#ISSS2016 Boulder

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Globally, information systems are gaining prominence and their proliferation has been substantial considering the rate of adoption by the masses.  Information systems facilitate design of solutions that are useful, usable, desirable, efficient, effective and different. People, technologies, and processes are brought together to address a problem by conceiving a solution that creates value for users. As a result, the world at large is witnessing a massive pace of digitization wherein businesses and governments are adopting different forms of information systems to connect to their customers in order to bring in a difference.  As a result, increasingly the term “Digital” has been utilize to characterize such information systems.

Digital is far more pervasive now than it was previously and its mass adoption has enabled information generation and application in diverse areas.  However, digital by itself is not beneficial to anyone.  Only when Digital enables a sector/domain, it becomes useful.

Businesses have realized the importance of digital as a differentiator in customer engagements so as to stay competitive and relevant in their respective areas of business.
They have also realized that digital has transformed social interactions, customer relationships, as well as reshaped the ability to access and leverage information.  They have experienced that business decisions are no longer based on opinions but on verifiable data.


To cope with this, businesses deal with interconnected, global systems that interact with multiple role players across multiple geographies, addressing multiple concerns of stakeholders across multiple disciplines by utilizing emerging technologies in a dynamic and challenging environment while providing near real time response and rich customer experience.  Over the last few decades, product companies who were traditionally involved in creating digital solutions have moved into service businesses as the market for their core product has reached maturity.  This is further prompted by the change in employment patterns, job opportunities, contribution to GDP and reduction in product sales and license fees.  However, such companies need ways and means for improving and standardizing their services as the reputation for the quality of their services is generally poor affecting their customer’s loyalty and brand image.  Since digital has standardized quality in other domains, it is obvious that digital can provide key advantages to these companies by improving quality of their services.  In this discussion, such digitally enhanced/enabled services are considered as digital services.  Digital service is an integration of people, processes, infrastructure and digital technologies, which are independent and operable, and which are networked together for a period of time to deliver a service for the benefit of another entity or the entity itself in real world.  The formation of the digital service is not a permanent phenomenon but rather a necessity for integrating and networking the different components to achieve the desired quality levels for the service.  The digital service emerges from a combination of the constituent elements (people, processes, infrastructure, and digital technologies), the interactions between themselves and their interactions with the customer’s environment.

While delivering digital services, businesses need to deal with interconnected, global systems, interact with collection of related services, multiple geographies, multiple stakeholders with differing concerns, multiple disciplines, emerging technologies, dynamic and challenging environment, interconnectivity and variety, near real time response and rich customer experience.  Digital services design aims at synthesizing services that are useful, usable and desirable from the consumer perspective, and efficient, effective and different from the provider perspective. It brings together people, skills, technology, methods and tools to address change and create value for customers. It involves solving multiple problems across multiple disciplines. It is iterative and requires participation of several stakeholders’ along with relevant domain experts. Existing service design methodologies are implicitly software/product design methodologies and they require tweaking to be applied in a servicing situation.

Applying the same mind-set to designing a service as to the design of product/software will lead to solutions that are possibly not appropriate to the servicing scenario. Services cannot be treated in the same way that software are treated and it is necessary to have a different perspective for designing services.  Currently, while numerous architectural frameworks and service design approaches as well as numerous digitization case-studies exist, a unified systematic approach for designing digital services does not exist.  In this workshop, the foundational concepts and the underlying processes for an approach to design digital services is presented.  

