published_or_final_version / Public Administration / Master / Master of Social Sciences

<p>Successful project selection and management requires optimal supervision of corporate resources within specifications for time, cost, and performance. We developed a model and algorithm to support decisions on these three dimensions for project managers. It combines the advantages of the Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) and the Critical Path Method (CPM). Our methodology leads to more accurate results than PERT/CPM, which typically results in optimistic planning due to less than actual completion time estimates that do not consider the possibility of more than one longest (critical) path. We also estimate performance measured by the Internal Rate of Return (IRR) of the project and the tradeoffs between time/cost and performance. We allow decision makers to calculate the probability that each activity will be critical, an indication of their relative importance for managerial purposes, in polynomial time. Furthermore, our methodology provides the means to obtain the optimal time/cost schedule of expected completion times as well as the variability in these time, cost, and performance estimates. We can apply our equations to rank the desirability of projects in a proposed portfolio, thus aiding in the portfolio selection process. A stochastic extension to the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is also used in conjunction with our methodology to demonstrate the application of uncertainty calculations in managerial group choice situations.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p>Negotiation is an important part of the life in many organizations. Many works have been undertaken to build tools for conducting negotiations, such as theoretical models and computerized support systems. Some of the existing computerized support systems provide suggestions and solution alternatives to the users. Other systems support the negotiation process, including: support for communications, structuring the process, and managing the documentation. The advent of the World Wide Web as widely available networking platform, the Client/Server as a computing architecture, and Java language as a programming language for the Web, creates new and promising ways to conduct negotiations as an alternative if face-to-face negotiations are not possible. This article describes the design, implementation, and validation of a computerized process support for negotiation, a Web-based Collective Bargaining Support System (CBSS). This system is implemented on Microsoft's Windows 95 environment, written in Java (Sun's JAVA SDK version 1.0), and accessed through the Web. Simulated union-management contract negotiations were conducted in an experiment to test the validity of CBSS as a negotiation stool, and to investigate the effectiveness and the efficiency of this negotiation support system. The data analysis (of questionnaires distributed during the experiment) shows that CBSS is a valid alternative, both when face-to-face negotiation is not possible and when it is combined with face-to-face negotiations. It is also concluded from the experiment that, although CBSS is perceived to be slower than face-to-face negotiation, it is an effective tool for negotiators, and it does not negatively affect bargaining outcomes.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p>The management area includes a large class of pattern recognition (classification) problems. Traditionally, these problems have been solved by using statistical methods or expert systems. In practice, however, statistical assumptions about the probability distributions of the pattern variables are often not verifiable, and expertise concerning the correct classification is often not explicitly available. These obstacles may make statistical methods and expert system techniques difficult to apply. Since the early 1980s neural network techniques have been widely used in pattern recognition, especially after Rumelhart's back propagation learning algorithm was adapted to the solution of these problems. The standard neural network, using the back propagation learning algorithm, requires no statistical assumptions but uses training sample data to generate classification boundaries, allowing it to perform pattern recognition.</p> <p>In this dissertation the neural network's behavior in classification boundary generation is analyzed. Based on this analysis, three models are developed. The first model improves the classification performance of neural networks in managerial pattern recognition by modifying the training algorithm through the use of monotonicity. Using simulated and real data, the developed model is tested and verified. The second model solves bias problems caused by small sample size in neural network classification results. The third model develops multi-architecture neural networks to supply decision makers with more natural pattern recognition information, based on fuzzy theory.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p>The provision of software support for conceptual model design processes has been an important issue in Model Management Systems research. This study examines the issue by empirically studying design behaviour and the techniques used during design, with a focus on the use of abstraction in the design process.</p> <p>A framework that explains the relationships between the use of abstraction and the output of the design process is proposed. We classify abstraction into vertical, horizontal and general abstraction techniques. We then propose that three dimensions of a design: the completeness of the design, higher level concepts in design, and the organization of the design, are affected by effective use of these abstractions. We also propose aids to support these three types of abstraction, and develop measures to evaluate their effectiveness.</p> <p>A software prototype was developed to illustrate the implementation of the proposed abstraction aids. A pilot study was also conducted to test the effectiveness of these aids using different versions of the prototype.</p> <p>Three hypotheses that test the effectiveness of the proposed abstraction aids were tested in an experimental study with treatments that included three design environments and two training methods. The three design environments were two which were supported by pencil and paper design, and one which was supported by a software prototype. The two training methods used were based on our proposed abstraction aids. The results of the experiment indicate some significant differences in the performance of the participants in different treatment groups.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

published_or_final_version / Management Studies / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

