Innovative project procurement in the Queensland government : the Woodford Correctional Centre

Much of the effort of the construction industry is directed towards the provision of services and products, many with substantial long term implications. Systems and procedures have evolved over centuries to provide these services and products, but inefficiencies have developed. One strategy for improving the efficiency of the construction industry is to restructure the systems and procedures which deliver projects so that improved benefits to the end users are provided. In this paper, contemporary systems and procedures for the delivery of projects are reviewed and the roles of the major stakeholders are examined. The recent construction of Woodford Correctional Centre in Queensland is reviewed as a case study in restructuring the delivery process and the lessons learned from this successful project are summarised.

Leveraging R&D investment for the Australian built environment

This paper discusses a current research project building new understandings and knowledge relevant to R&D funding strategies in Australia. Building on a retrospective analysis of R&D trends and industry outcomes, an industry roadmap will be developed to inform R&D policies more attuned to future industry needs to improve research investment effectiveness. The project will also include analysis of research team formation and management (involving end users from public and private sectors together with research and knowledge institutions), and dissemination of outcomes and uptake in the Australian building and construction industry. The project will build on previous research extending open innovation system theory and network analysis and procurement, focused on R&D. Through the application of dynamic capabilities and strategic foresighting theory, an industry roadmap for future research investment will be developed, providing a stronger foundation for more targeted policy recommendations. This research will contribute to more effective construction processes in the future through more targeted research funding and more effective research partnerships between industry and researchers.

Conceptualising use for information systems (IS) success

This thesis conceptualises Use for IS (Information Systems) success. While Use in this study describes the extent to which an IS is incorporated into the user’s processes or tasks, success of an IS is the measure of the degree to which the person using the system is better off. For IS success, the conceptualisation of Use offers new perspectives on describing and measuring Use. We test the philosophies of the conceptualisation using empirical evidence in an Enterprise Systems (ES) context. Results from the empirical analysis contribute insights to the existing body of knowledge on the role of Use and demonstrate Use as an important factor and measure of IS success. System Use is a central theme in IS research. For instance, Use is regarded as an important dimension of IS success. Despite its recognition, the Use dimension of IS success reportedly suffers from an all too simplistic definition, misconception, poor specification of its complex nature, and an inadequacy of measurement approaches (Bokhari 2005; DeLone and McLean 2003; Zigurs 1993). Given the above, Burton-Jones and Straub (2006) urge scholars to revisit the concept of system Use, consider a stronger theoretical treatment, and submit the construct to further validation in its intended nomological net. On those considerations, this study re-conceptualises Use for IS success. The new conceptualisation adopts a work-process system-centric lens and draws upon the characteristics of modern system types, key user groups and their information needs, and the incorporation of IS in work processes. With these characteristics, the definition of Use and how it may be measured is systematically established. Use is conceptualised as a second-order measurement construct determined by three sub-dimensions: attitude of its users, depth, and amount of Use. The construct is positioned in a modified IS success research model, in an attempt to demonstrate its central role in determining IS success in an ES setting. A two-stage mixed-methods research design—incorporating a sequential explanatory strategy—was adopted to collect empirical data and to test the research model. The first empirical investigation involved an experiment and a survey of ES end users at a leading tertiary education institute in Australia. The second, a qualitative investigation, involved a series of interviews with real-world operational managers in large Indian private-sector companies to canvass their day-to-day experiences with ES. The research strategy adopted has a stronger quantitative leaning. The survey analysis results demonstrate the aptness of Use as an antecedent and a consequence of IS success, and furthermore, as a mediator between the quality of IS and the impacts of IS on individuals. Qualitative data analysis on the other hand, is used to derive a framework for classifying the diversity of ES Use behaviour. The qualitative results establish that workers Use IS in their context to orientate, negotiate, or innovate. The implications are twofold. For research, this study contributes to cumulative IS success knowledge an approach for defining, contextualising, measuring, and validating Use. For practice, research findings not only provide insights for educators when incorporating ES for higher education, but also demonstrate how operational managers incorporate ES into their work practices. Research findings leave the way open for future, larger-scale research into how industry practitioners interact with an ES to complete their work in varied organisational environments.

Designing disruption : linking participatory design and design thinking in technology orientated industries

A vast proportion of companies nowadays are looking to design and are focusing on the end users as a means of driving new projects. However still many companies are drawn to technological improvements which drive innovation within their industry context. The Australian livestock industry is no different. To date the adoption of new products and services within the livestock industry has been documented as being quite slow. This paper investigates how disruptive innovation should be a priority for these technologically focused companies and demonstrates how the use of design led innovation can bring about a higher quality engagement between end user and company alike. A case study linking participatory design and design thinking is presented. Within this, a conceptual model of presenting future scenarios to internal and external stakeholders is applied to the livestock industry; assisting companies to apply strategy, culture and advancement in meaningful product offerings to consumers.

