Systems thinking and simulation to help it/software professionals to visualize knowledge assets evolution according to digital solutions implementation

Resumo

Introduction In the current era, the digitization of organizations is essential to add value to the business. For many years has been recognized the fact that Business-value generation has become one of the main focuses of organizational strategists and stakeholders, and one of the key aspects to better keep this focus is the relation between IT governance and decision making processes, and still in recent times is stated that with a better IT governance in mind, it is feasible to understand that companies are looking to technology to create business value. In view of the above industry needs, IT/SW professionals are the appropriate professionals to be in charge of providing digital solutions to improve the companies’ business value with the long-term goal of guaranteeing organizational competitiveness against their competitors, ensuring sustainability along time and envisioning innovation strategies to face the future. IT/SW professionals are those that may be in charge of both leading the development of digital solutions and such digital solutions’ governance. IT governance reflects the general corporate governance principles of an organization, and it focuses on the management and use of information technologies to achieve corporate performance goals. Given that the digital solutions provision affects most industries, and that such is crucial for digitization, IT/Software professionals must have the capability to create and offer the digital solutions that effectively leverage the specific business goal defined to create business value. In the current era of simultaneous immediacy and service or product quality, the IT/SW professional must have mechanisms intended to help in making decisions about which is the convenient digital solution that best fits the company needs. It is not enough to have several recognized and brand affiliated tools, but the IT/SW professional must be able to visualize and propose that solution that correctly fits the clients’ needs, which it is argued are affected for both trivial (procedures, documents, etc.) and soft and complex aspects (in-culture, external culture, the environmental constraints, etc.). Until now, no mechanisms have been considered to help the IT/SW professional to identify and propose the best digital solution (whether it is an existent artefact or an ad-hoc development project) having into account something inherent to every company, that is the state of health of organizational knowledge assets, of their knowhow. To become competitive, software/technology provision companies and their professionals have begun to interest and appreciate the importance of their client’s knowledge related aspects such as: • Their clients’ knowledge and organizational culture, • What sets apart client companies from their competitors and, • What their client companies have learned to do from their professional practice, that is, their know-how. All this knowledge, which is the key asset for company’s differentiation, can be used to ascertain how well a client company is faring in the pursuit of its organizational goals. Company knowledge is represented by all the resources that despite being non-tangible still contribute to the delivery of a company’s value proposition. An enterprise’s success may not be guaranteed by just having the financial (money, credit, funds, etc.) or physical (computers, buildings, etc.) capital to support its operations, but the intangible must be considered as well. Purpose This doctoral thesis presents the SIPAC-framework, a methodological proposal created to systemically guide and help software engineers and information technology professionals in the process of proposing a customized technological solution, specifically oriented to identify software or IT solutions that provide business value to client companies supported on the status of their intangible knowledge assets, and from this, drive the achievement of the strategic goals that define the organizational operation. Objectives Following is a general objective which can be inclusive of four subsequently presented specific objectives. General Objective: “To develop a methodological and technological framework to guide IT/SW professionals to identify and use their client’s knowhow and its alignment with the client’s business goals, as the basis to identify better digital solutions that provide business value to their clients” Specific Objectives: Specific objective 1 To develop a general methodological guide for the SW/IT professionals to be able to perform a knowledge audit comprising the elicitation of intangible knowledge assets, the definition and measurement of such knowledge assets’ indicators, the proposal of the adequate digital solution for organizational improvement based on their knowhow, and finally the demonstration of how such solutions effect on the state of the knowledge assets and vice versa. Specific objective 2 To develop a conceptual framework for the valuation and characterization of knowledge assets based on their quality and the impact on the defined business goal. Specific objective 3 To develop a simulated environment that represents the characterization of knowledge assets and how they may change along time depending on decisions made regarding the implementation of the organizational digital and technological solutions. Specific objective 4 To develop a conceptual framework able to represent the process of making decisions in regard to implement or not a specific digital solution and how the intangible assets status are affected by this decision and vice versa. Hypotheses Four hypotheses have been identified within the context of this research work. Hypothesis 1 “By using the SIPAC-framework, and following all its methodological guidance, IT/SW professionals can effectively elicitate the processes, know-how and knowledge related assets of their client organizations”. Hypothesis 2 “From the implementation of the strategy or digital solution that the SIPAC-framework helps the IT/SW professional to propose to their clients, the state of organizational knowledge assets can be improved so that the organizational business goal is better pursued” Hypothesis 3 “The SIPAC-framework is effective at predicting a company’s’ knowledge assets evolution, based on information about its effectiveness in previous experiences”. Hypothesis 4 “SW/IT professionals are satisfied with the