Crowdsourcing innovation intermediaries functions

Open innovation is a hot topic in innovation management. Its basic premise is open up the innovation process. The innovation process, in general sense, may be seen as the process of designing, developing and commercializing a novel product or service to improve the value added of a company. The development of Web 2.0 tools facilitates this kind of contributions, opening space to the emergence of crowdsourcing innovation initiatives. Crowdsourcing is a form of outsourcing not directed to other companies but to the crowd by means of an open call mostly through an Internet platform. Innovation intermediaries, in general sense, are organizations that work to enable innovation, that just act as brokers or agents between two or more parties. Usually, they are also engaged in other activities like inter-organizational networking and technology development and related activities. A crowdsourcing innovation intermediary is an organization that mediates the communication and relationship between the seekers – companies that aspire to solve some problem or to take advantage of any business opportunity – with a crowd that is prone to give ideas based on their knowledge, experience and wisdom. This paper identifies and analyses the functions to be performed by an intermediary of crowdsourcing innovation through grounded theory analyses from literature. The resulting model is presented and explained. The resulting model summarizes eight main functions that can be performed by a crowdsourcing process, namely, diagnoses, mediation, linking knowledge, community, evaluation, project management, intellectual property governance and marketing and support. These functions are associated with a learning cycle process which covers all the crowdsourcing activities that can be realized by the broker.

Um sistema de informação – a solução?

Pequenas empresas reconhecem a necessidade de sistematizar os seus procedimentos, por forma, a alcançarem sucesso nas suas propostas de negócio. Esta padronização pressupõe uma avaliação do enquadramento social e de mercado existente e dos valores, missão e objetivos das próprias empresas. As constantes inovações na área tecnológica e as mudanças sociais, refletem-se no desenvolvimento e estratégia a seguir pelas organizações, que se desdobram num ambiente muito competitivo e dinâmico, o que lhes exige uma atenção constante e ponderada. Ao analisarmos uma micro empresa portuguesa, que desenvolve a sua atividade na área da gestão e promoção de imóveis para arrendamento de curta duração, verificamos a existência de lacunas ao nível do seu modelo de gestão operacional. A escassez de meios financeiros e humanos, e o fraco conhecimento das práticas de gestão organizacional e estratégica, são fatores limitadores para o bom desempenho da empresa, podendo colocar em causa a sua viabilidade a curto prazo. Esta constatação foi o ponto de partida para a realização deste projeto que, após as diversas leituras efetuadas, o levantamento dos processos existentes, a análise e ponderação das diversas soluções possíveis a aplicar, terminou na proposta de um Sistema de Informação - opção que nos pareceu ser a mais adequada. Esta proposta foi aprovada pela gestão da empresa e o Sistema de Informação irá ser implementado. O presente trabalho teve como objetivo ajudar esta organização a melhorar o seu desempenho. Para atingir estes objetivos foi necessário elencar os pontos fortes e fracos desta empresa, de forma a ser possível agregar num documento, as necessidades que a mesma demonstrava, para colmatar as falhas existentes e que poderiam ser, num futuro próximo, motivo de desagregação da mesma. A metodologia adotada seguiu uma estratégia de investigação descritiva, utilizando o método de investigação-ação. A recolha de dados baseou-se em entrevistas à equipa de gestão e colaboradores da empresa, em documentação levantada na mesma relativa aos processos de gestão e informação institucional, cujos conteúdos foram analisados numa perspetiva qualitativa.

Regional change in the Algarve: A Geographic Information System approach

Thesis submitted to the Instituto Superior de Estatística e Gestão de Informação da Universidade Nova de Lisboa in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Information Management – Geographic Information Systems

Frameworks Verticas vs Horizontais Gestão de Recursos Humanos com o OFBiz

Os sistemas de informação integrados contribuem para a gestão eficiente das empresas, seja na organização e funcionamento internos ou nas relações externas. O mercado deste software é dominado pelas empresas que criam e distribuem sistemas proprietários. Existe uma alternativa, software livre, que disponibiliza aplicações em código aberto e maioritariamente de licença gratuita, que pode ser adaptado às necessidades das empresas. O objetivo do presente trabalho é avaliar a viabilidade de plataformas livres, de natureza vertical – OFBiz – e horizontal – Spring – como opção na escolha de um sistema de informação nas Pequenas e Médias Empresas portuguesas. Das áreas de negócio principais das organizações, foi selecionada a área de Recursos Humanos para efeitos de adaptação na aplicação OFBiz, com incidência em dois casos de uso: uma opção essencial, mas que atualmente não está prevista – Processamento de vencimentos – e outra já existente e que é avaliada em termos de necessidades de adaptação – Recrutamento. Sendo o idioma um requisito indispensável à internacionalização da aplicação, foi também analisada a sua implementação. A metodologia de investigação utilizada foi o Design Science Research, tendo sido implementado um protótipo para efeitos de teste e avaliação do projeto, com a elaboração de dois modelos: configuração e desenvolvimento. Implementado o protótipo, verificou-se que a framework vertical apresenta-se como uma alternativa mais viável do que a horizontal, pelas funcionalidades já existentes e que facilitam a adequação às necessidades de informação das Pequenas e Médias Empresas. A sua base tecnológica e de estrutura permite que a aplicação possa ser adaptada por técnicos especialistas das próprias empresas.

