Small business prosperity and wellbeing : an alternative measure for success among small business owners

This study investigated the influences of business prosperity on small business owners’ wellbeing with gender as a moderator. A sample of 687 Australian small business owners from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey (HILDA) from 2008 to 2010 was utilised. Findings suggest that procedural utility contributed to small business owners’ wellbeing over economic utility. Procedural utility was significantly related to small business owners’ wellbeing for males and females. However, economic utility contributed only to male small business owners’ wellbeing. In order to increase the understanding of these findings it is suggested that more theoretical work regarding gender differences in procedural and economic utility should be carried out.

Business value from intelligent fields

The Smart Fields programme has been active in Shell over the last decade and has given large benefits. In order to understand the value and to underpin strategies for the future implementation programme, a study was carried out to quantify the benefits to date. This focused on actually achieved value, through increased production or lower costs. This provided an estimate of the total value achieved to date. Future benefits such as increased reserves or continued production gain were recorded separately. The paper describes the process followed in the benefits quantification. It identifies the key solutions and technologies and describes the mechanism used to understand the relation between solutions and value. Examples have been given of value from various assets around the world, in both existing fields and in green fields. Finally, the study provided the methodology for tracking of value. This helps Shell to estimate and track the benefits of the Smart Fields programme at company scale.

Risky Business : managing creative practice postgraduates

In Australia, as elsewhere, universities are being encouraged to grow their postgraduate research candidature base while at the same time there is increasing pressure on resources with which to manage the burgeoning groups. In this environment HDR supervision strategies are seen as increasingly important as research managers seek the best possible ‘fit’ for an applicant: the candidate who will provide a sound return on investment and demonstrate endurance in the pursuit of a timely completion.

A critical analysis of business process management education and alignment with industry demand : an Australian perspective

Business Process Management (BPM) is accepted globally as an organizational approach to enhance productivity and drive cost efficiencies. Studies confirm a shortage of BPM skilled professionals with limited opportunities to develop the required BPM expertise. This study investigates this gap starting from a critical analysis of BPM courses offered by Australian universities and training institutions. These courses were analyzed and mapped against a leading BPM capability framework to determine how well current BPM education and training offerings in Australia address the core capabilities required by BPM professionals globally. To determine the BPM skill-sets sought by industry, online recruitment advertisements were collated, analyzed, and mapped against this BPM capability framework. The outcomes provide a detailed overview on the alignment of available BPM education/training and industry demand. These insights are useful for BPM professionals and their employers to build awareness of the BPM capabilities required for a BPM mature organization. Universities and other training institutions will benefit from these results by understanding where demand is, where the gaps are, and what other BPM education providers are supplying. This structured comparison method could continue to provide a common ground for future discussion across university-industry boundaries and continuous alignment of their respective practices.

Sexualities and sensitivities: Queer(y)ing the ethics of youth research in the field

In contemporary Western societies, the years between childhood and young adulthood are commonly understood to be (trans)formative in the reflexive project of sexual self-making (Russell et al. 2012). As sexual subjects in the making, youthful bodies, desires and sexual activities are often perceived as both volatile and vulnerable, thus subjected to instruction and discipline, protection and surveillance. Accordingly, young people’s sexual proximities are closely monitored by social institutions and ‘(hetero)normalising regimes’ (Warner 1999) for any signs that may compromise the end goal of development—a ‘normal’ reproductive heterosexual monogamous adult...

Design and ethics in digital mental health promotion

This chapter presents a case study of Participatory Design as a design framework for developing interactive digital tools for promoting children’s resilience. The author argues for a participatory methodology as an ethical approach that involves children as co-designers in the process from which they are traditionally excluded, namely the creative design process and the process of mental health promotion.

Professionalizing Business Process Management : towards a Body of Knowledge for BPM

Business Process Management (BPM) is rapidly evolving as an established discipline. There are a number of efforts underway to formalize the various aspects of BPM practice; creating a formal Body of Knowledge (BoK) is one such effort. Bodies of knowledge are artifacts that have a proven track record for accelerating the professionalization of various disciplines. In order for this to succeed in BPM, it is vital to involve the broader business process community and derive a BoK that has essential characteristics that addresses the discipline’s needs. We argue for the necessity of a comprehensive BoK for the BPM domain, and present a core list of essential features to consider when developing a BoK based on preliminary empirical evidence. The paper identifies and critiques existing Bodies of Knowledge related to BPM, and firmly calls for an effort to develop a more accurate and sustainable BoK for BPM. An approach for this effort is presented with preliminary outcomes.

A little learning is a dangerous thing? The ethics of teaching accidental tourists in higher education

This paper raises questions about the ethical issues that arise for academics and universities when under-graduate students enrol in classes outside of their discipline - classes that are not designed to be multi-disciplinary or introductory. We term these students ‘accidental tourists'. Differences between disciplines in terms of pedagogy, norms, language and understanding may pose challenges for accidental tourists in achieving desired learning outcomes. This paper begins a discussion about whether lecturers and universities have any ethical obligations towards supporting the learning of these students. Recognising that engaging with only one ethical theory leads to a fragmented moral vision, this paper employs a variety of ethical theories to examine any possible moral obligations that may fall upon lecturers and/or universities. In regards to lecturers, the paper critically engages with the ethical theories of utilitarianism, Kantianism and virtue ethics (Aristotle) to determine the extent of any academic duty to accidental tourists. In relation to universities, this paper employs the emerging ethical theory of organisational ethics as a lens through which to critically examine any possible obligations. Organisational ethics stems from the recognition that moral demands also exist for organisations so organisations must be reconceptualised as ethical actors and their policies and practices subject to ethical scrutiny. The analysis in this paper illustrates the challenges faced by lecturers some of whom, we theorise, may experience a form of moral distress facing a conflict between personal beliefs and organisational requirements. It also critically examines the role and responsibilities of universities towards students and towards their staff and the inherent moral tensions between a market model and demands for ‘good' learning experiences. This paper highlights the tensions for academics, between academics and universities and within university policy and indicates the need for greater reflection about this issue, especially given the many constraints facing lecturers and universities.

