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<p>This master thesis has been carried out at Billerud AB in Skärblacka and Gruvön and at the Department of Science and Technology, University of Linköping. The purpose of this thesis work is to evaluate the new standardised IT system in comparison to the old systems in reference to create routines, models and working practices and to see how the daily work will be affected for the delivery coordinators.</p><p>Billerud is a packaging paper company with four production sites located in Gruvön, Karlsborg, Skärblacka and Beetham (United Kingdom). The company’s sales organisation is made up of sales offices around the world.</p><p>The thesis is based on the problem with differences in calculated and actual freight costs that have arisen over the years. Part of the study has therefore been aimed at reaching an understanding of why these differences occur.</p><p>Freight cost data has been gathered from Billerud Skärblacka and Billerud Gruvön for the years 2005 and 2006. From this data the author has seen for himself that a problem exists but also that there might be a way to change the trend.</p><p>The study then focused more on the current working practices and the forthcoming ones that will come with the implementation of the new IT system BonD. This system is meant to replace the IT systems of Billeruds four mills in 2007. The new IT system will shift focus to be more market oriented and hope is that working practices at the mills will be more unified.</p><p>The study of the new system has shown that alterations need to be made, and they need be made rather quickly. There are aspects that initially are lost from the old system that could prove troublesome in the future. One of these aspects that the author fears will lead to a worse situation is the decrease in importance of roll numbers; traceability can become an issue if nothing is done to ensure that the current traceability is maintained and improved.</p><p>A number of proposed measures for improving the working practices are stated in the recommendations. The main conclusion is that even though BonD will be an easier system to work with, largely depending on the user interface, there are factors and working practices that need to be changed in order facilitate the work of the delivery coordinators. With the difference in freight charges in mind, Billerud also needs to evaluate, review and revise the current freight charges allocated to their customers.</p>

This master thesis has been carried out at Billerud AB in Skärblacka and Gruvön and at the Department of Science and Technology, University of Linköping. The purpose of this thesis work is to evaluate the new standardised IT system in comparison to the old systems in reference to create routines, models and working practices and to see how the daily work will be affected for the delivery coordinators. Billerud is a packaging paper company with four production sites located in Gruvön, Karlsborg, Skärblacka and Beetham (United Kingdom). The company’s sales organisation is made up of sales offices around the world. The thesis is based on the problem with differences in calculated and actual freight costs that have arisen over the years. Part of the study has therefore been aimed at reaching an understanding of why these differences occur. Freight cost data has been gathered from Billerud Skärblacka and Billerud Gruvön for the years 2005 and 2006. From this data the author has seen for himself that a problem exists but also that there might be a way to change the trend. The study then focused more on the current working practices and the forthcoming ones that will come with the implementation of the new IT system BonD. This system is meant to replace the IT systems of Billeruds four mills in 2007. The new IT system will shift focus to be more market oriented and hope is that working practices at the mills will be more unified. The study of the new system has shown that alterations need to be made, and they need be made rather quickly. There are aspects that initially are lost from the old system that could prove troublesome in the future. One of these aspects that the author fears will lead to a worse situation is the decrease in importance of roll numbers; traceability can become an issue if nothing is done to ensure that the current traceability is maintained and improved. A number of proposed measures for improving the working practices are stated in the recommendations. The main conclusion is that even though BonD will be an easier system to work with, largely depending on the user interface, there are factors and working practices that need to be changed in order facilitate the work of the delivery coordinators. With the difference in freight charges in mind, Billerud also needs to evaluate, review and revise the current freight charges allocated to their customers.

Für die Entwicklung komplexer Produkte werden eine Vielzahl unterschiedlicher IT-Systeme eingesetzt. Die softwaretechnische Verknüpfung dieser Systeme ermöglicht den automatisierten Datenaustausch und damit einen schnellen und reibungslosen Ablauf der Produktentwicklung. In dieser Arbeit wird eine komponentenbasierte und generische Verknüpfung von IT-Systemen auf Basis von Webservices und eines Enterprise Service Bus vorgestellt. Die Verknüpfung ist durch die Nutzung standardisierter Schnittstellen plattformunabhängig und erweiterbar. Zudem ermöglicht sie eine lose Kopplung der beteiligten IT-Systeme, wodurch ein Austausch bzw. eine Änderung der IT-Systeme vereinfacht wird. Als Referenzrealisierung wird die Verknüpfung der IT-Systeme Energy Navigator und Virtual Reality Control Platform vorgestellt, die im Rahmen des Projekts eniPROD (Energieeffiziente Produkt- und Prozessinnovationen in der Produktionstechnik, http://www.eniprod.de) insbesondere für die Entwicklung energieeffizienter Werkzeugmaschinen entwickelt wurden.