GI Systems for public health with an ontology based approach

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies.

An Open Source BI Approach: Concept Proof Tracking Fleet

É possível assistir nos dias de hoje, a um processo tecnológico evolutivo acentuado por toda a parte do globo. No caso das empresas, quer as pequenas, médias ou de grandes dimensões, estão cada vez mais dependentes dos sistemas informatizados para realizar os seus processos de negócio, e consequentemente à geração de informação referente aos negócios e onde, muitas das vezes, os dados não têm qualquer relacionamento entre si. A maioria dos sistemas convencionais informáticos não são projetados para gerir e armazenar informações estratégicas, impossibilitando assim que esta sirva de apoio como recurso estratégico. Portanto, as decisões são tomadas com base na experiência dos administradores, quando poderiam serem baseadas em factos históricos armazenados pelos diversos sistemas. Genericamente, as organizações possuem muitos dados, mas na maioria dos casos extraem pouca informação, o que é um problema em termos de mercados competitivos. Como as organizações procuram evoluir e superar a concorrência nas tomadas de decisão, surge neste contexto o termo Business Intelligence(BI). A GisGeo Information Systems é uma empresa que desenvolve software baseado em SIG (sistemas de informação geográfica) recorrendo a uma filosofia de ferramentas open-source. O seu principal produto baseia-se na localização geográfica dos vários tipos de viaturas, na recolha de dados, e consequentemente a sua análise (quilómetros percorridos, duração de uma viagem entre dois pontos definidos, consumo de combustível, etc.). Neste âmbito surge o tema deste projeto que tem objetivo de dar uma perspetiva diferente aos dados existentes, cruzando os conceitos BI com o sistema implementado na empresa de acordo com a sua filosofia. Neste projeto são abordados alguns dos conceitos mais importantes adjacentes a BI como, por exemplo, modelo dimensional, data Warehouse, o processo ETL e OLAP, seguindo a metodologia de Ralph Kimball. São também estudadas algumas das principais ferramentas open-source existentes no mercado, assim como quais as suas vantagens/desvantagens relativamente entre elas. Em conclusão, é então apresentada a solução desenvolvida de acordo com os critérios enumerados pela empresa como prova de conceito da aplicabilidade da área Business Intelligence ao ramo de Sistemas de informação Geográfica (SIG), recorrendo a uma ferramenta open-source que suporte visualização dos dados através de dashboards.

NEGOSEIO: framework for the sustainability of model-oriented enterprise interoperability

Dissertation to obtain the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical and Computer Engineering(Industrial Information Systems)

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.

Analysis of panoramio photo tags in order to extract land use information

In the recent past, hardly anyone could predict this course of GIS development. GIS is moving from desktop to cloud. Web 2.0 enabled people to input data into web. These data are becoming increasingly geolocated. Big amounts of data formed something that is called "Big Data". Scientists still don't know how to deal with it completely. Different Data Mining tools are used for trying to extract some useful information from this Big Data. In our study, we also deal with one part of these data - User Generated Geographic Content (UGGC). The Panoramio initiative allows people to upload photos and describe them with tags. These photos are geolocated, which means that they have exact location on the Earth's surface according to a certain spatial reference system. By using Data Mining tools, we are trying to answer if it is possible to extract land use information from Panoramio photo tags. Also, we tried to answer to what extent this information could be accurate. At the end, we compared different Data Mining methods in order to distinguish which one has the most suited performances for this kind of data, which is text. Our answers are quite encouraging. With more than 70% of accuracy, we proved that extracting land use information is possible to some extent. Also, we found Memory Based Reasoning (MBR) method the most suitable method for this kind of data in all cases.