Major issues in business process management : an expert perspective

Study Approach The results presented in this report are part of a larger global study on the major issues in BPM. Only one part of the larger study is reported here, viz. interviews with BPM experts. Interviews of BPM tool vendors together with focus group studies involving user organizations were conducted in parallel and set the groundwork for the identification of BPM issues on a global scale. Through this multi-method approach, we identify four distinct sets of outcomes. First, as is the focus of this report, we identify the BPM issues as perceived by BPM experts. Second, the research design allows us to gain insight into the opinions of organizations deploying BPM solutions. Third, an understanding of organizations’ misconceptions of BPM technologies, as confronted by BPM tool vendors, is obtained. Last, we seek to gain an understanding of BPM issues on a global scale, together with knowledge of matters of concern. This final outcome is aimed to produce an industry-driven research agenda that will inform practitioners and, in particular, the research community worldwide on issues and challenges that are prevalent or emerging in BPM and related areas...

Expertise in Business Process Management

As organizations attempt to become more business process-oriented, existing role descriptions are revised and entire new business process-related roles emerge. A lot of attention is often being paid to the technological aspect of Business Process Management (BPM), but relatively little work has been done concerning the people factor of BPM and the specification of BPM expertise in particular. This study tries to close this gap by proposing a comprehensive BPM expertise model, which consolidates existing theories and related work. This model describes the key attributes characterizing “BPM expertise” and outlines their structure, dynamics, and interrelationships. Understanding BPM expertise is a predecessor to being able to develop and apply it effectively. This is the cornerstone of human capital and talent management in BPM.

Business process mining success

Process mining has developed into a popular research discipline and nowadays its associated techniques are widely applied in practice. What is currently ill-understood is how the success of a process mining project can be measured and what the antecedent factors of process mining success are. We consider an improved, grounded understanding of these aspects of value to better manage the effectiveness and efficiency of process mining projects in practice. As such, we advance a model, tailored to the characteristics of process mining projects, which identifies and relates success factors and measures. We draw inspiration from the literature from related fields for the construction of a theoretical, a priori model. That model has been validated and re-specified on the basis of a multiple case study, which involved four industrial process mining projects. The unique contribution of this paper is that it presents the first set of success factors and measures on the basis of an analysis of real process mining projects. The presented model can also serve as a basis for further extension and refinement using insights from additional analyses.

Business Innovation and Disruption in Publishing

This is the first volume in a book series examining how organizations in the creative industries respond to disruptive change and how they themselves generate business innovations. The aspiration of this book series is to understand some of the common forces behind the disruptions occurring in so many creative industries today and identifying the most promising strategies and responses by organizations to create new value propositions, business models and business practices that can enable these industry participants to cope with and eventually thrive as their industries and sectors are transformed. The chapters included in the volume examine the processes of disruption and transformation due to the technology of the Internet, social forces driven by social media, the development of new portable digital devices with greater capabilities and smaller size, the decreasing costs of new information, and the creation of new business models and forms of intellectual property ownership rights for a digitized industry. The context for this volume is the publishing industries, understood as the industries for the publishing of fiction and non-fiction books, academic literature, consumer as well as trade magazines, and daily newspapers. This volume includes chapters by an internationally diverse array of media scholars whose chapters provide insights into these phenomena in Eastern Europe, Finland, France, Germany, Norway, Portugal, Russia, and the United States, using different methodological frameworks including, but not limited to, surveys, in-depth interviews and multiple-case studies. One gap that this book series seeks to fill is that between the study of business innovation and disruption by innovation scholars largely based in business school settings and similar studies by scholarly experts from non-business school disciplines, including the broader social sciences (e.g. sociology, political science, economic geography) and creative industry based professional school disciplines (e.g. architecture, communications, design, film making, journalism, media studies, performing arts, photography and television). Future volumes of this book series will examine disruption and business innovation in the film, video and photography sectors (volume two), the music sector (volume three) and interactive entertainment (volume four), with subsequent volumes focusing on the most relevant developments in creative industry business innovation and disruption that emerge.

Can Business Continuity Management Create Reliability in Airports? (Issues from Theory into Practice)

The advances made within the aviation industry over the past several decades have significantly improved the availability, affordability and convenience of air travel and have been greatly beneficial in both social and economic terms. Air transport has developed into an irreplaceable service being relied on by millions of people each day and as such airports have become critical elements of national infrastructure to facilitate the movement of people and goods. As components of critical infrastructure (CI), airports are integral parts of a national economy supporting regional as well as national trade, commercial activity and employment. Therefore, any disruption or crisis which impacts the continuity of operations at airports can have significant negative consequences for the airport as a business, for the local economy and other nodes of transport infrastructure as well as for society. Due to the highly dynamic and volatile environment in which airports operate in, the aviation industry has faced many different challenges over the years ranging from terrorist attacks such as September 11, to health crises such as the SARS epidemic to system breakdowns such as the recent computer system outage at Virgin Blue Airlines in Australia. All these events have highlighted the vulnerability of airport systems to a range of disturbances as well as the gravity and widespread impact of any kind of discontinuity in airport functions. Such incidents thus emphasise the need for increasing resilience and reliability of airports and ensuring business continuity in the event of a crisis...