Demand side response to mitigate electrical peak demand in Eastern and Southern Australia

The aim of this work is to develop a Demand-Side-Response (DSR) model, which assists electricity end-users to be engaged in mitigating peak demands on the electricity network in Eastern and Southern Australia. The proposed innovative model will comprise a technical set-up of a programmable internet relay, a router, solid state switches in addition to the suitable software to control electricity demand at user's premises. The software on appropriate multimedia tool (CD Rom) will be curtailing/shifting electric loads to the most appropriate time of the day following the implemented economic model, which is designed to be maximizing financial benefits to electricity consumers. Additionally the model is targeting a national electrical load be spread-out evenly throughout the year in order to satisfy best economic performance for electricity generation, transmission and distribution. The model is applicable in region managed by the Australian Energy Management Operator (AEMO) covering states of Eastern-, Southern-Australia and Tasmania.

Development of the sustainable building and construction products industry in Australia

This paper draws on a major study the authors conducted for the Australian Government in 2009. It focuses on the diffusion issues surrounding the uptake of sustainable building and construction products in Australia. Innovative sustainable products can minimise the environmental impact during construction, while maximising asset performance, durability and re-use. However, there are significant challenges faced by designers and clients in the selection of appropriate sustainable products in consideration of the integrated design solution, including overall energy efficiency, water conservation, maintenance and durability, low-impact use and consumption. The paper is a review of the current state of sustainable energy and material product innovations in Australia. It examines the system dynamics surrounding these innovations as well as the drivers and obstacles to their diffusion throughout the Australian construction industry. The case product types reviewed comprise: solar energy technology, small wind turbines, advanced concrete technology, and warm-mixed asphalt. The conclusions highlight the important role played by Australian governments in facilitating improved adoption rates. This applies to governments in their various roles, but particularly as clients/owners, regulators, and investors in education, training, research and development. In their role as clients/owners, the paper suggests that government can better facilitate innovation within the construction industry by adjusting specification policies to encourage the uptake of sustainable products. In the role as regulators, findings suggest governments should be encouraging the application of innovative finance options and positive end-user incentives to promote sustainable product uptake. Also, further education for project-based firms and the client/end users about the long-term financial and environmental benefits of innovative sustainable products is required. As more of the economy’s resources are diverted away from business-as-usual and into the use of sustainable products, some project-based firms may face short-term financial pain in re-shaping their businesses. Government policy initiatives can encourage firms make the necessary adjustments to improve innovative sustainable product diffusion throughout the industry.

Observing the relevance of an information systems success model

This paper contributes to the rigor vs. relevance debate in the Information Systems (IS) discipline. Using the Action Research methodology, this study evaluates the relevance of a rigorously validated IS evaluation model in practice. The study captures observations of operational end-users employing a market leading Enterprise System application for procurement and order fulfillment in an organization. The analysis of the observations demonstrates the broad relevance of the measurement instrument. More importantly, the study identifies several improvements and possible confusions in applying the instrument in the practice.

Reconfiguration or innovation in supply chains?

This research explores supply chain competitiveness and dynamic capabilities. It examines a pilot group of Australian supply chain organisations to understand the importance of dynamic capability in building innovation capacity for competitive advantage, and the concept of adopting a strategic approach to supply chain relationship building. A supply chain is after all a group of intra and interorganisational relationships delivering demand to end-users. This exploratory study confirms a positive relationship between the variables indicating both a strategic intent to develop relational capability, and very strong predictive linkages between the importance placed on developing supply chain dynamic capability and achieving supply chain innovation capacity as a competitive advantage.

The future of the internet economy : addressing challenges facing the implementation of the Australian national broadband network

Innovation is vital for the future of Australia.s internet economy. Innovations rely on businesses. ability to innovate. Businesses. ability to innovate relies on their employees. The more these individual end users engage in the internet economy, the better businesses. engagement will be. The less these individual end users engage, the less likely a business is to engage and innovate. This means, for the internet economy to function at its fullest potential, it is essential that individual Australians have the capacity to engage with it and participate in it. The Australian federal government is working to facilitate the internet economy through policies, legislation and practices that implement high-speed broadband. The National Broadband Network will be a vital tool for Australia.s internet economy. Its .chief importance¡® is that it will provide faster internet access speeds that will facilitate access to internet services and content. However, an appropriate infrastructure and internet speed is only part of the picture. As the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development identified, appropriate government policies are also needed to ensure that vital services are more accessible by consumers. The thesis identifies essential theories and principles underpinning the internet economy and from which the concept of connectedness is developed. Connectedness is defined as the ability of end users to connect with internet content and services, other individuals and organisations, and government. That is, their ability to operate in the internet economy. The NBN will be vital in ensuring connectedness into the future. What is not currently addressed by existing access regimes is how to facilitate end user access capacity and participation. The thesis concludes by making recommendations to the federal government as to what the governing principles of the Australian internet economy should include in order to enable individual end user access capacity.

