Incentive mechanisms in infrastructure projects : A case-based comparison between Australia and the Netherlands

Despite a general belief that incentive mechanisms can improve value for money during procurement and performance during project execution, empirical research on the actual effects is nascent. This research focuses on the design and implementation of incentive mechanisms in four different infrastructure projects: two road reconstructions in the Netherlands and two building constructions in Australia. Based on an analytical framework of key motivation drivers, a cross cases analysis is conducted in view of performance on the contract assumptions, selection phase, execution phase and project contract performance. It was identified that despite significant differences in the project characteristics, results indicate that they experience similar contextual drivers on the incentive effectiveness. High value was placed on risk allocation and relationship building in the selection and construction phase. The differences can be explained from both contextual and project related characteristics. Although there are limitations with this research in drawing generalizations across two sets of case projects, the results provide a strong base to explore the nature of incentive systems across different geographical and contextual boundaries in future research.

Cabin crew rostering at KLM: optimization of reserves

In this paper, we will discuss the issue of rostering jobs of cabin crew attendants at KLM. Generated schedules get easily disrupted by events such as illness of an employee. Obviously, reserve people have to be kept 'on duty' to resolve such disruptions. A lot of reserve crew requires more employees, but too few results in so-called secondary disruptions, which are particularly inconvenient for both the crew members and the planners. In this research we will discuss several modifications of the reserve scheduling policy that have a potential to reduce the number of secondary disruptions, and therefore to improve the performance of the scheduling process.

Agility of the firm : customer's perspective

Agility is emerging as an important determinant of success and achieving sustained competitive advantage in hyper-competition. Whilst the digital natives are on the rise, ubiquitous technologies, networks and associated systems are increasingly weaving themselves into the very fabric of everyday life of both individuals and corporations. With a global shift towards “everywhere retailing”, ubiquitous contemporary information systems such as mobile CRM systems (C-CRMS) are evolving. Unlike in traditional CRMS, customers are becoming an important user group in this new paradigm. Draws on agility literature, this study examine how customers’ use of C-CRMS influence firm’s customer sensing capability, firm’s customer responding capability, and how customer-perceived firm’s responsiveness influence customers use of C-CRMS. Following the notions of agility we theorized firm’s customer agility from customers’ standpoint where we use customers’ use of C-CRMS and customer-perceived firm’s responsiveness for sensing and responding components of agility respectively. This research-in-progress paper investigates how C-CRMS facilitates firm’s customer agility, and reports the approach pursued in adopting sense and response measures of customer agility taking the customers perspective derived through extant literature.

Construct Redundancy in Process Modeling Grammars: Improving the Explanatory Power of Ontological Analysis

Conceptual modelling supports developers and users of information systems in areas of documentation, analysis or system redesign. The ongoing interest in the modelling of business processes has led to a variety of different grammars, raising the question of the quality of these grammars for modelling. An established way of evaluating the quality of a modelling grammar is by means of an ontological analysis, which can determine the extent to which grammars contain construct deficit, overload, excess or redundancy. While several studies have shown the relevance of most of these criteria, predictions about construct redundancy have yielded inconsistent results in the past, with some studies suggesting that redundancy may even be beneficial for modelling in practice. In this paper we seek to contribute to clarifying the concept of construct redundancy by introducing a revision to the ontological analysis method. Based on the concept of inheritance we propose an approach that distinguishes between specialized and distinct construct redundancy. We demonstrate the potential explanatory power of the revised method by reviewing and clarifying previous results found in the literature.

The Imperial War Museum's social interpretation project

This report represents the output from research undertaken by University of Salford and MTM London as part of the joint Digital R&D Fund for Arts and Culture, operated by Nesta, Arts Council England and the AHRC. University of Salford and MTM London received funding from the programme to act as researchers on the Social Interpretation (SI) project, which was led by the Imperial War Museum (IWM) and their technical partners, The Centre for Digital Humanities, University College London, Knowledge Integration, and Gooii. The project was carried out between October 2011 and October 2012.