Keywords: Information Systems, Services, Digital Solutions, Digital Services, Architecting Digital Services, Transforming Digital Solutions, Enabling Services
 

2814 As systemists we need to be able to communicate using a common reference for the science of systems. Such a reference should provide a simple compelling framework for understanding systemist attitudes and systems concepts. It should be compelling for scientists, engineers and for people, even children, who are just starting out in their journey to understand systems. A candidate framework explored during the INCOSE international workshop in 2016 was used as a basis for developing a game at the IFSR conversation in 2016. The game is intended as a candidate contributor to Systems Literacy. The intended experience of the game is to help people to act in a systemic way when presented with a new situation. By playing the SysteMystery game the learners will be able to reflect on a situation and make improved decisions or judgements. Through playing the game learners will be able to grasp and expand their knowledge of core systems concepts. Through practice the learners will begin to naturally use concepts effectively when converting information into knowledge and forming their mental model of a bigger picture. Playing the game has three phases: a phase of experience which could be a story, game, poem, song or explanation of problem or situation; a phase of reflection and analysis of the experience using the SysteMystery cards and a post analysis phase where improvements to the SysteMystery framework are considered and fed-back to the repository.

2796 Throughout the years, there has been a concern about how the school systems in the United States can be improved. As population growth continues and existing issues remain due to a insufficient funding, it becomes more complex to address the specific areas where training is needed, students with special needs are forgotten, growing classroom sizes, parent involvement student health and more. The current issue we can see now is the lack of resources schools have to spend on research and development. By utilizing technology to conduct the research and collect data, it may be possible to optimize resources of faculty and improve student learning. Similar to any change in organizations, there will be resistance among not only the faculty, but also the parents and students whose cooperation and belief in the technology is needed. The presentation will build upon the ideas that success in implementing technology into classrooms relies heavily on collaborative teamwork from educators and education leaders, an established digital platform as a tool to keep all team members in constant communication and in sync, and well as trust in the relationships between the technology, the user, and the leaders advocating for this transition into the 21st century. Leaders who are successful should likely have less feelings of frustration, doubt, or impatience with the process. On the contrary, leaders THE PHENOMENON OF TECHNOLOGY IN K-12 CLASSROOMS 3 who have achieve levels of technology integration in their schools should feel hopeful, eager, enthusiastic, and inquisitive with their responsibilities. The analysis will be strictly K-12 focused considering that Higher Education operates significantly different than K-12 (Ensminger, 2005). The demonstration will attempt to provide insight not only on the success of what leaders have experienced through integrating technology in K-12 schools, but also some of the challenges they had encountered when working with students and parents to accept and believe in the technology they want to use. This investigation will help shed light on some of the likely obstacles and the solutions decided by these leaders in order to prepare future education leaders for the transition as more and more school board members and leaders begin to embrace technology as a positive and efficient change for their organizations

2879 This paper brings together a systems approach and an academic literacies perspective to offer a response to the problem of how to support professionals enrolled for postgraduate study in the transition to scholarly research practice. While such study presents exciting opportunities for practice-led research, there are a number of challenges for the academic staff member who supervises the research. For becoming a researcher and scholar is more than a process of bridging a gap between the world of work and academia, as these students seek to maintain their professional identities while navigating what is valued in the academy and the power relations in and between contexts. Recent approaches to research capacity development have shifted away from viewing the transition to scholarly research practice as simply a matter of transferring skills across contexts or as socialization into the valued research conventions. Rather, from an academic literacies perspective, becoming a research scholar means coming to participate in a practice characterized by particular knowledge, tools, values, behaviours, ways of using language, and power relations, some of which is tacit and some of which is explicit. From this perspective, language use such as reading and writing is central to the process of thinking, producing data, and generating new knowledge. Supporting students in this process can present a challenge to academic staff for whom, as experts, the process of doing scholarly research has become tacit. Pressure to increase graduation rates and to reduce time to completion in postgraduate programmes, has placed the role, practice and responsibility of the supervisor in facilitating the development of research practice under increased scrutiny. Many universities have intensified their efforts at supervisor and research training by creating human activity systems with purposes aligned with this goal. At the University of Cape Town where the research reported in this article is located, discipline experts have also taken the initiative to draw on language and literacy experts to support students in research writing development for the research report or dissertation. This contribution of the literacy expert has often been in the form of a course or series of lectures as a service to a programme or group of students. This paper reports on an example of the systemic collaboration, at the level of a programme, between literacy and discipline experts in the design of a dissertation process. This programme attracts students who are working full time, usually in engineering disciplines and is offered as a block release Systems Practice Masters Programme. The purpose of supervisory practice in this programme is to develop practice-led research drawing on systems theory and practice. The specific aim of the collaboration between discipline and literacy expert is to facilitate the holistic development of the reading and writing practices valued in scholarly research practice. This design incorporates the integration of activities, modelling and feedback that facilitates interaction between the conventions of the research practice, what the student brings to the practice, and the agency of the student. The systemic approach involves working together at programme level with a clear conceptual framework of academic literacies. In this paper we present the integrative design as an activity system. We present preliminary findings of our investigation of the development of students’ research writing practices and their perceptions of the dissertation preparation process. These findings are based on the analysis of student texts, focus group interviews and reflections on the impact of supervisory practice. Key words: Academic literacies; dissertation preparation; postgraduate research capacity development; practice-led research; systemic design for learning; systemic collaboration

