Organizational reframing : the commercialization of a public sector organization

The purpose of this study is to elaborate shared schema change theory in the context of the radical restructuring-commercialization of an Australian public infrastructure organization. Commercialization of the case organization imposed high individual and collective cognitive processing and emotional demands as organizational members sought to develop new shared schema. Existing schema change research suggests that radical restructuring renders pre-existing shared schema irrelevant and triggers new schema development through experiential learning (Balogun and Johnson, 2004). Focus groups and semi-structured interviews were conducted at four points over a three-year period. The analysis revealed that shared schema change occurred in three broad phases: (1) radical restructuring and aftermath; (2) new CEO and new change process schema, and: (3) large-group meeting and schema change. Key findings include: (1) radical structural change does not necessarily trigger new shared schema development as indicated in prior research; (2) leadership matters, particularly in framing new means-ends schema; (3) how change leader interventions are sequenced has an important influence on shared schema change, and; (4) the creation of facilitated social processes have an important influence on shared schema change.

The structured and practical approach in development of decision support system for consultant selection in public sector infrastructure project

Nowadays, most of the infrastructure development projects undertaken are complex in nature. Practically, public clients who do not have a good understanding of the design and management may suffer severe losses, especially for infrastructure projects. There is a need for luring the right consultant to secure client's investment in infrastructure developments. Throughout the project life cycle, consultants play vital role from the inception to completion stage of a project. A few studies in Malaysia show that infrastructure projects involving irrigation and drainage have experience problems such as poor workmanship, delay and cost overrun due to the consultant's inability or the client incompetence of recruiting consultants in time. This highlights the need of aided decision making and an efficient system to select the best consultant by using Decision Support System (DSS). On the other hand, recent trends reveal that most DSS in construction only concentrate on decision model development. These models are impractical and unused as they are complicated or difficult for laymen such as project managers to utilize. Thus, this research attempts to develop an efficient DSS for consultant selection namely consultDeSS. Driven by the motivation and research aims, this study deployed Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM) dominant with a combination of case studies at the Malaysian Department of Irrigation and Drainage (DID). Two real projects involving irrigation and drainage infrastructure were used to design, implement and evaluate the artefact. The 3-tier consultDeSS was revised after the evaluation and the design was significantly improved based on user feedback. By developing desirable tools that fit client's needs will enhance the productivity and minimize conflict within groups and organisations. The tool is more usable and efficient compared to previous studies in construction. Thus, this research has demonstrated a purposeful artefact with a practical and valid structured development approach that is applicable in a variety of problems in construction discipline.

Kaleidoscope : Reframing learning and teaching evaluation through a shared stakeholder lens