Perdido : the first Smart Field in the western hemisphere

Located in the Gulf of Mexico in nearly 8,000 feet of water, the Perdido development is the world’s deepest spar and Shell’s first Smart Field in the Western hemisphere. Jointly developed by Shell, BP, and Chevron, the spar and the subsea equipment connected to it will eventually capture approximately an order of magnitude more data than is collected from any other Shell-designed and managed development currently operating in the Gulf of Mexico. This paper will describe Shell’s Smart Fields design philosophy, briefly explain the five design elements that underpin “smartness” in Shell’s North and South American operations—specifically, remote assisted operations, exception-based surveillance, collaborative work environments, hydrocarbon development tools and workflows, and Smart Fields Foundation IT infrastructure—and shed light on the process by which a highly customized Smart Fields development and management plan was put together for Perdido.

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.

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.

TEXTA Book Club in the QUT Art Museum

TEXTA runs as a type of book club that we have previously labelled as ‘bespoke’ (Ellison, Holliday and Van Luyn 2012). We visualise TEXTA as a meeting place between the community and the university, as a space for discussion and engagement with both visual art forms and written texts. In today’s presentation, we shall briefly establish the ‘bespoke’ bookclub. We then want to introduce the idea of TEXTA as an example of a book club that negotiates Edward Soja’s Thirdspace (1996) – a space that incorporates and extends concepts of First and Secondspace (or perceived and conceived spaces). In doing so, we showcase two recent sessions of TEXTA as case studies. We will then illustrate some ideas we have for expanding TEXTA beyond the boundaries of Brisbane city, and invite feedback on how to further extend the opportunities for community engagement that TEXTA can offer in regional areas.

Exploring subscription renewal intention of operational cloud enterprise systems-a socio-technical approach

Despite the fact that customer retention is crucial for providers of cloud enterprise systems, only little attention has been directed towards investigating the antecedents of subscription renewal in an organizational context. This is even more surprising, as cloud services are usually offered as subscription-based pricing models with the (theoretical) possibility of immediate service cancellation, strongly opposing classical long-term IT-Outsourcing contracts or license-based payment plans of on premise enterprise systems. To close this research gap an empirical study was undertaken. Firstly, a conceptual model was drawn from theories of social psychology, organizational system continuance and IS success. The model was subsequently tested using survey responses of senior management within companies which adopted cloud enterprise systems. Gathered data was then analysed using PLS. The results indicate that subscription renewal intention is influenced by both – social-related and technology-specific factors – which are able to explain 50.4% of the variance in the dependent variable. Beneath the cloud enterprise systems specific contributions, the work advances knowledge in the area of organizational system continuance, as well as IS success.

Evaluating operational cloud enterprise systems success : an organizational perspective

This paper presents a formative measurement index to assess cloud enterprise systems success. The scale development procedure is based on Moore and Benbasat (1991), including newer scale development elements which focus on the creation and assessment of formative constructs. The data is analysed using SmartPLS with a sample of 103 IT decision makers. The results show that the perception of net benefits is shaped not only by enterprise-system-specific factors like productivity improvements and higher quality of business processes, but also by factors which are specifically attributed to cloud systems, such as higher strategic flexibility. Reliability, user requirements and customization contribute most to the overall perception of system quality. Information quality shows no cloud-specific facets and is robust in the context of cloud enterprise systems.

The knowledge: a project by Boxcopy at Post-Museum, Singapore

‘The Knowledge’ was part of the Next Wave/Asialink project 'Invisible Structures: Australian artist collectives in Tokyo, Singapore and Yogyakarta' in January 2011. For this project, Brisbane ARI Boxcopy undertook a two-week residency at Post Musuem in Singapore. In this project, the Boxcopy artists Channon Goodwin, Joseph Breikers, Timothy P Kerr, Daniel McKewen, Raymonde Rajkowski, Tim Woodward, attempted to acquire an intimate knowledge of the city of Singapore by forming a free delivery company, The Boxcopy Publics Carriage Office of Singapore (BPCOS), which provided services around the city by foot, bike and public transport. In addition to committing to memory and documenting the streets and sites of Singapore, the BPCOS team also performed tasks such as delivering goods or messages, travel a particular route or visit a site, as requested by the people of Singapore. The project comprised this process of public interaction as well as an exhibition and website.