2775 The denigration of the world’s ecosystems has been driven by the economic imperatives of insatiable multi-national corporations whose goals are to concentrate the ownership and control of global resources in a progressively narrowing band of society. The impacts of this denigration are understood as crises called, ozone depletion, global warming, sea-level rise, extreme weather events, water scarcity, and the shrinking polar ice regions. These challenges involve significant degrees of complexity in our rapidly changing world. Engaging societies and communities in the meaningful changes of behaviour necessary to halt and reverse the denigration of our life-supporting ecosystems is extremely difficult, given that the majority of these societies are a significant part of the problem. They rely almost universally on the same epistemological basis of understanding the world as the multi-national corporations that are destroying it. In many ways, these societies support the behaviours of the multi-national corporations through their consumerism and political systems of representation. Decision making frameworks based on systems thinking can facilitate enhanced understandings of sustainability and potentially enlighten societies to behave differently. However to do so they must communicate an understanding of complexity that engages society at the level of values and beliefs, as these determine actions. They must also be transparent, inclusive, contextually relevant, and based on epistemological concepts that are much more strongly aligned with sustainability. The epistemologies of Indigenous Peoples are based on principles of interconnectedness, holism, relevance over long periods of time, inter-generational equity, and uniqueness to place. Indigenous Peoples have out of necessity had to develop ways of retaining their values and beliefs while accommodating the enforced changes associated with the destructive colonisation processes experienced in many parts of the world. The Waitangi Tribunal was born of the first recognition of New Zealand’s 1840 founding document in the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975. This tribunal was established to avoid further transgressions of the Treaty. Many early claims were about environmental degradation while others related to the retention of cultural values, knowledge and language. Claims all identified impacts upon mauri, life supporting capacity. Indigenous concepts raised in hearings included; retention of intrinsic values / mauri; spiritual and cultural values; obligations to enhance mauri; and implications for future generations. Often successful, these claims resulted in significant rethinking of projects and ultimately informed changes in law. The Resource Management Act (1991) has the purpose of promoting sustainable development taking into account environmental, social, cultural and economic well-being of society. However while the ground-breaking new law incorporated numerous indigenous concepts, it stopped short of actually including mauri. The Mauri Model Decision Making Framework allows Indigenous Peoples to contribute understanding based on their own knowledge so that they can be effectively included in resource management decision making processes. The Framework adds a strengthened decision making context due to its ability to incorporate culturally relevant knowledge seamlessly alongside scientific understandings of a situation, incorporating both quantitative and qualitative data consistently into the same assessment. When mauri is defined as the life supporting capacity of the air, water and soil the theoretical basis is created for relevance in terms of New Zealand law, and a means to measure and evaluate impacts in a holistic way then exists. Thus through integrating systems techniques and the indigenous concept, Mauri, the Mauri Model Decision Making Framework creates a new approach to cross-cultural communication and action. Independent research has assessed the Mauri Model as an exemplar against Bellagio STAMP and it is now included in curricula in engineering, planning and international studies at the University of Auckland, as well as being an online resource.

