In terms of competitiveness, Business-IT Alignment (BITA) is still a crucial challenge for business leaders and CIOs, especially in the context of Digital Transformation and time-to-market challenges. Core Operational BITA is a projection of BITA to the Enterprise Information System perimeter, i.e., the operational alignment between the business processes and supporting IT. It is a major source of issues (e.g., strong couplings, maintenance costs, technical debt, slow adaptation). These issues cause a misalignment and thus contribute to the well-known Business-IT Gap. In this paper, we review the current state of this operational alignment in the context of Enterprise Architecture (EA) i.e. between the Business Process layer and the Application layer. Our analysis focuses on five facets: modelling notations used at the Business Process and Application layers, existence of explicit and implicit links between these layers, potential of these links in terms of alignment or misalignment in the information system, tooling and support. As a result, we notably outline some current limitations, such as modelling disparities, misuse of links between the two layers and an under-coverage of real alignment processes. We also discuss some lessons learned and future challenges, mainly around modelling needs and consistency management between the two considered layers for core operational BITA.
Manufacturing processes are characterized by an increasing complexity, making them susceptible to failures. An effective strategy to avoid such failures, or at least to minimize their impact, is data-driven failure management. However, for many small and medium sized manufacturers, this strategy is not feasible due to a paucity of relevant failure data, which can be explained by the severe limitations and shortcomings of available solutions: ranging from the error proneness and high efforts of manual solutions to the high costs and implementation efforts of automated solutions. Against this backdrop, our study follows a design science research approach to design, develop, and evaluate a novel ontology-based speech recognition app that addresses key shortcomings of currently available solutions. Main contributions of our study are the development of design requirements and principles, as well as their instantiation in an app prototype for collecting failure data in the context of manufacturing processes.
Innovation has become a driving force for all spheres of contemporary society, including entrepreneurial activities in start-ups. Evidence from the scientific literature shows how innovative start-ups play an important role in economic, technological and social development. Innovation is the ability of start-ups to face challenges by creating new solutions. Despite the fact that the evaluation model is in all respects necessary to measure the innovativeness of start-ups, no comprehensive attempts have been found in the literature to conduct this type of research. This paper represents a preliminary study that aims to develop an evaluation model of the innovativeness of innovative start-ups; it is an attempt to construct a framework of variables that could be useful for assessing innovativeness capability of start-ups. The results of this research must be evaluated in the future by conducting round tables and interviews with economic operators who will provide the academic community with sufficient evidence on the method of evaluating innovativeness from the practical side.
One of the more striking effects of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the worsening of inequalities, especially for already vulnerable people. This is the case for people with disability who came into the COVID-19 crisis already facing significant exclusion from employment. Based on a single case study research project concerning an Italian province, the current paper highlights the role social cooperatives played in mitigating the negative effects of the pandemic on the work inclusion of people with disability during the most acute phase of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020. By triangulating multiple sources of evidence (both qualitative and quantitative), the study identifies local embeddedness and organisational hybridity as the most relevant properties that allowed cooperatives to play that role. This result confirms social cooperatives as fundamental actors for social innovation and primary partners for public administration within a plural welfare system.
Due to the processes of the virtualisation of work, organisations are facing profound transformations which are also changing their organisational culture. The mainstream academic literature defines organisational culture in terms of shared meaning i.e., patterns of belief, symbolism, rituals, and mythology, which evolve and function as a source of cohesion for an organisation (Glaser et al. Management Communication Quarterly 1(2):173–198, 1987). Therefore, it argues that organisational culture develops within organisations through a top-down approach (Shepherd and Sutcliffe. The Academy of Management Review 36(2):361–380, 2011). However, as emerging technologies and the virtualisation of work have brought about substantial change (Großer and Baumöl. International Journal of Information Systems and Project Management 5(4):21–35, 2022), it is necessary to redefine the concept of organisational culture. Considering the different approaches to organisational culture, the present research aims at analysing how it is formulated within virtualised organisations (Atkinson and Sohn. TESOL Quarterly 47, 2013) that have several peculiarities both in terms of organisational designs and soft competencies (Autor et al. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 118(4):1279–1333, 2003; Autor. The changing task composition of the US Labor Market: An update of Autor, Levy, and Murnane (2003)—David Autor. ScholarSite, Inc., 2013; Grundke et al. Which skills for the digital era? Returns to skills analysis. OECD, 2018; Bissola et al. Journal of Product Innovation Management 31, 2014). Despite the increasing prevalence, this aspect has received little attention within academia. We will analyse the bottom-up perspective through the lenses of Socio-technical and Complexity theories (Bednar and Welch. Information Systems Frontiers 22(2):281–298, 2020; Kuhn. 9. The essential tension: Tradition and innovation in scientific research. In The essential tension. University of Chicago Press, pp 225–239. 2011; Bauman. Liquid modernity. Polity, 2000), as well as compare academic and grey literature to highlight the need for a change in the mainstream approach to organizational culture.
