolidation. Thereby, after testing an Agent Based Simulation Model originally applied to a case study in London, in Reunion Island, we present a more generic simulation model that works for both systems.