Organisations enter into collaborative working arrangements with others to deliver mutual benefits. In Multi-Organisational Collaborative Groups (MOCGs), organisations share knowledge, coordinate their activities, and engage in joint decision-making processes. Local government domains commonly adopt this approach. Strategic partnerships are deployed to develop new solutions to complex social problems because it is believed that these problems can only be solved by pooling the resources of a diverse range of stakeholders. Yet this approach can be problematic. The multitude of perceptions towards a problem increases the difficulty in achieving consensus. The lack of a managerial structure complicates activity coordination. The lack of a shared interface makes transparent information exchange burdensome. Research challenges lie in designing techniques to support such partnerships. Existing techniques for achieving consensus omit key contextual information about local. government strategic partnerships. Furthermore, existing technologies for supporting group work provide insufficient functionality for supporting roles, relationships, responsibilities, and information exchange requirements of these partnerships. To define and structure social problems the partnership domain must be characterised and represented. The identification of relationships, roles, and responsibilities found amongst partners is necessary to devise mechanisms to support activity coordination. The identification of partnership information resources is required to facilitate transparent information exchange. This problem-centred, information systems research PhD project addresses these challenges. A post- modernist position is taken towards research phenomena within the neohumanist paradigm. It draws on the principles of Organisational Semiotics, Soft Systems Methodology, Role-Based Access Control, and Unified Modelling Language. It contributes five IT artefacts designed to enable the development of software solutions: the specification of domain characteristics and solution requirements, a conceptual architecture, a description of partnership stakeholders, a representation of domain entities and relationships, an architecture of partnership information resources. Furthermore, a non-electronic technique for specifying the context of a partnership is provided, as well as specifications for an e-collaboration technology. The latter is a configuration of new and existing functionality designed to meet the requirements of partnerships, which demonstrates how software design could be derived from the IT artefacts.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:558782 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Harris, Joycelyn |
| Publisher | University of Reading |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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