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Coordination and awareness mechanisms are important in systems for Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and traditional groupware systems. It has been a key focus of research into collaborative groupware and its capability to enable people to efficiently collaborate and coordinate work. Until now, no classification of the mechanisms has been undertaken to identify commonalities and differences in coordination and awareness mechanisms and to show their significance in collaborative environments. In addition, there is a little investigation of coordination and awareness mechanisms in new forms of groupware such as socially enabled Enterprise Collaboration Systems (ECS). Indeed, both in science and in practices, ECS incorporating social software have become increasingly important. Based on the combination of traditional groupware and social software, ECS also include coordination and awareness mechanisms that may simplify collaboration, but these have not yet been investigated.
Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to identify coordination and awareness mechanisms in the academic literature to provide a general overview of those mechanisms examples. Additionally, this thesis aims to classify the mechanism examples. Based on a deep literature analysis, concepts described in literature are chosen and applied with the intension to analyse the mechanisms and to reach a classification. Based on the classification of the identified mechanisms their commonalities and differences are examined and described to gain a better understanding of them. For illustration purpose, examples of coordination and awareness mechanisms and their application are portrayed. The mechanisms examples refer to the classification groups derived. The selection of the mechanisms for the visualization is based on significant differences in their functionality. Subsequently, the selected mechanisms, more based on traditional groupware, are checked to a limited extend whether they can be found in socially enabled ECS. The collaborative platform of IBM Connections serves as a practical example of ECS incorporating social software. IBM Connections is used at the University of Koblenz to run the platform "UniConnect". On the platform it is investigated which of the identified mechanisms examples of the literature are applied in IBM Connections and which additional mechanisms are created by users. This work is the first step in the study of coordination and awareness mechanisms in socially-enabled ECS. In addition, it is expected to detect new mechanisms which are used while the social factor to collaborative work is new.
The purpose of this thesis is to examine and collect coordination and awareness mechanisms examples in literature to analyse them. Additionally, the purpose is to provide a first overview of mechanisms and to classify them by investigating their commonalities. Beside this thesis should give incentive for further investigations to investigate coordination and awareness mechanisms in socially integrated ECS.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of addressable, physical objects that contain embedded sensing, communication and actuating technologies to sense and interact with their environment (Geschickter 2015). Like every novel paradigm, the IoT sparks interest throughout all domains both in theory and practice, resulting in the development of systems pushing technology to its limits. These limits become apparent when having to manage an increasing number of Things across various contexts. A plethora of IoT architecture proposals have been developed and prototype products, such as IoT platforms, been introduced. However, each of these architectures and products apply their very own interpretations of an IoT architecture and its individual components so that IoT is currently more an Intranet of Things than an Internet of Things (Zorzi et al. 2010). Thus, this thesis aims to develop a common understanding of the elements forming an IoT architecture and provide high-level specifications in the form of a Holistic IoT Architecture Framework.
Design Science Research (DSR) is used in this thesis to develop the architecture framework based on the pertinent literature. The development of the Holistic IoT Architecture Framework includes the identification of two new IoT Architecture Perspectives that became apparent during the analysis of the IoT architecture proposals identified in the extant literature. While applying these novel perspectives, the need for a new component for the architecture framework, which was merely implicitly mentioned in the literature, became obvious as well. The components of various IoT architecture proposals as well as the novel component, the Thing Management System, were combined, consolidated and related to each other to develop the Holistic IoT Architecture Framework. Subsequently, it was shown that the specifications of the architecture framework are suitable to guide the implementation of a prototype.
This contribution provides a common understanding of the basic building blocks, actors and relations of an IoT architecture.
In the last few years the Internet of things has gained increased attention from authors as well as companies due to its innovation potential. The rising interest in the Internet of Things has also affected the logistics, which currently suffers from the effects of the globalization and the ever-increasing competitive pressure. Thus, there are efforts to discover how the logistics can profit from the use of IoT concepts, ideas and technologies to help it overcome its challenges. This research study focuses on the identification of these efforts and the corresponding research for logistics processes. For that purpose the researcher explored current literature referring to this topic. The final outcome of this paper is a structured overview of the identified IoT use-cases, their corresponding technologies and devices and finally their affected stakeholders. Whether the expectations regarding the IoT implementation in logistics processes are met, how companies can profit from these use-cases and which problems potentially arise by using IoT devices and technologies in logistics are answered at the end of this paper.
