Impactos do modelo de relacionamento entre TI e áreas de negócio: estudo de caso em uma instituição financeira brasileira

Nos últimos 30 anos os executivos têm consistentemente identificado o alinhamento estratégico entre TI e negócio como uma das suas principais preocupações ainda não devidamente endereçadas. Existem diversos conceitos definidos sobre o significado deste alinhamento e suas consequências na performance das empresas, mas os estudos ainda são vagos em relação a como ele pode ser atingido e focam principalmente no alinhamento entre executivos, explorando pouco o nível operacional nas organizações. O objetivo deste estudo foi aprofundar-se no alinhamento entre TI e unidades de negócio na dimensão operacional, através de um estudo de caso avaliando o impacto na percepção de alinhamento entre as áreas após a criação de uma área dedicada ao relacionamento entre TI/Negócio, composta por profissionais de TI especializados e com conhecimentos específicos das unidades de negócio que atendem, visando um melhor entendimento dos objetivos da organização. Para tanto, foi aplicada uma abordagem multi-metodológica utilizando-se de Insider Action Research, que investiga um fenômeno partindo de uma intervenção no ambiente (em que o pesquisador faz parte), em conjunto com Design Research, que realiza o estudo de forma qualitativa centrada na construção e avaliação cíclica de um artefato. Para este estudo de caso, o artefato criado foi o método de trabalho utilizando-se de uma área responsável pela gestão do relacionamento entre TI/Negócio e a intervenção foi a implantação deste artefato na organização. As percepções foram capturadas através de reuniões com gestores da organização. As avaliações de efetividade foram apoiadas no framework de Luftman que mede o nível de alinhamento entre TI/Negócio em seis dimensões (Comunicação, Mensuração, Governança, Parceria, Escopo/Arquitetura e Competências). Os resultados mostraram que a criação da área de relacionamento TI/Negócios teve um claro impacto positivo na percepção de alinhamento entre as áreas, principalmente nas dimensões de comunicação e parceria. O estudo mostra que este tipo de abordagem gera uma maior sensação de confiança e proximidade e, portanto, pode ser utilizada para evoluir o alinhamento operacional entre as áreas.

Futures dreaming outside and on the margins of the western world

In this article, we challenge the hegemony of western science fiction, arguing that western science fiction is particular even as it claims universality. Its view remains based on ideas of the future as forward time. In contrast, in non-western science fiction the future is seen outside linear terms: as cyclical or spiral, or in terms of ancestors. In addition, western science fiction has focused on the good society as created by technological progress, while non-western science fiction and futures thinking has focused on the fantastic, on the spiritual, on the realization of eupsychia-the perfect self. However, most theorists assert that the non-west has no science fiction, ignoring Asian and Chinese science fiction history, and western science fiction continues to 'other' the non-west as well as those on the margins of the west (African-American woman, for example). Nonetheless, while most western science fiction remains trapped in binary opposites-alien/non-alien; masculine/feminine; insider/outsider-writers from the west's margins are creating texts that contradict tradition and modernity, seeking new ways to transcend difference. Given that the imagination of the future creates the reality of tomorrow, creating new science fictions is not just an issue of textual critique but of opening up possibilities for all our futures.

Moving from outsider to insider : peer status and partnerships between electricity utilities and residential consumers

An electricity demand reduction project based on comprehensive residential consumer engagement was established within an Australian community in 2008. By 2011, both the peak demand and grid supplied electricity consumption had decreased to below pre-intervention levels. This case study research explored the relationship developed between the utility, community and individual consumer from the residential customer perspective through qualitative research of 22 residential households. It is proposed that an energy utility can be highly successful at peak demand reduction by becoming a community member and a peer to residential consumers and developing the necessary trust, access, influence and partnership required to create the responsive environment to change. A peer-community approach could provide policymakers with a pathway for implementing pro-environmental behaviour for low carbon communities, as well as peak demand reduction, thereby addressing government emission targets while limiting the cost of living increases from infrastructure expenditure.

Insider comes out : an artist's inquiry and narrative about the relationship of art and mental health

Background Through an account of prevailing experiences of art and mental illness, this paper aims to raise awareness, open dialogue and create agency about art created by people with experience of mental illness. Methods This paper draws on personal narrative and inquiry by an artist with mental illness and data collected as part of a larger participatory action research project that investigated understandings of identity, art and mental illness. Result An inquiry through art raised awareness and attentiveness to the importance of choice in identity construction and exposed frequent dichotomies in art and mental illness that were negotiated to eschew prescribed social stratification. As an artist, the first author challenged values present in one idea and absent in the other, and the options and concessions available to authorise her own dialogue and agency of being an artist. Conclusion Constructing an identity is an important part of being human, the labels that we choose or are chosen for us attribute to our identity. Reflections and recommendations are offered to consider expanded ways of thinking about art and mental illness and the functions that art play in identity construction.