Agile methodology has existed for over a decade – its potential benefits have made it attractive and popular. As part of innovation, public organisations increasingly invest in information technology systems. Nevertheless, complex information technology adaptive systems require adaptability and flexibility to improve public organisations' delivery systems. Even though the Agile methodology can increase productivity and quality, adopting agile scrum methodology in public organisations is challenging. This study investigates public organisations where IT projects have unclear requirements and cross-functional team environments – which the scrum methodology is typically best suited for. However, despite the widely spread agile method concept and the need increased in the last two decades, still public organisations are not fully adapted to agile scrum methodology, and researchers have noticed slow and ineffective changes in adopting it. While many studies are available on challenges in adopting agile scrum methodology in public organisations' IT project management, there is a lack of comprehensive understanding of these challenges. Therefore, challenges in adopting Agile scrum methodology in public organisations' IT project management context were studied in this literature review. This study aims to report on a systematic literature review about adopting agile scrum methodology in public organisations' IT project management and provide empirical evidence about its current situation and challenges. This research has used a systematic literature review as a research strategy and thematic analysis to analyse the secondary data, where the analysis is conducted based on the filtered themes, sub-themes and codes. The systematic literature review uses the preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) framework; inclusion and exclusion criteria systematically assess the quality of chosen papers and either include or exclude them for this research. Most relevant studies for final inclusion were selected, screened, and shortlisted based on the keywords from academic databases and other online resources to investigate and analyse the research question. The implementation of the agile scrum methodology in IT project management can present notable challenges for public organisations. A number of sources have identified these challenges, and a thorough examination of the matter reveals their frequency.

Nach einem 10 bis 15 Jahre dauernden Lebenszyklus besteht die Notwendigkeit große IT-Systeme durch eine neue Generation zu ersetzen. Dabei ist es vom Aufwand her unwesentlich, ob es sich um einen Generationswechsel des gleichen Herstellers handelt oder um die vergleichbare Lösung eines anderen Herstellers. Im beschriebenen Fall hat sich die Daimler AG im November 2010 entschieden auf ein anderes CAD-System zu wechseln und die Migration bis Ende 2016 abzuschließen. Der Beitrag zeigt die Vorgehensweise der Umstellung unter fünf Aspekten: — Anwendungsmethodik inkl. Datenarchivierung — Datenmigration — Use-Case-Absicherung — Rolloutplanung — Schulungskonzept

Le concept de systèmes informatisés complexes rassemble tous les systèmes constitués d’un grand nombre de composantes inter-connectées et gérées par ordinateur. La configuration et la gestion de ces systèmes passe par une multitude de tâches critiques à leur bon fonctionnement et leur évolution. La problématique de la mise en place et la maîtrise des procédures de gestion et de configuration de tels systèmes devient un point critique au vu de la complexité croissante et du besoin d’évolution de ces derniers. L’objectif de cette thèse est de répondre à cette problématique, à travers le développement d’un outil de planification en mixed-initiative pour la co-génération automatique d’actions de gestion et de configuration, indépendamment du domaine d’application. Dans cette perspective, nous développons « Grounded Totally Ordered Hierarchical Planner » (GTOHP), un planificateur automatique hiérarchique, en « Hierarchical Task Network » (HTN), qui présente des performances élevées nécessaires à une interaction en mixed-initiative. Pour cela nous proposons un algorithme d’instanciation et de simplification des problèmes de planification HTN qui réduit de manière très significative leur complexité et améliore de ce fait les performances des algorithmes de planification. Nous proposons aussi une extension au langage de définition des domaines de planification automatique PDDL afin de modéliser les connaissances des experts du domaine d’application sous forme de méthodes de décomposition des tâches qui serviront à guider l’algorithme de planification HTN. Ensuite, nous intégrons au planificateur GTOHP des mécanismes de récolte de statistiques et d’in- formations sur les résultats des tests réalisés lors de la recherche de plans et nous l’intégrons dans le système « Mixed-Initiative Planner » (MIP) qui fournit plusieurs fonctionnalités d’interaction en mixed-initiative. Nous démontrons les performances élevées du planificateur GTOHP et les apports de l’algorithme d’instanciation et de simplification en le comparant à un planificateur HTN de l’état de l’art à travers une série d’expérimentations sur des domaines de planification issues de la compé- tition internationale de planification automatique. Enfin, nous proposons des critères d’évaluation pour les systèmes en mixed-initiative qui servent de base à la discussion du système MIP. / The concept of complex IT systems includes all systems consisting of a large number of inter-connected and computer-managed components. The configuration and management of these systems involves a multitude of tasks that are critical to their proper functioning and their evolution. The problem of defining procedures for managing and configuring such systems becomes very critical in view of their increasing complexity and their rapid evolution. The aim of this thesis is to develop a mixed-initiative planning tool for the automatic co-generation of a set of management and configuration actions, regardless of the application domain. In this perspective, we develop GTOHP, a hierarchical automatic planner, with HTN, that present the high performance needed for a mixed-initiative interaction. We propose an algorithm for the instantiation and the simplification of HTN planning problems, which significantly reduces their complexity and improves the performance of the planning algorithms. We also propose an extension to the « Planning Domain Definition Language » (PDDL) in order to modelize the knowledge of domain experts in the form of tasks decomposition methods that will be used to guide the HTN planning algorithm. Then, we integrate some mechanisms to GTOHP for collecting statistics and information about the tests results carried out during the plans search and integrate them into the MIP which provides several features of mixed-initiative interaction. We demonstrate the high performance of the GTOHP planner and the contributions of the instantiation and simplification algorithm, by comparing them to a state-of-the-art HTN planner through a series of experiments on planning domains from the international planning competitions. Finally, we propose a panel of evaluation criteria of mixed-initiative systems that serve as a basis for the discussion about the performances and contributions of the MIP system.

