m-SportGIS

Information technologies (ITs), and sports resources and services aid the potential to transform governmental organizations, and play an important role in contributing to sustainable communities development, respectively. Spatial data is a crucial source to support sports planning and management. Low-cost mobile geospatial tools bring productive and accurate data collection, and their use combining a handy and customized graphical user interface (GUI) (forms, mapping, media support) is still in an early stage. Recognizing the benefits — efficiency, effectiveness, proximity to citizens — that Mozambican Minister of Youth and Sports (MJD) can achieve with information resulted from the employment of a low-cost data collection platform, this project presents the development of a mobile mapping application (app) — m-SportGIS — under Open Source (OS) technologies and a customized evolutionary software methodology. The app development embraced the combination of mobile web technologies and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) (e.g. Sencha Touch (ST), Apache Cordova, OpenLayers) to deploy a native-to-the-device (Android operating system) product, taking advantage of device’s capabilities (e.g. File system, Geolocation, Camera). In addition to an integrated Web Map Service (WMS), was created a local and customized Tile Map Service (TMS) to serve up cached data, regarding the IT infrastructures limitations in several Mozambican regions. m-SportGIS is currently being exploited by Mozambican Government staff to inventory all kind of sports facilities, which resulted and stored data feeds a WebGIS platform to manage Mozambican sports resources.

Fostering e-participation sustainability through a BPM-driven semantic model

According to a recent Eurobarometer survey (2014), 68% of Europeans tend not to trust national governments. As the increasing alienation of citizens from politics endangers democracy and welfare, governments, practitioners and researchers look for innovative means to engage citizens in policy matters. One of the measures intended to overcome the so-called democratic deficit is the promotion of civic participation. Digital media proliferation offers a set of novel characteristics related to interactivity, ubiquitous connectivity, social networking and inclusiveness that enable new forms of societal-wide collaboration with a potential impact on leveraging participative democracy. Following this trend, e-Participation is an emerging research area that consists in the use of Information and Communication Technologies to mediate and transform the relations among citizens and governments towards increasing citizens’ participation in public decision-making. However, despite the widespread efforts to implement e-Participation through research programs, new technologies and projects, exhaustive studies on the achieved outcomes reveal that it has not yet been successfully incorporated in institutional politics. Given the problems underlying e-Participation implementation, the present research suggested that, rather than project-oriented efforts, the cornerstone for successfully implementing e-Participation in public institutions as a sustainable added-value activity is a systematic organisational planning, embodying the principles of open-governance and open-engagement. It further suggested that BPM, as a management discipline, can act as a catalyst to enable the desired transformations towards value creation throughout the policy-making cycle, including political, organisational and, ultimately, citizen value. Following these findings, the primary objective of this research was to provide an instrumental model to foster e-Participation sustainability across Government and Public Administration towards a participatory, inclusive, collaborative and deliberative democracy. The developed artefact, consisting in an e-Participation Organisational Semantic Model (ePOSM) underpinned by a BPM-steered approach, introduces this vision. This approach to e-Participation was modelled through a semi-formal lightweight ontology stack structured in four sub-ontologies, namely e-Participation Strategy, Organisational Units, Functions and Roles. The ePOSM facilitates e-Participation sustainability by: (1) Promoting a common and cross-functional understanding of the concepts underlying e-Participation implementation and of their articulation that bridges the gap between technical and non-technical users; (2) Providing an organisational model which allows a centralised and consistent roll-out of strategy-driven e-Participation initiatives, supported by operational units dedicated to the execution of transformation projects and participatory processes; (3) Providing a standardised organisational structure, goals, functions and roles related to e-Participation processes that enhances process-level interoperability among government agencies; (4) Providing a representation usable in software development for business processes’ automation, which allows advanced querying using a reasoner or inference engine to retrieve concrete and specific information about the e-Participation processes in place. An evaluation of the achieved outcomes, as well a comparative analysis with existent models, suggested that this innovative approach tackling the organisational planning dimension can constitute a stepping stone to harness e-Participation value.

Standardization of project management processes

Software development is a discipline that is almost as old as the history of computers. With the advent of the Internet and all of its related technologies, software development has been on high demand. But, and especially in SME (small and medium enterprise), this was not accompanied with a comparable effort to develop a set of sustainable and standardized activities of project management, which lead to increasing inefficiencies and costs. Given the actual economic situation, it makes sense to engage in an effort to reduce said inefficiencies and rising costs. For that end, this work will analyze the current state of software development’s project management processes on a Portuguese SME, along with its problems and inefficiencies in an effort to create a standardized model to manage software development, with special attention given to critical success factors in an agile software development environment, while using the best practices in process modeling. This work also aims to create guidelines to correctly integrate these changes in the existing IS structure of a company.

Métodos de avaliação do impacto económico dos eventos adversos em meio hospitalar

RESUMO - O sistema de saúde é constantemente sujeito a pressões sendo as mais relevantes a pressão para o aumento da qualidade e a necessidade de contenção de custos. Os Eventos Adversos (EAs) ocorridos em meio hospitalar constituem um sério problema de qualidade na prestação de cuidados de saúde, com consequências clinicas, sociais, económicas e de imagem, que afectam pacientes, profissionais, organizações e o próprio sistema de saúde. Os custos associados à ocorrência de EAs em meio hospitalar, incrementam significativamente os custos hospitalares, representando cerca de um em cada sete dólares gastos no atendimento dos doentes. Só na última década surgiram estudos com o objectivo principal de avaliar esse impacto em meio hospitalar, subsistindo ainda uma grande indefinição quanto às variáveis e métodos a utilizar. O objectivo principal deste trabalho de projecto foi conhecer e caracterizar as diferentes metodologias utilizadas para avaliação dos custos económicos, nomeadamente dos custos directos, relacionados com a ocorrência de eventos adversos em meio hospitalar. Tendo em atenção as dificuldades referidas, utilizou-se como metodologia a revisão narrativa da literatura, complementada com a realização de uma técnica de grupo nominal. Os resultados obtidos foram os seguintes: i) a metodologia utilizada na maioria dos estudos para determinar a frequência, natureza e consequências dos EAs ocorridos em meio hospitalar, utiliza matrizes de base observacional, analítica, com base em estudos de coorte retrospectivo recorrendo aos critérios definidos pelo Harvard Medical Practice Study; ii) a generalidade dos estudos realizados avaliam os custos directos dos EAs em meio hospitalar, iii) verificou-se a existência de uma grande diversidade de métodos para a determinação dos custos associados aos EAs. A generalidade dos estudos determina esse valor com base na contabilização do número de dias adicionais de internamento, resultantes do EA, valorizados com base em custos médios; iv) o grupo de peritos, propôs como metodologia para a determinação do custo associado a cada EA, a utilização de sistemas de custeio por doente; v) propõe-se o desenvolvimento de uma plataforma informática, que permita o cruzamento da informação disponível no registo clinico electrónico do doente com um sistema automático de identificação de EAs, a desenvolver, e com sistemas de custeio por doente, de modo a valorizar os custos por doente e por tipo de EA. A avaliação dos custos directos associados à ocorrência de EAs em contexto hospitalar, pelo impacto económico e social que tem nos doentes e organizações, será seguramente uma das áreas de estudo e investigação futuras, no sentido de melhorar a eficiência do sistema de saúde e a qualidade e segurança dos cuidados prestados aos doentes.