Dancing as Knowledge Production/Dancer as Researcher in Practice-led Research

This chapter discusses research undertaken for a PhD in dance, highlighting the oscillating and ambivalent nature of practice-led research methods. Holding an unusual position within the field of practice-led research in dance, the researcher adopted the role of dancer within four creative processes led by four choreographers. Although instigating and leading this research, the author produced new knowledge of dancing practices whilst being directed creatively by the choreographers in the research environment. In line with many definitions of practice-led research, the methods used were emergent from the research arena and responsive to the requirements of the project. Deeply imbricated in the research environment, the researcher used her embodied self as a research tool, as the one who participated, discovered and recorded. This outsider/insider role of researcher/participant produced a series of meta-positions, leading to a mixed-modal outcome that encompassed live performance, a movement treatise and a written thesis.

Judah Benjamin: marginalized outsider or admitted insider?

Judah Benjamin (1811-1884) was one of the greatest of nineteenth century lawyers. This article analyses how a young man who might have been marginalized in society because of the circumstances of his birth, ethnic origin and religious identity rose to prominence in law, politics and business in the United Kingdom and the United States.

Mothering and ‘insider’ dilemmas:feminist sociologists in the research process

This paper is about care, insider positions and mothering within feminist research. We ask questions about how honest, ethical and caring can we really be in placing the self into the research process as mothers ourselves. Should we leave out aspects of the research that do not fit neatly and how ethical can we claim to be if we do? Moreover, should difficult differences, secrets and silences that emerge from the research process and research stories that might 'out' us as failures be excluded from research outcomes so as to claim legitimate research? We consider the use of a feminist methods as crucial in the reciprocal and relational understanding of personal enquiry. Mothers invest significant emotional capital in their families and we explore the blurring of the interpersonal and intrapersonal when sharing mothering experiences common to both participant and researcher. Indeed participants can identify themselves within the process as 'friends' of the researcher. We both have familiarity within our respective research that has led to mutual understanding of having insider positions. Crucially individuals' realities are a vital component of the qualitative paradigm and that 'insider' research remains a necessary, albeit messy vehicle in social research. As it is we consider a growing body of literature which marks out and endorses a feminist ethics of care. All of which critique established ways of thinking about ethics, morality, security, citizenship and care. It provides alternatives in mapping private and public aspects of social life as it operates at a theoretical level, but importantly for this paper also at the level of practical application.

Implementing an emergency department patient admission predictive tool : insights from practice

Purpose: This paper aims to show that identification of expectations and software functional requirements via consultation with potential users is an integral component of the development of an emergency department patient admissions prediction tool. ---------- Design/methodology/approach: Thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 14 key health staff delivered rich data regarding existing practice and future needs. Participants included emergency department staff, bed managers, nurse unit managers, directors of nursing, and personnel from health administration. ---------- Findings: Participants contributed contextual insights on the current system of admissions, revealing a culture of crisis, imbued with misplayed communication. Their expectations and requirements of a potential predictive tool provided strategic data that moderated the development of the Emergency Department Patient Admissions Prediction Tool, based on their insistence that it feature availability, reliability and relevance. In order to deliver these stipulations, participants stressed that it should be incorporated, validated, defined and timely. ---------- Research limitations/implications: Participants were envisaging a concept and use of a tool that was somewhat hypothetical. However, further research will evaluate the tool in practice. ---------- Practical implications: Participants' unsolicited recommendations regarding implementation will not only inform a subsequent phase of the tool evaluation, but are eminently applicable to any process of implementation in a healthcare setting. ---------- Originality/value: The consultative process engaged clinicians and the paper delivers an insider view of an overburdened system, rather than an outsider's observations.