process of deploying and experimenting with the SIPAC-framework in real organizational contexts” Methodology An empirical primary research is developed. Considering that the research fields “Knowledge Management”, “Modelling and Simulation” and “Systems Thinking” are soft and hard approaches to understanding problems, the research work related to this PhD thesis is being developed under the following qualitative and quantitative directions, with no strict but controlled experimentation phases. Observation and problem immersion In this phase, all conceptual and contextual framework for understanding organizations knowledge management has to be developed. Terms, concepts, organizational models, indicators and metrics that describe how organizations create value from their knowledge assets must be clarified and documented. The first step to understand how the organization create value is through objective observation, with no restriction or prejudices governing the organizational immersion process. Questionnaires Given that information relative to knowledge management about an organization is not equally known by all organization’s members, a direct interaction with the CEO and directives must be sustained. It is important to use direct interaction to get immeasurable information, however, it is equally important to collect and document important information through questionnaires that facilitate the collection of information and maybe the measuring and computing of valuation metrics. Sampling Being an innovative proposal, a selection of experimental cases of study (companies) must be made. At this initial point, the developed tool(s) should be tested in real companies such that usefulness and potential improvements be identified before to affirm any generalizability of this approach. Interviews/Interaction with experts A very important part of this research is the feedback and support ideas that experts and recognized people from different fields of study (simulation, computational intelligence and strategic management) will provide for the improvement of the developed conceptual framework. While each of the related fields have been widely studied with successful results, this research, as an innovative junction point, should guarantee correctness and precision in the use of techniques and concepts. Since the problem that is being faced may be understood as “complex”, it is difficult to describe it and understand it numerically and using formal and traditional structures. A better approximation to the problem is going to be found through a hybrid research methodology. The SIPAC-framework This doctoral thesis presents the SIPAC-framework, a methodological proposal created to systemically guide and help software engineers and information technology professionals in the process of proposing a customized technological solution, specifically oriented to propose software or IT solutions that provide business value to client companies supported on the status of their intangible knowledge assets, and from this, drive the achievement of the strategic goals that define the organizational operation. To achieve this, the SIPAC-framework comprises three layers clearly differentiated but intimately interrelated and co-dependent on each other: a methodological layer, a mechanisms layer and a technological layer inclusive of the technological artifacts to be used. 1. The methodological layer comprises the SIPAC methodology itself, inspired by Peter Checkland's soft systems approach, but adapted to, from an engineering point of view, addressing the situation given by the underlying knowledge of an organization, which it is usually unstructured and disordered, and whose understanding fits to be addressed as a complex problem. The SIPAC-framework guides the professional in the process of identifying such knowledge, structuring it in knowledge assets, organizing such assets according to the identity of the organization, characterizing them according to their quality and the impact they have in achieving the strategic objectives, exploiting them to propose an appropriate technological solution and envisaging possible future scenarios based on what can happen to them as a consequence of the decision making about the technological solution to be implemented. 2. The mechanisms layer comprises the constructs necessary to be able to carry out the subjacent activities of the methodological layer, mainly a model of identification and valuation of intangible knowledge assets, a model of characterization of the assets according to their quality and impact, a Markovian model of prediction of the re-characterization of intangible knowledge assets, and an instance-based learning model implementation of decisions on the implementation of technological solutions. 3. The technological layer constitutes the artifacts to be used during the deployment of the methodology to support its methodological processes. In detail, this layer presents an instrument for collecting information on the knowledge of a company and its structuring into knowledge assets, a web application for the management of such information through a database, an agent-based model that implements both the automatic characterization of the knowledge assets from the information stored in the database, as well as the simulation and prediction of the behavior of said assets as a product of the decisions made regarding technological implementations. Findings The SIPAC framework has been used in a total of 11 small and medium enterprises, by means of teams of 2-4 software engineers each, who have been in charge of doing the deployment in two different time stages: an initial audit carried out in the pre-project phase and prior to the decision of technological implementation; and an audit carried out after the implementation of the technological solution. The interaction of said professionals with the interested parties by the companies (stakeholders) has been discontinuous, limited to specific audits, interviews and validations on the information and models built. This work has derived in the methodological proposal that constitutes the SIPAC-framework, with its mechanisms and technological artefacts, and whose impact can be evidenced in several aspects: • The effective elicitation and characterization of organizational knowledge of the participating companies. • The success of the goals-aligned digital solution implementation proposals, which is evidenced by the improvement in organizational knowledge assets’ state. • The effective predictive