Diese Arbeit kombiniert zwei Themengebiete, welche in unserer Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft immer präsenter und aktueller werden. Das erste Thema beinhaltet die Nachhaltigkeit, welche sich in dieser Arbeit in die drei Säulen Ökologie, Ökonomie und Soziales untergliedert. Die erste Säule, Ökologie, beschäftigt sich hauptsächlich mit der Bekämpfung von Umweltproblemen und dem nachhaltigen Erhalt der Natur. Der Bereich Ökonomie befasst sich damit, die Ressourcen nachhaltig zu nutzen, um ein langfristiges Erzielen von wirtschaftlichen Erträgen zu gewährleisten. Die letzte Säule hat den Zweck die Soziale Nachhaltigkeit zu fördern, indem der gesellschaftliche Zusammenhalt gesichert und die Chance auf Arbeit ermöglicht wird, um gleichzeitig für gute Arbeitsbedingungen zu sorgen. Alle drei Säulen sind daher auch für Unternehmen relevant und sollten von diesen stetig beachtet werden, um eine sogenannte unternehmerische Nachhaltigkeit umzusetzen. Zur Unterstützung dieser Umsetzung, soll hier das zweite Thema hinzugezogen werden, das sogenannte Internet of Things. Das Internet of Things gewinnt, wie auch das Thema Nachhaltigkeit, zunehmend an Bedeutung und bietet viele Vorteile zur Unterstützung nachhaltiger Unternehmen. Dabei sollen immer mehr Geräte zu intelligenten Geräten gewandelt werden um eine Integration in ein Informationsnetzwerk zu gewährleisten. Dort können gesammelte Daten sinnvoll analysiert und genutzt werden, wodurch viele Bereiche effizienter gestaltet und viele Handlungen erleichtert werden können.
Aufbauend auf diesen zwei Themengebiete werden, im weiteren Verlauf dieser Arbeit, IoT- Technologien vorgestellt, die der Unterstützung, in den Bereichen Ökologie, Ökonomie und Soziales, von Unternehmen dienen. Zu den aufgezeigten Technologien werden anschließend Beispiele präsentiert und, wenn vorhanden, auch die jeweiligen Anbieter.
Da eine Nutzung von IoT-Technologien nicht nur von Vorteil ist, sondern auch Herausforderungen mit sich bringt, werden diese abschließend aufgezeigt. Diesen Herausforderungen gilt es sich seitens der Unternehmen, der Gesellschaft und auch der Politik zu stellen, um eine effiziente Nutzung zu ermöglichen.
The Internet of Things (IoT) recently developed from the far-away vision of ubiquitous computing into very tangible endeavors in politics and economy, implemented in expensive preparedness programs. Experts predict considerable changes in business models that need to be addressed by organizations in order to respond to competition. Although there is a need to develop strategies for upcoming transformations, organizational change literature did not turn to the specific change related to the new technology yet. This work aims at investigating IoT-related organizational change by identifying and classifying different change types. It therefore combines the methodological approach of grounded theory with a discussion and classification of identified change informed by a structured literature review of organizational change literature. This includes a meta-analysis of case studies using a qualitative, exploratory coding approach to identify categories of organizational change related to the introduction of IoT. Furthermore a comparison of the identified categories to former technology-related change is provided using the example of Electronic Business (e-business), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. As a main result, this work develops a comprehensive model of IoT-related business change. The model presents two main themes of change indicating that personal smart things will transform businesses by means of using more personal devices, suggesting and scheduling actions of their users, and trying to avoid hazards. At the same time, the availability of information in organizations will further increase to a state where information is available ubiquitously. This will ultimately enable accessing real time information about objects and persons anytime and from any place. As a secondary result, this work gives an overview on concepts of technology-related organizational change in academic literature.
The extensive literature in the data visualization field indicates that the process of creating efficient data visualizations requires the data designer to have a large set of skills from different fields (such as computer science, user experience, and business expertise). However, there is a lack of guidance about the visualization process itself. This thesis aims to investigate the different processes for creating data visualizations and develop an integrated framework to guide the process of creating data visualizations that enable the user to create more useful and usable data visualizations. Firstly, existing frameworks in the literature will be identified, analyzed and compared. During this analysis, eight views of the visualization process are developed. These views represent the set of activities which should be done in the visualization process. Then, a preliminary integrated framework is developed based on an analysis of these findings. This new integrated framework is tested in the field of Social Collaboration Analytics on an example from the UniConnect platform. Lastly, the integrated framework is refined and improved based on the results of testing with the help of diagrams, visualizations and textual description. The results show that the visualization process is not a waterfall type. It is the iterative methodology with the certain phases of work, demonstrating how to address the eight views with different levels of stakeholder involvement. The findings are the basis for a visualization process which can be used in future work to develop the fully functional methodology.
With global and distributed project teams being increasingly common Collaborative Project Management is becoming the prevalent paradigm for the work in most organisations. Software has for many years been one of the most used tools for supporting Project Management and with the focus on Collaborative Project Management and accompanied by the emergence of Enterprise Collaboration Systems (ECS), Collaborative Project Management Software (CPMS) is gaining increased attention. This thesis examines the capabilities of CPMS for the long-term management of information which not only includes the management of files within these systems, but the management of all types of digital business documents, particularly social business documents. Previous research shows that social content in collaboration software is often poorly managed which poses challenges to meeting performance and conformance objectives in a business. Based on literature research, requirements for the long-term management of information in CPMS are defined and 7 CPMS tools are analysed regarding the content they contain and the functionalities for the long-term management of this content they offer. The study shows that CPMS by and large are not able to meet the long-term information management needs of an organisation on their own and that only the tools geared towards enterprise customers have sufficient capabilities to support the implementation of an Enterprise Information Management strategy.