Role Ambiguity and conflicts: A study of company secretaries and two-tier boards in the Netherlands

Recent research suggests that company secretaries are increasingly involved in governance responsibilities in addition to traditional administrative tasks. Little is known in the literature, however, about company secretaries' changing governance role, and their daily challenges in liaising with boards and other stakeholders. In addition, few studies have been able to gain access to learn firsthand how company secretaries operate. This exploratory study fills this void by gaining access to the opinions of about one hundred company secretaries in the Netherlands who operate in the two-tier board system. Our findings indicate that company secretaries significantly influence an organisation's governance framework, while they face a number of practical challenges with directors, employees and management in fulfilling their diverse roles and responsibilities.

External signal-activated liposomal drug delivery systems

Modern drug discovery gives rise to a great number of potential new therapeutic agents, but in some cases the efficient treatment of patient may not be achieved because the delivery of active compounds to the target site is insufficient. Thus, drug delivery is one of the major challenges in current pharmaceutical research. Numerous nanoparticle-based drug carriers, e.g. liposomes, have been developed for enhanced drug delivery and targeting. Drug targeting may enhance the efficiency of the treatment and, importantly, reduce unwanted side effects by decreasing drug distribution to non-target tissues. Liposomes are biocompatible lipid-based carriers that have been studied for drug delivery during the last 40 years. They can be functionalized with targeting ligands and sensing materials for triggered activation. In this study, various external signal-assisted liposomal delivery systems were developed. Signals can be used to modulate drug permeation or release from the liposome formulation, and they provide accurate control of time, place and rate of activation. The study involved three types of signals that were used to trigger drug permeation and release: electricity, heat and light. Electrical stimulus was utilized to enhance the permeation of liposomal DNA across the skin. Liposome/DNA complex-mediated transfections were performed in tight rat epidermal cell model. Various transfection media and current intensities were tested, and transfection efficiency was evaluated non-invasively by monitoring the concentration of secreted reporter protein in cell culture medium. Liposome/DNA complexes produced gene expression, but electrical stimulus did not enhance the transfection efficiency significantly. Heat-sensitive liposomal drug delivery system was developed by coating liposomes with biodegradable and thermosensitive poly(N-(2-hydroxypropyl) methacrylamide-mono/dilactate polymer. Temperature-triggered liposome aggregation and contents release from liposomes were evaluated. The cloud point temperature (CP) of the polymer was set to 42 °C. Polymer-coated liposome aggregation and contents release were observed above CP of the polymer, while non-coated liposomes remained intact. Polymer precipitates above its CP and interacts with liposomal bilayers. It is likely that this induces permeabilization of the liposomal membrane and contents release. Light-sensitivity was introduced to liposomes by incorporation of small (< 5 nm) gold nanoparticles. Hydrophobic and hydrophilic gold nanoparticles were embedded in thermosensitive liposomes, and contents release was investigated upon UV light exposure. UV light-induced lipid phase transitions were examined with small angle X-ray scattering, and light-triggered contents release was shown also in human retinal pigment epithelial cell line. Gold nanoparticles absorb light energy and transfer it into heat, which induces phase transitions in liposomes and triggers the contents release. In conclusion, external signal-activated liposomes offer an advanced platform for numerous applications in drug delivery, particularly in the localized drug delivery. Drug release may be localized to the target site with triggering stimulus that results in better therapeutic response and less adverse effects. Triggering signal and mechanism of activation can be selected according to a specific application.