This dissertation presents the Participant-driven Group Support System (PD-GSS)framework. This framework presents an approach for Group Support System (GSS)designers to accommodate distributed or asynchronous groups through the use ofdifferent technologies and processes than traditional GSS.The goal of the PD-GSS framework is to further involve the collaborativeparticipants during the workflow in an effort to reduce the load on the meetingfacilitator. As the name implies, it is the participants that are increasingly responsiblefor conducting and executing the required actions during a collaborative processes. Thesystem empowers the participants in the meeting to conduct the meeting themselves,reducing the need for a dedicated facilitator to guide the process.One of the modules from the PD-GSS framework, Peer-reviewed Brainstorming,was developed into a prototype and tested experimentally. This module requires eachbrainstorming idea to be routed through a peer-review process whereby the originalbrainstorming idea is edited for clarity and completeness. The goal of this new moduleis to reduce the number of low quality, noisy comments while increasing the quantity ofhigh quality comments.Ten six-person groups participated in the first experiment. Five groups wereplaced in a traditional electronic brainstorming GSS while the other five groups wereplaced in the peer-review treatment. The results indicate that the peer-review processdid control the brainstorming process, yielding a higher percentage of validbrainstorming ideas.The second module examined was the categorization module, allowing groups towork autonomously to identify similar ideas that should be grouped together in the samecategory or bucket. This new approach to the categorization of brainstorming ideasenables groups to work independently, asynchronously, and anonymously to organizethe brainstorming input.An existing GSS, ThinkTank by GroupSystems, was utilized. Eighty-one groupswere used in the second experiment to test the ability of groups to work independently,without a facilitator, in an attempt to organize brainstorming ideas. The groups workingsynchronously outperformed the groups working in a mock asynchronous setting.Likewise, the groups that had to categorize the fewest number of brainstorming ideasreceived the highest performance measures.

Web forums offer open and interactive social communication platforms for numerous participants to share information and offer perspectives on a variety of business and social issues with audiences around the world. In addition to facilitating widespread communication, these web forums contain massive amounts of data and represent rich sources of information that can be utilized to advance the understanding of participants and society. In particular, web forums pertaining to firms and their customers, employees, and investors, represent valuable resources for the acquisition of business intelligence. However, web forums represent a complex analytic landscape requiring the development of automated, intelligent, and scalable analytic approaches. The dissertation follows the design science paradigm in management information systems research, and aims to develop and refine approaches to the analysis of web forums, and to apply these analytic approaches to firm-related web forums to derive information that may explain and predict firm stock behavior. The designs of the devised approaches to web forum analysis are informed by the stakeholder theory of the firm, and systemic functional linguistic theory. We introduce and advance a stakeholder approach to the analysis of firm-related web forums, and improve existing approaches to sentiment analysis in web forums. In Chapter 2 we develop and deploy a stakeholder framework to analyze a popular firm-related finance web forum and apply the extracted measures to explain firm stock return, volatility, and trading volume. In Chapter 3 we advance the stakeholder framework and perform dynamic analyses of web forums over time, and compare several feature representations of stakeholders and approaches to sentiment analysis. We deploy the stakeholder framework to analyze several firm-related web forums, and apply the derived measures to predict firm stock return and perform simulated trading of firm stock over a one year period to determine the economic value of the extracted information. Finally, in Chapter 4 we develop approaches to improve the scalability of sentiment analysis across multiple web forums in a collection. Overall the dissertation contributes to the literature on the analysis of web forums, and demonstrates the value of firm-related web forums as sources of business intelligence.

We are living in a world of service economy. Global markets have radically transformed from product-based industrial structures to service-based post-industrial ones over the past fifty years. IT has catalyzed a significant portion of this transformation. Advances in IT have not only alleviated the accessibility of existing service systems, but also enabled Servitization of products and commodities that were delivered through traditional mediums. Ironically, IT itself has been a commodity that has met its own share of Servitization. Hardware computing resources have been virtualized, whereas software and media content have been delivered through distributed networks. Causing a paradigm shift on how IT is delivered and used, Servitization of IT is expected to impose technical, economical and managerial challenges in various business domains of organizations. In this dissertation, I develop novel methods and policies to overcome such challenges. By conducting four closely related studies, I address common IT Servitization problems encountered in the service-oriented architecture and customer relationship management domains. Specifically, I make the following contributions: (1) in study one, I work on the efficient creation of software services out of legacy software by annotating source code components of an IT system with business semantics. The approach facilitates source code reuse in developing new web services. (2) In study two, I develop a financial valuation model for SOA investments. The model quantifies evident and elusive costs and benefits of SOA and supports managerial decision making regarding the investment. (3) In study three, I investigate the deployment of live-chat online service channels by evaluating the impact of priority-based admission control policies. I show that under imperfect profiling of customer types, reserve-type admission control policies may have negative consequences for the entire system. (4) In study four, I investigate the value of adding flexibility in live-chat contact centers. Contrary to the service management literature, I find out that cross-training of agents in large contact centers suffers from switching costs as well as capacity shifting inefficiencies. Methods, models and policies proposed in this dissertation are expected to contribute towards understanding the short-term applicability and long-term impact of service-orientation and IT Servitization in business organizations.

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