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Background: Stress and stress-related disorders have risen throughout the years and negatively impacted individual, organisational and societal levels. Digital stress management interventions are considered promising additions to the spectrum of programs companies use to support the mental wellbeing of their employees. However, a series of constraints are identified that hinder the potential benefits of such interventions. These constraints include lack of user engagement, lack of personalization, poor adherence, and high attrition. Thus, to increase the likelihood of success of implementing ICT supported stress management interventions it is essential to understand the user requirements. Methods: With the participation of 22 software employees in three focus groups in Sri Lanka, the current study further explores the user needs and design requirements of a digital stress management intervention. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the collected data. Results: The analysis of the focus groups’ discussions provided a deeper understanding of the user needs. Three major themes and twelve subthemes emerged. The main themes were 1. provision for self-help: individual space, 2. provision for social support: collaborative space and 3. general design considerations for achieving success. Overall, participants preferred to use web and mobile as their preferred platforms. Participants emphasized the importance of incorporating content that is familiar to them and keeping the intervention simple and user friendly. While appreciating the provision for individual activities female participants highlighted the importance of having the support of peers to manage their stressful situations. Conclusions: The findings of the study directed to the implementation of a few design considerations to govern the artefact design and development process. Such design considerations covered the aspects of modality and focus of the intervention, rendering personalised experience, provision for active and passive content generation, social connectedness, and gamification.

Information and communication technology (ICT) supported occupational stress management interventions are considered as an effective way of treating stress-related complications. Digital healthcare, including both e-health and m-health, is provided by a diverse ecosystem of actors that aims at contributing to better health of people. The development of such technological interventions is considered as an emerging area with a unique set of constraints and design concerns. However, to increase the likelihood of success of implementing ICT supported interventions for occupational stress management, it is essential to conduct a detailed analysis of the design practices and implications related to prior studies. Thus, the proposed systematic literature review based on qualitative content analysis encapsulates the knowledge gained from existing design and development efforts in the area of ICT supported occupational stress management interventions. Knowledge incorporates design characteristics and methodological implications concerning the evaluation of the design. Further, practical limitations to yield optimum efficacy levels of ICT supported stress interventions are also discussed. A systematic review of publications in four databases (PsycINFO, Scopus, Web of Science and MEDLINE) was carried out using broad search queries. The search strategy yielded 985 unique citations. Of those, this paper presents details relevant to 31 assessed full-text publications selected during the search process. The review showed a variety of interventional platforms, health outcomes and intervention usage measurements. Various modalities of human-and machine-based support and interactions were also identified in the analysis along with several study limitations. The findings of this review may offer insights for IT professionals working in design and implementation of ICT supported stress management interventions and to researchers involved in designing and evaluating ICT supported interventions.

Adequately managing project interdependencies among diverse and simultaneous projects is deemed critical for successful implementation of project portfolios. The challenge is significant because it may entail managing a complex network of project interdependencies that keeps changing over time. The present study investigates the managerial challenges that may undermine effective management of project interdependencies in IT/IS project portfolios. The investigation is based on evidence from reviewing relevant literature and documented studies associated with managing project interdependencies. The main contribution of this study is to discuss three managerial challenges of project interdependencies in project portfolios. We discuss the challenges from three perspectives: types of interdependencies; patterns of interaction in interdependencies; and cost/benefit impact of project interdependencies.

Background One component of the 2009 Chinese health care reform plan is to train general practitioners to improve the delivery of primary care services. This continuing professional development is expected to further improve the physicians’ competencies to be general practitioners in primary care. Augmented reality–a combination of virtual information and the real environment–may enhance general practitioners’ continuing professional development by allowing their learning experiences to overlap with their workplace practice. Objective To explore the needs, opportunities, and challenges involved in continuing professional development for Chinese physicians becoming competent general practitioners within primary care, with a special focus on the possibilities of applying augmented reality. Methods This study used a qualitative approach with semi-structured face-to-face interviews. Two managers and thirteen physicians (from four community health centers and stations) participated. The data were analyzed using a thematic inductive analysis approach. Results Based on our interviews, most of the physicians were not fully trained as general practitioners but still assumed the duties of that position; they were supposed to eventually become fully trained in line with the reforms of the Chinese primary care system. However, they reported a lack of in-service training opportunities to fulfill this goal. Even those who said that they had such opportunities perceived the efficacy of that training as being poor. The managers and most of the physicians reacted positively to the idea of using augmented reality in continuing professional development, and they suggested antibiotics treatment, surgery, and emergency care as learning areas in which augmented reality could be applied. Conclusions Due to the Chinese reforms of the primary care system, both managers and the physicians themselves expect general practitioners to become qualified by engaging in continuing professional development. Both groups also regarded augmented reality as a potentially useful tool.