Framework for the semantic alignment of enterprise’s domain knowledge

Nowadays, the consumption of goods and services on the Internet are increasing in a constant motion. Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) mostly from the traditional industry sectors are usually make business in weak and fragile market sectors, where customized products and services prevail. To survive and compete in the actual markets they have to readjust their business strategies by creating new manufacturing processes and establishing new business networks through new technological approaches. In order to compete with big enterprises, these partnerships aim the sharing of resources, knowledge and strategies to boost the sector’s business consolidation through the creation of dynamic manufacturing networks. To facilitate such demand, it is proposed the development of a centralized information system, which allows enterprises to select and create dynamic manufacturing networks that would have the capability to monitor all the manufacturing process, including the assembly, packaging and distribution phases. Even the networking partners that come from the same area have multi and heterogeneous representations of the same knowledge, denoting their own view of the domain. Thus, different conceptual, semantic, and consequently, diverse lexically knowledge representations may occur in the network, causing non-transparent sharing of information and interoperability inconsistencies. The creation of a framework supported by a tool that in a flexible way would enable the identification, classification and resolution of such semantic heterogeneities is required. This tool will support the network in the semantic mapping establishments, to facilitate the various enterprises information systems integration.

A type system for value-dependent information flow analysis

Information systems are widespread and used by anyone with computing devices as well as corporations and governments. It is often the case that security leaks are introduced during the development of an application. Reasons for these security bugs are multiple but among them one can easily identify that it is very hard to define and enforce relevant security policies in modern software. This is because modern applications often rely on container sharing and multi-tenancy where, for instance, data can be stored in the same physical space but is logically mapped into different security compartments or data structures. In turn, these security compartments, to which data is classified into in security policies, can also be dynamic and depend on runtime data. In this thesis we introduce and develop the novel notion of dependent information flow types, and focus on the problem of ensuring data confidentiality in data-centric software. Dependent information flow types fit within the standard framework of dependent type theory, but, unlike usual dependent types, crucially allow the security level of a type, rather than just the structural data type itself, to depend on runtime values. Our dependent function and dependent sum information flow types provide a direct, natural and elegant way to express and enforce fine grained security policies on programs. Namely programs that manipulate structured data types in which the security level of a structure field may depend on values dynamically stored in other fields The main contribution of this work is an efficient analysis that allows programmers to verify, during the development phase, whether programs have information leaks, that is, it verifies whether programs protect the confidentiality of the information they manipulate. As such, we also implemented a prototype typechecker that can be found at http://ctp.di.fct.unl.pt/DIFTprototype/.

Design of a case-based reasoner for information security in military organizations

Information security is concerned with the protection of information, which can be stored, processed or transmitted within critical information systems of the organizations, against loss of confidentiality, integrity or availability. Protection measures to prevent these problems result through the implementation of controls at several dimensions: technical, administrative or physical. A vital objective for military organizations is to ensure superiority in contexts of information warfare and competitive intelligence. Therefore, the problem of information security in military organizations has been a topic of intensive work at both national and transnational levels, and extensive conceptual and standardization work is being produced. A current effort is therefore to develop automated decision support systems to assist military decision makers, at different levels in the command chain, to provide suitable control measures that can effectively deal with potential attacks and, at the same time, prevent, detect and contain vulnerabilities targeted at their information systems. The concept and processes of the Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) methodology outstandingly resembles classical military processes and doctrine, in particular the analysis of “lessons learned” and definition of “modes of action”. Therefore, the present paper addresses the modeling and design of a CBR system with two key objectives: to support an effective response in context of information security for military organizations; to allow for scenario planning and analysis for training and auditing processes.

Modelação de processos de negócio: análise comparativa de linguagens

Dissertação de mestrado integrado em Engenharia e Gestão de Sistemas de Informação

Modelação de governo electrónico para países emergentes: O caso de São Tomé e Príncipe

Tese de Doutoramento em Tecnologias e Sistemas de Informação

Predicting pre-triage waiting time in a maternity emergency room through data mining

An unsuitable patient flow as well as prolonged waiting lists in the emergency room of a maternity unit, regarding gynecology and obstetrics care, can affect the mother and child’s health, leading to adverse events and consequences regarding their safety and satisfaction. Predicting the patients’ waiting time in the emergency room is a means to avoid this problem. This study aims to predict the pre-triage waiting time in the emergency care of gynecology and obstetrics of Centro Materno Infantil do Norte (CMIN), the maternal and perinatal care unit of Centro Hospitalar of Oporto, situated in the north of Portugal. Data mining techniques were induced using information collected from the information systems and technologies available in CMIN. The models developed presented good results reaching accuracy and specificity values of approximately 74% and 94%, respectively. Additionally, the number of patients and triage professionals working in the emergency room, as well as some temporal variables were identified as direct enhancers to the pre-triage waiting time. The imp lementation of the attained knowledge in the decision support system and business intelligence platform, deployed in CMIN, leads to the optimization of the patient flow through the emergency room and improving the quality of services.