power of the SIPAC-framework’s simulation module. • The satisfaction of software engineers and IT professionals by both the process of deploying the methodology and the results obtained. • The improvement of the profession of software engineers and professionals of information and communication technologies, by providing them with an innovative approach that leads them to demonstrate to their clients the knowledge they have, in what state they are, how they can improve and what can happen if they decide to improve it. The emergence of organizational information that is traditionally hidden and incomprehensible, usually reserved for its management by expensive consultants and the experience of a few; all at a minimum cost, maximizing the visualization of the information and minimizing the complexity of its interpretation. Research Implications In the software engineering and information technology professional practice, professionals have the responsibility to identify their clients’ needs and design and propose the corresponding digital solution that will best fit with the client needs. Bearing this in mind, this work has presented a methodological and technological framework to improve the software engineering objective of better proposing digital solutions from the fact that a company’s knowledge must be aligned with organizational business goal, so any strategy or digital solution implemented within the company must also be designed to pursue such alignment. This methodological and technological framework was presented as a three-layer solution with distinguished functional parts. • The methodological layer presented a soft methodological guide to help the software consultant to transit among all the stages of identifying the client needs, identifying the knowledge assets, identifying the organizational business goals, selecting what is the organizational mission that better aligns business goals and knowledge assets, using such knowledge assets indicators information to characterize them and so being able to define an improvement plan that proposes the best aligned digital solution. Also, this framework helps the software and information technology professional to demonstrate the effect of implementing the proposed digital solution from the impact it has on organizational performance from the perspective of their knowledge assets behavior and the impact they have regarding the business goal. • The mechanisms layer proposes a conceptual framework that supports the methodological deployment of the first layer. Is has been defined a conceptual proposal for characterizing a company’s knowledge assets based on their quality and impact on organizational business goals, for which a standard method for measuring and valuating knowledge assets is proposed. Also, a conceptual design of the process of decision-making is presented as the basis for simulating the process of decision making in regard to a software solution implementation decision. This decision-making model is based on the Instance-based learning model in which a memory existence is represented with several instances that are the reference to make better decisions from experiencing with all of them and using the most productive or rewarding ones. For such experiential learning, specific processes and concepts of the Instance-based learning model were used, such as blending, activation, etc. • The technological layer proposed the use of artifacts to better implement the general methodology of layer one. The more important artefact is an agent-based simulation model able to characterize knowledge assets using a graphical abstract representation, and able also to represent the decision-making process of deciding to implement or not the technological solution that the software engineer has defined, showing besides the effect that such a decision may have on the corresponding knowledge assets. There is also an artefact consisting on a web application to store, retrieve and export the information of a company’s knowledge assets audit. A third artefact consist on a spreadsheet useful to manually save the information of a company at the time of interaction with a company information stakeholder. All the three layers conform a whole framework that as a group of interconnected parts is definitely more than the sum of the parts if seen as separated and independent elements. This mix of the three layers gives us a general guide to completely provide the service of guiding the client to improve from their knowhow identification and the better fit of the digital solution to implement. This thesis has been the matrix of several publications containing specific contributions to the existing body of knowledge in the following related fields: software engineering, intellectual capital, applied simulation modeling, applied systems thinking, etc. As a summary, the main contributions may be stated as: • A methodological guide to help IT/Software professionals in the process of the organizational intervention to diagnose their clients knowledge state and use it to design and propose a digital strategy aligned with organizational business goals. • A general framework for characterizing organizational knowledge into organizational knowledge assets from their quality and their impact on strategic goals achievement. • A simulated environment to perform an automated characterization process. • A simulated environment to predict based on previous experiences what the organizational knowledge assets’ state would be as a product of implementing the SIPAC-framework based specific digital strategy. This thesis is a starting point for the development of the body of knowledge about the valuation of knowledge assets in technological environments as a tool to achieve the strategic goal of an organization. In addition, this work leaves open the way for the future development of decision-making models based on value, as well as the evolution of the presented model, ideally in a single patentable technological device. As a final contribution, this thesis has approached the business and software languages into a common field of convergence in which modern professionals need to operate aiming to help organizations to achieve their business goal based on their knowledge and the technology they have available at hand. This is very relevant to modern organizational roles in which neither pure business or software professionals find a perfect fit, but with this approach they may find a path to follow for better adaptation and complexity management.