2728 According to US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Planning Report 02-3, across the entire system development life cycle (SDLC), 70% of the defects are introduced in the Requirements Gathering and Analysis/Architectural Design stage. Enterprise Level Concept of Operations (CONOPs) may exist but are not linked to system models. The missing link between CONOPs and system models causes the requirements either inadequately or incorrectly defined. As systems become more complex and concepts continue evolving, there is a need for approaches that combine CONOPs with system models to build an integrated modelling environment. This paper proposes a CONSYS approach that extends system models to CONOPs in the context of Model-Base System Engineering (MBSE). This paper evaluates the benefits of this CONSYS approach. The goal is to build a link between CONOPs and system models so that CONOPs are baselined and change controlled as the way system models are. SysML has been widely adopted as the language to capture system models. A case study example is presented to demonstrate the CONSYS approach using a SysML tool and to show the benefits of this approach. The areas for further research is also discussed in this paper.

2732 A model to achieve technological development (DT) is proposed, in particular a satellite, with the following sub phases: 1.Analysis of International satellite system; 2. Analysis of the National satellite system; 3.diagnose, using the SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats); 4. Proposed solution; 5.Mission, vision, values and strategic objectives of the proposal; 6.Strategias using SWOT combinations: FO, FA, OD and AD; 7.Action plan; 8. Technological development. With analysis and diagnosis it was found that one of the great strengths in this country is the development of scientific research, in particular space, since the forties, but it is isolated, ie, not integrated in the productive industry and therefore state policy proposes establishing humanistic satellite companies to promote and preserve the ecology, self-financing, public, mixed, or private initiative, integrating scientific, basic and applied research, based on the goals, objectives and marketing strategies. Companies call for the design, construction and launch of satellites, thus providing efficient, fast, safe and cheap services to meet the demand of domestic and international users, as developed countries have done through their space agencies, in order to have DT in this area.

2823 A Systemic Model for a telecommunications innovation system was designed with the proposal for technological development, to avoid situations that endanger the cancellation, by the International Union of Communications of the satellite orbits assigned to Mexico, and thus promote public and private investment through the integration of basic and applied scientific research in enterprises. The idea is to make appropriate innovations and make significant improvements to products, thus meeting the demands of domestic and international consumers. Keywords: Systemic model, innovation, and technological development.

2791 What our media named as terrorism today are perceived as revolution by some. What we call revolution in mainland China and Russia, are no less violent and cruel than terrorism too. This paper observes and identifies the roots, the triggering historic events, the similarities among the differences, of the two huge phenomena and their two driving ideologies, i.e. the Extreme Islamism and the Bloody Communism, that have deep influence to our time and our daily life. As one of our subject has been just fading away into history (not really) and another is still going on while this paper is being written, we highlight the similarities or even isomorph of these two violent social phenomena, raising a question behind such similarity – what are the driven forces that enable these phenomena to emerge, or, why on this planet a certain number of people are doomed to believe, engage, fight for, and victimized by such pathological ideologies?

2872 Historically, the evolution of supply chain management passed in four stages: the physical distribution management (1960s); the logistics management (1970s-1980s), the SCM (1980s-1990s) and the Green Supply chain Management (1990- Till now). Green supply chain management (GSCM) integrates environmental thinking into supply chain management; from conceptual product design to the delivery of final product to the consumers, and also involves end-of-life management. The implementation of GSCM is supported by few factors which are known as GSCM drivers. The aim of this paper is to study the state of green supply chain in the Lebanese food industry and investigate focally on the drivers affecting GSCM. To approach this investigation, we selected four companies due to their size in the Lebanese food industry.