BioPatML.NET – a bioinformatic pattern search engine

In the present paper, we introduce BioPatML.NET, an application library for the Microsoft Windows .NET framework [2] that implements the BioPatML pattern definition language and sequence search engine. BioPatML.NET is integrated with the Microsoft Biology Foundation (MBF) application library [3], unifying the parsers and annotation services supported or emerging through MBF with the language, search framework and pattern repository of BioPatML. End users who wish to exploit the BioPatML.NET engine and repository without engaging the services of a programmer may do so via the freely accessible web-based BioPatML Editor, which we describe below.

Process mining manifesto

Process mining techniques are able to extract knowledge from event logs commonly available in today’s information systems. These techniques provide new means to discover, monitor, and improve processes in a variety of application domains. There are two main drivers for the growing interest in process mining. On the one hand, more and more events are being recorded, thus, providing detailed information about the history of processes. On the other hand, there is a need to improve and support business processes in competitive and rapidly changing environments. This manifesto is created by the IEEE Task Force on Process Mining and aims to promote the topic of process mining. Moreover, by defining a set of guiding principles and listing important challenges, this manifesto hopes to serve as a guide for software developers, scientists, consultants, business managers, and end-users. The goal is to increase the maturity of process mining as a new tool to improve the (re)design, control, and support of operational business processes.

Impact of a data warehouse model for improved decision-making process in healthcare

The health system is one sector dealing with a deluge of complex data. Many healthcare organisations struggle to utilise these volumes of health data effectively and efficiently. Also, there are many healthcare organisations, which still have stand-alone systems, not integrated for management of information and decision-making. This shows, there is a need for an effective system to capture, collate and distribute this health data. Therefore, implementing the data warehouse concept in healthcare is potentially one of the solutions to integrate health data. Data warehousing has been used to support business intelligence and decision-making in many other sectors such as the engineering, defence and retail sectors. The research problem that is going to be addressed is, "how can data warehousing assist the decision-making process in healthcare". To address this problem the researcher has narrowed an investigation focusing on a cardiac surgery unit. This research used the cardiac surgery unit at the Prince Charles Hospital (TPCH) as the case study. The cardiac surgery unit at TPCH uses a stand-alone database of patient clinical data, which supports clinical audit, service management and research functions. However, much of the time, the interaction between the cardiac surgery unit information system with other units is minimal. There is a limited and basic two-way interaction with other clinical and administrative databases at TPCH which support decision-making processes. The aims of this research are to investigate what decision-making issues are faced by the healthcare professionals with the current information systems and how decision-making might be improved within this healthcare setting by implementing an aligned data warehouse model or models. As a part of the research the researcher will propose and develop a suitable data warehouse prototype based on the cardiac surgery unit needs and integrating the Intensive Care Unit database, Clinical Costing unit database (Transition II) and Quality and Safety unit database [electronic discharge summary (e-DS)]. The goal is to improve the current decision-making processes. The main objectives of this research are to improve access to integrated clinical and financial data, providing potentially better information for decision-making for both improved from the questionnaire and by referring to the literature, the results indicate a centralised data warehouse model for the cardiac surgery unit at this stage. A centralised data warehouse model addresses current needs and can also be upgraded to an enterprise wide warehouse model or federated data warehouse model as discussed in the many consulted publications. The data warehouse prototype was able to be developed using SAS enterprise data integration studio 4.2 and the data was analysed using SAS enterprise edition 4.3. In the final stage, the data warehouse prototype was evaluated by collecting feedback from the end users. This was achieved by using output created from the data warehouse prototype as examples of the data desired and possible in a data warehouse environment. According to the feedback collected from the end users, implementation of a data warehouse was seen to be a useful tool to inform management options, provide a more complete representation of factors related to a decision scenario and potentially reduce information product development time. However, there are many constraints exist in this research. For example the technical issues such as data incompatibilities, integration of the cardiac surgery database and e-DS database servers and also, Queensland Health information restrictions (Queensland Health information related policies, patient data confidentiality and ethics requirements), limited availability of support from IT technical staff and time restrictions. These factors have influenced the process for the warehouse model development, necessitating an incremental approach. This highlights the presence of many practical barriers to data warehousing and integration at the clinical service level. Limitations included the use of a small convenience sample of survey respondents, and a single site case report study design. As mentioned previously, the proposed data warehouse is a prototype and was developed using only four database repositories. Despite this constraint, the research demonstrates that by implementing a data warehouse at the service level, decision-making is supported and data quality issues related to access and availability can be reduced, providing many benefits. Output reports produced from the data warehouse prototype demonstrated usefulness for the improvement of decision-making in the management of clinical services, and quality and safety monitoring for better clinical care. However, in the future, the centralised model selected can be upgraded to an enterprise wide architecture by integrating with additional hospital units’ databases.