Sector wide interest in Reframe: QUT’s Evaluation Framework continues with a number of institutions requesting finer details as QUT embeds the new approach to evaluation across the university in 2013. This interest, both nationally and internationally has warranted QUT’s collegial response to draw upon its experiences from developing Reframe into distilling and offering Kaleidoscope back to the sector. The word Reframe is a relevant reference for QUT’s specific re-evaluation, reframing and adoption of a new approach to evaluation; whereas Kaleidoscope reflects the unique lens through which any other institution will need to view their own cultural specificity and local context through an extensive user-led stakeholder engagement approach when introducing new approaches to learning and teaching evaluation. Kaleidoscope’s objectives are for QUT to develop its research-based stakeholder approach to distil the successful experience exhibited in the Reframe Project into a transferable set of guidelines for use by other tertiary institutions across the sector. These guidelines will assist others to design, develop, and deploy, their own culturally specific widespread organisational change informed by stakeholder engagement and organisational buy-in. It is intended that these guidelines will promote, support and enable other tertiary institutions to embark on their own evaluation projects and maximise impact. Kaleidoscope offers an institutional case study of widespread organisational change underpinned by Reframe’s (i) evidence-based methodology; (ii) research including published environmental scan, literature review (Alderman, et al., 2012), development of a conceptual model (Alderman, et al., in press 2013), project management principles (Alderman & Melanie, 2012) and national conference peer reviews; and (iii) year-long strategic project with national outreach to collaboratively engage the development of a draft set of National Guidelines. Kaleidoscope’s aims are to inform Higher Education evaluation policy development through national stakeholder engagement, the finalisation of proposed National Guidelines. In correlation with the conference paper, the authors will present a Draft Guidelines and Framework ready for external peer review by evaluation practitioners from the Higher Education sector, as part of Kaleidoscope’s dissemination strategy (Hinton & Gannaway, 2011) applying illuminative evaluation theory (Parlett & Hamilton, 1976), through conference workshops and ongoing discussions (Shapiro, et al., 1983; Jacobs, 2000). The initial National Guidelines will be distilled from the Reframe: QUT’s Evaluation Framework’s Policy, Protocols, and incorporated Business Rules. It is intended that the outcomes of Kaleidoscope are owned by and reflect sectoral engagement, including iterative evaluation through multiple avenues of dissemination and collaboration including the Higher Education sector. The dissemination strategy with the inclusion of Illuminative Evaluation methodology provides an inclusive opportunity for other institutions and stakeholders across the Higher Education sector to give voice through the information-gathering component of evaluating the draft Guidelines, providing a comprehensive understanding of the complex realities experienced across the Higher Education sector, and thereby ‘illuminating’ both the shared and unique lenses and contexts. This process will enable any final guidelines developed to have broader applicability, greater acceptance, enhanced sustainability and additional relevance benefiting the Higher Education sector, and the adoption and adaption by any single institution for their local contexts.

Kaleidoscope : illuminating learning and teaching evaluation for a shared stakeholder lens

Within the Australian higher education sector, institutions are required to evaluate teaching, units and courses to assure the quality of the student learning experience, however with hardly any regulatory parameters guiding institutions, and with disparate practices, there are few opportunities to benchmakr across institutions or the sector. QUT has received interest and requests from national and international universities on accessing Reframe: QUT's Evaluation Framework.

Block models for improved earthwork allocation planning in linear infrastructure construction

Earthwork planning has been considered in this article and a generic block partitioning and modelling approach has been devised to provide strategic plans of various levels of detail. Conceptually this approach is more accurate and comprehensive than others, for instance those that are section based. In response to environmental concerns the metric for decision making was fuel consumption and emissions. Haulage distance and gradient are also included as they are important components of these metrics. Advantageously the fuel consumption metric is generic and captures the physical difficulties of travelling over inclines of different gradients, that is consistent across all hauling vehicles. For validation, the proposed models and techniques have been applied to a real world road project. The numerical investigations have demonstrated that the models can be solved with relatively little CPU time. The proposed block models also result in solutions of superior quality, i.e. they have reduced fuel consumption and cost. Furthermore the plans differ considerably from those based solely upon a distance based metric thus demonstrating a need for industry to reflect upon their current practices.

Data requirements of hedonic models in determining the impact of infrastructure charges on new housing costs

The use of hedonic models to estimate the effects of various factors on house prices is well established. This paper examines a number of international hedonic house price models that seek to quantify the effect of infrastructure charges on new house prices. This work is an important factor in the housing affordability debate, with many governments in high growth areas having user-pays infrastructure charging policies operating in tandem with housing affordability objectives, with no empirical evidence on the impact of one on the other. This research finds there is little consistency between existing models and the data sets utilised. Specification appears dependent upon data availability rather than sound theoretical grounding. This may lead to a lack of external validity with model specification dependent upon data availability rather than sound theoretical grounding.