<p>IT systems with poor usability are a serious problem in many workplaces. Many workers, particularly office workers, spend a large part of their workday at the computer, and usability problems can cause frustration and impact negatively on productivity. This thesis discusses some of the problems associated with addressing usability and users’ needs in IT systems development.</p><p>Usability issues and users’ needs are often marginalised or even abandoned in systems development. Technical issues and deadlines are given precedence, while usability activities and user activities are cut back or cancelled. Research shows that there are various obstacles to usability and user involvement, including difficulties with understanding the usability concept, insufficient usability expertise and a lack of time and resources.</p><p>This thesis presents a number of studies that look at the problem from different angles. The main question is why usability and users’ needs are marginalised in bespoke systems development, where IT systems are built for a specific work context. The research presented in this thesis also addresses user-centred systems design as a way of integrating usability issues and users’ needs into systems development. The thesis concludes with a discussion about different ways of viewing and representing the users’ work: the systems theoretical view and the view of work as a social process. The former emphasises the formal aspects of work and views users as components in an overall system, whereas the latter focuses on work as a social process and people as active agents. The discussion concludes with the argument that the conflict between these two views is played out in the systems development process, which may help explain some of the difficulties that arise when working with usability and users’ needs.</p>

s the dependence of IS/IT has grown in modern organizations, IT investments have soared in the last couple of decades. Large amounts of money are spent with the hope that the investments will generate value for the business organizations using the systems. It is hence easy to understand the needs for methods to assess the business value of IT-investments. The investment decision is basically about selecting the best IT-system or the best combination of IT-systems, i.e. the system(s) that provides the most business value in dimensions that are important business-wise. However, a problem with many of the avail-able methods is that they often fail to concretely explain what technical characteristics the IT systems(s) should have to achieve the business value desired. A complicating aspect of IT-investment evaluations is also that the evaluations usually include a high degree of un-certainty. In this thesis, an IT investment evaluation method is presented that indicatively assesses the differences in contribution to business value from IT-investment alternatives. The method provides, at a relatively low cost of investigation, indications of not only the technical differences between the IT-investment alternatives in a specific investment situation, but also an assessment of the differences in types and amounts of their business value. The presented method has been applied in a large case study at an electric power company. Furthermore, it also incorporates concepts found within Enterprise architecture (EA), particularly in how the information used in the evaluation is collected. The presented thesis is a composite thesis that, besides an introduction, includes five papers (paper A-E). Paper A presents an outline of the method as well as its application in the case study. It also presents the theoretical fundaments for the criteria used for the technical evaluation and the business value assessment including the method’s applications in relation to Enterprise architecture. The following two papers primarily present necessary steps in the development of the method. First, paper B presents the process to develop a functional reference model (used for the functional assessments in the method), including its application in the case study. Second, a breakdown of the term business value into a set of IS/IT-affected value dimension is presented in paper C. The last two papers present the final steps, i.e. the technical evaluation of the investment alternatives (paper D) and the final business value assessment (paper E). The papers include the methods to perform these analyses as well as the application of the method in the case study and the results of the case study. / QC 20100608

IT systems with poor usability are a serious problem in many workplaces. Many workers, particularly office workers, spend a large part of their workday at the computer, and usability problems can cause frustration and impact negatively on productivity. This thesis discusses some of the problems associated with addressing usability and users’ needs in IT systems development. Usability issues and users’ needs are often marginalised or even abandoned in systems development. Technical issues and deadlines are given precedence, while usability activities and user activities are cut back or cancelled. Research shows that there are various obstacles to usability and user involvement, including difficulties with understanding the usability concept, insufficient usability expertise and a lack of time and resources. This thesis presents a number of studies that look at the problem from different angles. The main question is why usability and users’ needs are marginalised in bespoke systems development, where IT systems are built for a specific work context. The research presented in this thesis also addresses user-centred systems design as a way of integrating usability issues and users’ needs into systems development. The thesis concludes with a discussion about different ways of viewing and representing the users’ work: the systems theoretical view and the view of work as a social process. The former emphasises the formal aspects of work and views users as components in an overall system, whereas the latter focuses on work as a social process and people as active agents. The discussion concludes with the argument that the conflict between these two views is played out in the systems development process, which may help explain some of the difficulties that arise when working with usability and users’ needs.