2783   This workshop will expand upon the content and ideas provided in the earlier session: Outdoor Adolescent Rites of Passages: Theoretical Foundations, Contemporary Shortcomings, and the Emerging New Model. Participants will be engaged by exploring personal connections to the outdoors and meaningful experiences they have had in the wilderness. A practical and working model of a community-based outdoor youth engagement initiative will then be presented. Participants will be asked to contribute to the development of this model through critical feedback, generative dialogue, and human-centered design. Participants will leave the workshop with a deeper understanding of how outdoor rites of passage can be offered in any community, as well as having contributed to the development of a practical initiative in Colorado.

2784  The workshop develops a network thinking lens then builds inter-organizational networking capacity with participants using Network Weaving principles and processes (Holley, 2010). Participants interact using Liberating Structures (Lipmanowicz & McCandless, 2014) to build relationships in the session and unleash collective intelligence to form inclusive networks of diverse stakeholders. An exercise makes the group’s structure visible first on butcher paper and then modeled in a free on-line network mapping tool (Kumu). An appreciation of the power of network thinking is developed. Techniques for building action-oriented, intentional, relationship-rich, and supportive networks can be applied to participant’s respective domain practices. Facilitated structures that achieve surprisingly good group engagement are easily adopted upon returning to participant home organizations. And we have fun!
This highly participatory workshop addresses the challenge of sustainability in human collectives working for change together by harnessing their diversity through intentional and systematic relationship building.  It uses information technology to make relationship structure visible (Kumu). It uses a “social technology of discourse” (Liberating Structures) to engage the active intelligence and diversity of every participant to build a social structure (Community of Practice) that can affect change through harnessing and coordinating their common intention.

Participants learn and take away:
1. A network thinking lens• Use a network thinking lens to engage differently in organizations • Use Network Weaving principles to begin to build out intentional networks for action• Holley, J. (2012). Network weaver handbook: A guide to transformational networks. Network Weaver Publishing
2. Use Liberating Structures to enable surprisingly good outcomes for groups• Learn the Liberating Structure called “1-2-4-all” to enhance the generative potential of any meeting• Learn the Liberating Structure “Social Network Webbing” so face-to-face groups visualize their networks• Capture the value diversity brings through full participation; encourage every voice• Lipmanowicz, H., & McCandless, K. (2014). The surprising power of liberating structures: Simple rules to unleash a culture of innovation.
3. Connect with people doing similar work, create Communities of Practice• Use Kumu to capture and model those relationships• Get support from like-minded network builders in the session when we return to our practices• https://kumu.ioParticipants discuss how and why building intentional networks based on strong, supportive relationships result in action. We’ll demonstrate Network Weaving concepts and methods applied to organizational networks. We’ll make networks visible by actually capturing and modeling the network of participants. Using Liberating Structures that hold both the individual and collective in the session enables participants to try them in their practices. Participants leave with new perspectives, increased skills in facilitating conversations, and accessible demonstrations of simple tools that support ongoing organizing.

The session is a micro-iteration of a participatory action research cycle. By observing, thinking, acting, and reflecting, the participants move together through cognitive and behavioral transformation about network thinking. The session uses a series of generative and participatory interactions (Liberating Structures) to engage people to learn and build a Community of Practice (CoP) for thinking from a network perspective and for building effective networks. The community structure is modeled in a tool (Kumu) that will allow participants to easily access each other after the session and use the tool to model their own native relationship and intentional networks.Impact? Effective large-scale collaborative relationship building and network thinking can be part of sustaining structures of intention and agency. Networks can address the challenge of systemic power imbalance; encourage peer relationships, valuing everyone’s unique contribution. Network thinking can empower everyone to step into leadership roles. Networks reach across a diversity of stakeholders drawing them near to each other in adaptive interaction. Promoting network thinking in a group of passionate change practitioners can lead to changes at scale.