Developing a dashboard for real-time data stream composition and visualization

Technological advances have led to an influx of affordable hardware that supports sensing, computation and communication. This hardware is increasingly deployed in public and private spaces, tracking and aggregating a wealth of real-time environmental data. Although these technologies are the focus of several research areas, there is a lack of research dealing with the problem of making these capabilities accessible to everyday users. This thesis represents a first step towards developing systems that will allow users to leverage the available infrastructure and create custom tailored solutions. It explores how this notion can be utilized in the context of energy monitoring to improve conventional approaches. The project adopted a user-centered design process to inform the development of a flexible system for real-time data stream composition and visualization. This system features an extensible architecture and defines a unified API for heterogeneous data streams. Rather than displaying the data in a predetermined fashion, it makes this information available as building blocks that can be combined and shared. It is based on the insight that individual users have diverse information needs and presentation preferences. Therefore, it allows users to compose rich information displays, incorporating personally relevant data from an extensive information ecosystem. The prototype was evaluated in an exploratory study to observe its natural use in a real-world setting, gathering empirical usage statistics and conducting semi-structured interviews. The results show that a high degree of customization does not warrant sustained usage. Other factors were identified, yielding recommendations for increasing the impact on energy consumption.

The development of shared understandings of assessment policy : travelling between global and local contexts

In this paper, teachers’ enactment of assessment policy within demands for accountability and consistency of teacher judgements is considered. Evidence is drawn from a qualitative study involving 50 middle school teachers from Queensland, Australia, who participated in online social moderation meetings with teachers located in dispersed areas around the state. The study presents how travelling policy is embedded in local histories and cultures, in particular within systems of accountability; and the different layers of what may be considered ‘local’. The paper examines the intersections of travelling and embedded policy, and global and local contexts as these are enacted through online moderation meetings.

Validation of an instrument to measure governance and performance on collaborative infrastructure projects

Collaborative infrastructure projects use hybrid formal and informal governance structures to manage transactions. Based on previous desk-top research, the authors identified the key mechanisms underlying project governance, and posited the performance implications of the governance (Chen et al. 2012). The current paper extends that qualitative research by testing the veracity of those findings using data from 320 Australian construction organisations. The results provide, for the first time, reliable and valid scales to measure governance and performance of collaborative projects, and the relationship between them. The results confirm seven of seven hypothesised governance mechanisms; 30 of 43 hypothesised underlying actions; eight of eight hypothesised key performance indicators; and the dual importance of formal and informal governance. A startling finding of the study was that the implementation intensity of informal mechanisms (non-contractual conditions) is a greater predictor of project performance variance than that of formal mechanisms (contractual conditions). Further, contractual conditions do not directly impact project performance; instead their impact is mediated by the non-contractual features of a project. Obligations established under the contract are not sufficient to optimise project performance.