Marginalised students and insider knowledge

One of the claims made for valuing the voices of marginalised students is that an insider perspective can be revealed on student issues and the ways in which education policies and systems impact on them. This chapter examines the ways in which participants in an Australian ‘students-as-researchers’ (SaR) project were able to raise knowledge of and address, to some extent, long-standing issues of racism in their schools. The SaR project has operated in more than thirty schools for periods of one to five years. Based on a participatory action research model, groups of secondary school students from schools serving socio-economically disadvantaged communities have worked with nominated teachers and university researchers to identify and research local issues relating to low academic outcomes and to develop and enact responses to the identified concerns. The voices of marginalised students quoted in this chapter illustrate that important insider knowledge can be revealed through the SaR process. Where student views have been acknowledged and acted on by the schools, significant change to student-teacher relationships and school culture has been achieved; the participants have been personally empowered and academic improvements across the schools have been noted. For such change to occur, however, a culture of mutual respect must be created in which teachers and school administrators value students’ views and are open to the possibility of unfavourable criticism.

Worthless and undeserving? : problematising the subjectivities of single parenthood

A considerable body of knowledge has been constructed perpetuating the notion single parenthood is a significant problem for society, and while this is supported by specific research designs and sampling practices, it is also maintained by two key discourses. The first constitutes single parenthood as a deficit, while the second identifies it as a risk. In both cases, these discourses are operationalised by the philosophy of neo-liberalism, which envisions good citizenship as economic autonomy. Historically, it has been the convergence of the risk and deficit discourses that has constituted single parenthood as a social problem. More recently, however, risk discourses have come to dominate thinking about single parenthood. As a result, this thesis terms risk discourses as dominant discourses. As dominant discourses, risk sidelines or discounts other ways of thinking about single parenthood. While a few exceptions are notable, including some feminist, poststructural and family resilience scholars, most researchers appear unable to see past the positioning of these discourses and envision another way of being for parents who are single. This means that alternative subjectivities are obscured and have limited influence in this field of research. Because this thesis aimed to problematise dominant subjectivities of single parenthood, a poststructural Foucauldian framework has been utilized in order to document the discursive constructions of single parenthood through literature, insider discourses, and outsider discourses. For the purposes of this thesis, outsider discourses are constituted as those outside the subjectivities of single parenthood, such as media and research discourses. An examination of the Australian media has been undertaken over a one year period, the results of which form the basis for the analysis of media discourses of single parenthood. Parents who are single were also targeted for self selection into this project to provide insider discourses about single parenthood. This analysis explored how respondents negotiated the discourses of single parenthood and how they themselves used or rejected the subjectivities constructed for them via these discourses to constitute their own subjectivities. This thesis aimed to explore the role of discourses in the construction of individuals' subjectivities. Specifically, it draws attention to the way in which knowledge and power work through discourses to emphasize what is allowable, both publicly and privately, in relation to single parenthood. Most importantly, this thesis offers alternative subjectivities for single parenthood to facilitate new ways of thinking about parents who are single.

The Dancer as Reflective Practitioner

The inextricably intimate relationships connecting the dancer, the dance and the self indicate that the practice of dance is inherently a reflective practice of feedback looping. Professional dancers are aware of this in continuing self-critical analyses and reflections for self-improvement, striving for the ever-elusive perfection in performance. The reflective nature of learning dance is, however, less apparent to the student of dance due to the traditional master/apprentice approach to dance training. By making explicit the essentially reflective sequence of processes through which the self becomes the dancer of the dance, the locus of control is shifted towards the dance student, thereby increasing the sense of autonomy and intrinsic motivation for exploration, discovery and improvement of her or his own practice. This study documents the implementation of the 4Rs approach to reflective practice in a university dance training context. Data include reflective observations of dance lessons, and teacher and student reflections on the reflective approach taken in these lessons. Insider and outsider perspectives from students, the dance teacher and external researchers are taken to provide a nuanced understanding of the value of corporeal, visual and verbal reflection in dance for improved performance.

Indigenous as ’not-Indigenous' as ’Us'?: A dissident insider's views on pushing the bounds for what constitutes 'our mob'

In australia, 'Aboriginality' is often defined by people in constrictive ways that are heavily influenced by the coloniser's epistemological frameworks. An essential component of this is a 'racial' categorisation of peoples that marks sameness and difference, thereby influencing insider and outsider status. In one sense, this categorisation of people acts to exclude non-aboriginal 'others' from participation in preinvasion indigenous ontologies, ways of living that may not have contained such restrictive identity categories and were thereby highly inclusive of outsiders. One of the effects of this is that aboriginal peoples' efforts for 'advancement' - either out of 'disadvantage' and/or towards political independence (ie, sovereignty) - become confined and restricted by what is deemed possible within the coloniser's epistemological frameworks. This is so much so that aboriginal people are at risk of only reinforcing and upholding the very systems that resulted in their original and continuing dispossession.