Objectives: Mobile systems are widely adopted in healthcare services. Mobile reporting systems have been recently introduced for social home care by municipalities in Sweden. The study aims to assess the benefits of using these systems.Methods: We followed an expert survey approach. Data were collected by means of telephone interviews with the experts in charge of managing and implementing the systems at the municipalities. In addition, several workshops were organized for assessing the economic value of the systems at one municipality. We performed thematic analysis and cost-benefit analysis of the data.Results: The thematic analysis showed the three main benefits of using the mobile reporting systems in social home care: municipal benefits, care providers’ benefits, and care recipients’ benefits. The cost-benefit analysis indicated that the systems could bring substantial long-term economic value for municipalities. The results also revealed the difficulties encountered at the early stage of the deployment and implementation of the systems.Conclusions: The mobile systems yield benefits for all the actors, that is, municipalities, care recipients and care providers. These enhance the public-private coordination and cooperation in social home care in Sweden. The municipalities are called upon to address change management and technical challenges in the implementation.

Different kinds of applications for self-help are available on the Internet today. Some aim to intervene with users’ life patterns such as negative stress exposure. It is not always an easy task to manage stressful life situations and to develop and maintain healthy living. It involves learning how to balance perceived demands from working and personal life, and to question underlying thoughts and beliefs. E-health communities can assist in this process through continuous interactions between community members. However, previous studies have shown that combining knowledge of health experts and the experiences of peers can create a good synergy. The question is how these findings can be applied to the area of stress management. In this chapter, the authors present a web-based self-help system for stress management based on a holistic view of actors and their different types of support. The system offers the user information in the form of research and real life stories, practical exercises (both text- and video-based), and the opportunity to interact with health experts and peers, all in an integrated way.

E-health communities, also called Web-based health communities, have become popular arenas for support and sharing of experience, knowledge and advice among patients and citizens. E-health communit ...

There are e-health communities of many different kinds available on the Internet today. Some e-health communities are for people who need to change their established bad, or unhealthy, habits such as the ones for people suffering from overweight or smoking. To develop and maintain a healthier life-style is not an easy task to succeed with, it involves being able to change everyday situations. E-health communities can assist in this process through continuous interactions between community members. However, whether these e-health communities actively support learning depends on the ways they help community members reflect upon their habits, underlying reasons and motivational factors. In this chapter, the author presents a framework for how to evaluate these e-health communities from a learning perspective. The framework covers different types of conversation topics, ways to respond and community knowledge.

This paper presents the results from a study of people with established bad habits and their conversations together in online health-communities. Target groups of the study have been overweight people, smokers, and alcohol and drug abusers who want to change life-style. The conversation issues raised in the communities were categorized based on the type of content. Frequency of the different types of issues was stated, and differences as well as similarities between the communities were investigated. Finally, suggestions on how to help community members to further develop conversations for learning purposes were proposed. Such a new design could also help active members as well as lurkers to more easily browse the communities for a certain type of conversation.

Problem management of business-critical systems has over the last few decades grown into a topic of great importance for business continuity. This is due to the increased use of critical systems both in private and public sectors: assets of great value, organisational viability and even people's lives can be put in jeopardy due to poor management of malfunctioning software. Hence, understanding what influences critical software problem management is important. Even so, studies of the human side of this topic are sparse. In this article, a literature review to identify main socio-technical issues in managing critical software problems is presented. We can see from the results that factors influencing software problem management of business critical systems can be grouped into four themes: reliability in operations, fault detection, system recovery and change requests. By taking a socio-technical viewpoint, we outline some complex challenges and deepen our understanding of the factors involved.

This paper presents the results from a two month-long study of a group of people participating in an online health-community on overweight. The relation between their contributions in the community and their experienced weight change was investigated. The results show a tendency towards that the greater weight loss the community members experienced the more active they were in the conversations. When focusing on the online discussions more specifically concerned with learning problems, this relation was even more evident.

During recent years, online communities on the internet have grown in number. One area where these communities have become widely used is the healthcare sector. Besides the online communities for people who suffer from diseases, there are also communities for people who want to get rid of bad habits and learn how to develop a new behaviour. The question is how these communities manage to trigger learning. In this article, a study of the patterns of conversations in four online health-communities on bad habits is presented. The study focused on the usage of counter acts for learning purposes. The communities showed a relatively low frequency of responses that included opposition and counter-ideas. However, most of the time when these occurred, the community members managed to stay neutral or even balance opposition with empathy.

Capitalizing on inter-project interdependencies is widely accepted as being crucial for Information Technology/Information Systems (IT/IS) project portfolio success. However, handling these interdependencies becomes a source of increased management complexity as project portfolios get larger, increasingly diverse, and are much influenced by their environments. This then can lead to less predictable situations regarding the portfolio performance as a whole. Though there are many methods available for optimally selecting projects and cross-checking possible synergies and interdependencies among the projects in the portfolio, it remains unclear how one can gain control over the complexity of managing these interdependencies. In this study, we address the problem of handling many project interdependencies that continuously change and develop within a large IT/IS project portfolio. We found that the existing methods for selecting and managing the projects within a portfolio do not focus enough on how interdependencies can disrupt the balance of the whole project portfolio system. To tackle the problem, we propose a systemic approach using the Viable System Model to enhance the way that these interdependencies can be effectively managed in view of the overall portfolio system. We suggest that the Viable System Model, as a supplement to traditional IT/IS project portfolio management approaches, is recursively applied to diagnose and manage the complexity of project interdependencies within IT/IS project portfolios.