Slicing big data - Twitter, gambling and time sensitive information

Big Data presents many challenges related to volume, whether one is interested in studying past datasets or, even more problematically, attempting to work with live streams of data. The most obvious challenge, in a ‘noisy’ environment such as contemporary social media, is to collect the pertinent information; be that information for a specific study, tweets which can inform emergency services or other responders to an ongoing crisis, or give an advantage to those involved in prediction markets. Often, such a process is iterative, with keywords and hashtags changing with the passage of time, and both collection and analytic methodologies need to be continually adapted to respond to this changing information. While many of the data sets collected and analyzed are preformed, that is they are built around a particular keyword, hashtag, or set of authors, they still contain a large volume of information, much of which is unnecessary for the current purpose and/or potentially useful for future projects. Accordingly, this panel considers methods for separating and combining data to optimize big data research and report findings to stakeholders. The first paper considers possible coding mechanisms for incoming tweets during a crisis, taking a large stream of incoming tweets and selecting which of those need to be immediately placed in front of responders, for manual filtering and possible action. The paper suggests two solutions for this, content analysis and user profiling. In the former case, aspects of the tweet are assigned a score to assess its likely relationship to the topic at hand, and the urgency of the information, whilst the latter attempts to identify those users who are either serving as amplifiers of information or are known as an authoritative source. Through these techniques, the information contained in a large dataset could be filtered down to match the expected capacity of emergency responders, and knowledge as to the core keywords or hashtags relating to the current event is constantly refined for future data collection. The second paper is also concerned with identifying significant tweets, but in this case tweets relevant to particular prediction market; tennis betting. As increasing numbers of professional sports men and women create Twitter accounts to communicate with their fans, information is being shared regarding injuries, form and emotions which have the potential to impact on future results. As has already been demonstrated with leading US sports, such information is extremely valuable. Tennis, as with American Football (NFL) and Baseball (MLB) has paid subscription services which manually filter incoming news sources, including tweets, for information valuable to gamblers, gambling operators, and fantasy sports players. However, whilst such services are still niche operations, much of the value of information is lost by the time it reaches one of these services. The paper thus considers how information could be filtered from twitter user lists and hash tag or keyword monitoring, assessing the value of the source, information, and the prediction markets to which it may relate. The third paper examines methods for collecting Twitter data and following changes in an ongoing, dynamic social movement, such as the Occupy Wall Street movement. It involves the development of technical infrastructure to collect and make the tweets available for exploration and analysis. A strategy to respond to changes in the social movement is also required or the resulting tweets will only reflect the discussions and strategies the movement used at the time the keyword list is created — in a way, keyword creation is part strategy and part art. In this paper we describe strategies for the creation of a social media archive, specifically tweets related to the Occupy Wall Street movement, and methods for continuing to adapt data collection strategies as the movement’s presence in Twitter changes over time. We also discuss the opportunities and methods to extract data smaller slices of data from an archive of social media data to support a multitude of research projects in multiple fields of study. The common theme amongst these papers is that of constructing a data set, filtering it for a specific purpose, and then using the resulting information to aid in future data collection. The intention is that through the papers presented, and subsequent discussion, the panel will inform the wider research community not only on the objectives and limitations of data collection, live analytics, and filtering, but also on current and in-development methodologies that could be adopted by those working with such datasets, and how such approaches could be customized depending on the project stakeholders.

Learning routines used by firms during construction of infrastructure projects using the alliance procurement method

Collaborative contracting has emerged over the past 15 years as an innovative project delivery framework that is particularly suited to infrastructure projects. Australia leads the world in the development of project and program alliance approaches to collaborative delivery. These approaches are considered to promise superior project results. However, very little is known about the learning routines that are most widely used in support of collaborative projects in general and alliance projects in particular. The literature on absorptive capacity and dynamic capabilities indicates that such learning enhances project performance. The learning routines employed at corporate level during the operation of collaborative infrastructure projects in Australia were examined through a large survey conducted in 2013. This paper presents a descriptive summary of the preliminary findings. The survey captured the experiences of 320 practitioners of collaborative construction projects, including public and private sector clients, contractors, consultants and suppliers (three per cent of projects were located in New Zealand, but for brevity’s sake the sample is referred to as Australian). The majority of projects identified used alliances (78.6%); whilst 9% used Early Contractor Involvement (ECI) contracts and 2.7% used Early Tender Involvement contracts, which are ‘slimmer’ types of collaborative contract. The remaining 9.7% of respondents used traditional contracts that employed some collaborative elements. The majority of projects were delivered for public sector clients (86.3%), and/or clients experienced with asset procurement (89.6%). All of the projects delivered infrastructure assets; one third in the road sector, one third in the water sector, one fifth in the rail sector, and the rest spread across energy, building and mining. Learning routines were explored within three interconnected phases: knowledge exploration, transformation and exploitation. The results show that explorative and exploitative learning routines were applied to a similar extent. Transformative routines were applied to a relatively low extent. It was also found that the most highly applied routine is ‘regularly applying new knowledge to collaborative projects’; and the least popular routine was ‘staff incentives to encourage information sharing about collaborative projects’. Future research planned by the authors will examine the impact of these routines on project performance.

The link between infrastructure charges and housing affordability in Australia: Where is the empirical evidence?