The impact of knowledge integration on enterprise system success

Despite promising benefits and advantages, there are reports of failures and low realisation of benefits in Enterprise System (ES) initiatives. Among the research on the factors that influence ES success, there is a dearth of studies on the knowledge implications of multiple end-user groups using the same ES application. An ES facilitates the work of several user groups, ranging from strategic management, management, to operational staff, all using the same system for multiple objectives. Given the fundamental characteristics of ES – integration of modules, business process views, and aspects of information transparency – it is necessary that all frequent end-users share a reasonable amount of common knowledge and integrate their knowledge to yield new knowledge. Recent literature on ES implementation highlights the importance of Knowledge Integration (KI) for implementation success. Unfortunately, the importance of KI is often overlooked and little about the role of KI in ES success is known. Many organisations do not achieve the potential benefits from their ES investment because they do not consider the need or their ability to integrate their employees’ knowledge. This study is designed to improve our understanding of the influence of KI among ES end-users on operational ES success. The three objectives of the study are: (I) to identify and validate the antecedents of KI effectiveness, (II) to investigate the impact of KI effectiveness on the goodness of individuals’ ES-knowledge base, and (III) to examine the impact of the goodness of individuals’ ES-knowledge base on the operational ES success. For this purpose, we employ the KI factors identified by Grant (1996) and an IS-impact measurement model from the work of Gable et al. (2008) to examine ES success. The study derives its findings from data gathered from six Malaysian companies in order to obtain the three-fold goal of this thesis as outlined above. The relationships between the antecedents of KI effectiveness and its consequences are tested using 188 responses to a survey representing the views of management and operational employment cohorts. Using statistical methods, we confirm three antecedents of KI effectiveness and the consequences of the antecedents on ES success are validated. The findings demonstrate a statistically positive impact of KI effectiveness of ES success, with KI effectiveness contributing to almost one-third of ES success. This research makes a number of contributions to the understanding of the influence of KI on ES success. First, based on the empirical work using a complete nomological net model, the role of KI effectiveness on ES success is evidenced. Second, the model provides a theoretical lens for a more comprehensive understanding of the impact of KI on the level of ES success. Third, restructuring the dimensions of the knowledge-based theory to fit the context of ES extends its applicability and generalisability to contemporary Information Systems. Fourth, the study develops and validates measures for the antecedents of KI effectiveness. Fifth, the study demonstrates the statistically significant positive influence of the goodness of KI on ES success. From a practical viewpoint, this study emphasises the importance of KI effectiveness as a direct antecedent of ES success. Practical lessons can be drawn from the work done in this study to empirically identify the critical factors among the antecedents of KI effectiveness that should be given attention.

Identification of selection criteria for operational variations of the design-build system : a delphi study in China

The design-build (DB) system has been demonstrated as an effective delivery method and has gained popularity worldwide. However it is observed that a number of operational variations of DB system have emerged since the last decade to cater for different client’s requirements. After the client decides to procure his project through the DB system, he still has to choose an appropriate configuration to deliver their projects optimally. However, there is little research on the selection of DB operational variations. One of the main reasons for this is the lack of evaluation criteria for determining the appropriateness of each operational variation. To obtain such criteria, a three-round Delphi survey has been conducted with 20 construction experts in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Seven top selection criteria were identified. These are: (1) availability of competent design-builders; (2) client’s capabilities; (3) project complexity; (4) client’s control of project; (5) early commencement & short duration; (6) reduced responsibility or involvement; and (7) clearly defined end user’s requirements. These selection criteria were found to have a statistically significant agreement. These findings may furnish various stakeholders, DB clients in particular, with better insight to understand and compare the different operational variations of the DB system.

Improving posture and decreasing pain with novel shoe insoles

A single subject longevity study is presented as a case study for the Medical Device Partnering Program (MDPP). The MDPP supports the development of cutting-edge medical devices and assistive technologies, through unique collaborations between researchers, industry, clinical end-users and government. The study aimed to identify what effect the innersole has on specific muscles that may influence stability and whether the innersole had any influence on gait. Three tests were conducted; a standard gait test, dynamic balance test and a standing balance test. Results from the kinematic analysis showed reduced variability in post testing results when compared to pre testing results. Reductions in muscle activation levels were also found across all tests. Further testing with a larger sample size is required to determine if these effects are due to the innersole.