Developer paid charges or contributions are a commonly used infrastructure funding mechanism for local governments. However, developers claim that these costs are merely passed on to home buyers, with adverse effects to housing affordability. Despite a plethora of government reports and industry advocacy, there remains no empirical evidence in Australia to confirm or quantify this passing on effect to home buyers and hence no data for which governments to base policy decision upon. This paper examines the question of who really pays for urban infrastructure and the impact of infrastructure charges on housing affordability. It presents the findings of a number of international empirical studies that provide evidence that infrastructure charges do increase house prices. Based on international findings, and in the absence of any Australian research, then these findings suggest that if the international findings are transferable, then there is empirical evidence to support the proposition that developer paid infrastructure charges are a significant contributor to increasing house prices.

Talk about a YouTube video in preschool : the mutual production of shared understanding for learning with digital technology

Much of what is written about digital technologies in preschool contexts focuses on young children’s acquisition of skills rather than their meaning-making during use of technologies. In this paper, we consider how the viewing of a YouTube video was used by a teacher and children to produce shared understandings about it. Conversation analysis of talk and interaction during the viewing of the video establishes some of the ways that individual accounts of events were produced for others and then endorsed as shared understandings. The analysis establishes how adults and children made use of verbal and embodied actions during interactions to produce shared understandings of the YouTube video, the events it recorded and written commentary about those events

A shared reading intervention with parents to enhance young children’s early literacy skills

Parental reading to children from an early age has been shown to enhance children’s emergent literacy skills. A pragmatic randomized controlled trial (RCT) was used to investigate the effects of two forms of shared reading interventions on children’s language and literacy skills. Parents of 80 preparatory year children from outer suburban schools of an Australian metropolitan city were trained to use shared reading strategies in an eight-week home intervention. Families were assigned to one of three groups: Dialogic Reading (DR), Dialogic Reading with the addition of Print Referencing (DR + PR), or an attention-matched control group. The sample comprised 42 boys and 38 girls ranging in age from 4.9 years to 6.3 years (M = 5.5, SD = 0.3). Data were collected at pre, post, and at three months follow-up. Measures assessed children’s oral language (receptive and expressive vocabulary), phonological awareness (rhyme, word completion), alphabet knowledge, and concepts about print. Analyses of change from pre to post showed significant effects for the DR and DR + PR groups compared to the control group on three of the six measures: expressive language, rhyme, and concepts about print. At 3-month follow-up assessment, the two intervention groups maintained significantly better performance on the measure of concepts of print only. At both time points, there were no group differences between the DR and DR+PR conditions. These findings illustrate the potential of a brief home focused intervention on promoting children’s emergent literacy.

Primary control level of parallel distributed energy resources converters in system of multiple interconnected autonomous microgrids within self-healing networks

To minimise the number of load sheddings in a microgrid (MG) during autonomous operation, islanded neighbour MGs can be interconnected if they are on a self-healing network and an extra generation capacity is available in the distributed energy resources (DER) of one of the MGs. In this way, the total load in the system of interconnected MGs can be shared by all the DERs within those MGs. However, for this purpose, carefully designed self-healing and supply restoration control algorithm, protection systems and communication infrastructure are required at the network and MG levels. In this study, first, a hierarchical control structure is discussed for interconnecting the neighbour autonomous MGs where the introduced primary control level is the main focus of this study. Through the developed primary control level, this study demonstrates how the parallel DERs in the system of multiple interconnected autonomous MGs can properly share the load of the system. This controller is designed such that the converter-interfaced DERs operate in a voltage-controlled mode following a decentralised power sharing algorithm based on droop control. DER converters are controlled based on a per-phase technique instead of a conventional direct-quadratic transformation technique. In addition, linear quadratic regulator-based state feedback controllers, which are more stable than conventional proportional integrator controllers, are utilised to prevent instability and weak dynamic performances of the DERs when autonomous MGs are interconnected. The efficacy of the primary control level of the DERs in the system of multiple interconnected autonomous MGs is validated through the PSCAD/EMTDC simulations considering detailed dynamic models of DERs and converters.