2839 The purpose of this research is to determine, from the point of view of Systems Science, the weak organizational viability of Small Manufacturing Enterprises (SMEs) in order to advice how to raise its organizational and functional structure to face market complexity , for example attenuating the factors which affect the operation to early close enterprise . To achieve this end it were identified and ranked the most frequent factors that cause early closure of SMEs , these data were analyzed conceptually based on the Model of Viable Systems, defining a total of 30 ( thirty) elements that , empirically, provide the benchmarks for diagnosing and redesigning the organizational and functional operation of an SME in order to viable organization, that is, not only to maintain its existence but to transcend the variety of market. Keywords: Viability, SMEs, Viable System Model, Variety

2927 The public education of quality can mitigate educational differences between rich and poor families, according the report of United Nations about Human Development in 2014. The Human Development Index (HDI) is an index that measures the achievements of a country in three basic dimensions of human development: 1) A long and healthy Life, 2) Access to education and knowledge and 3) Dignified standard of life. The same report states that primary and secondary education worldwide remains at acceptable progress but in higher education levels there are large gaps between developed countries and those it in developing. Derived of policy national and institutional in education of Mexico, quality indicators involve various parameters within which highlighted, approval rating, the reproof rate and the desertion rate; although these rates are not the best way to measure the quality that exists in the process of educational training. It has been observed that ethics and responsibility of all stakeholders in the education system of this level have an influence unfavorably on the values presented by the mentioned parameters. This research attempts to find relation between educational performance and the behavior of the actors involved in the educational system; employing, a systemic methodology that allows us to evaluate the problem and contributing to the resolution of a holistically. Keyboards: Quality indicators, Educational Performance, Ethics, Responsibility.

2841 Schumpeter points out that innovation is a dynamic force that causes the continuous transformation of social, institutional and economic structures which ensures a plausible quality of life of its inhabitants. Innovation is a complex process of interactions between different actors can be understood best as a system where different social and institutional agents interact and promote the innovation and the development of the countries. To try to understand the complexity of this process were studied 41 variables which were related through network analysis and it was found emergent properties that reveal that less than 10 % of the variables are relevant and there are political and social, this result was mainly in developing countries like Mexico which was analyzed from 1980 to 2015. The results also show that these actors found in systemic innovation process have hampered the efficiency of the process. Keywords: Systemic Approach, Innovation, Networks

2827 The Viable System Model is a broadly applicable organizational model originally developed by Stafford Beer in the steel industry and includes a number of homeostats, including the one between the attention to the present and to the future (the three/four homeostat monitored by System Five), the vertical authority/horizontal autonomy homeostat and the homeostat between the system (systems one/two and three). Also important are the many homeostats that connect the system with its present contractual and contextual environments and the ones oriented toward varying aspects of future time. The Viable System Model is recursive: that is that each system is embedded in a number of other more comprehensive subsystems ranging from authority relationships to community and regulatory ones. These are not authority relations in the strict sense as, although a community has standards and norms, and a regulatory body its rules, these apply primarily within strict boundaries or parameters. These homeostats and recursive relationships do not follow a normal ordinal pattern or straightforward time scale. A lower level of recursion may be (e.g. the ‘grass roots’ where the most far reaching potential innovations are explored while the more comprehensive level may be constrained to pursue mainly those ‘possible futures’ that are acceptable to the full range of their members. They may have shorter or longer feedback cycles and they may be working within frameworks that are anywhere from hundreds of years old to yesterday. This can and sometimes does lead to systems pathologies as well as new opportunities for integrated approaches. In this presentation, I will illustrate some of these homeostats and their implications for progress on environmental, social and organizational fronts. Keywords: Viable System Model, homeostasis, recursion, time scale

2920 Universities are organized into disciplines, but most real world problems are interdisciplinary. Holistic conceptual models could help to overcome this fragmentation in our thinking and allow a more multi-perspective view of issues. When analyzing complex problems in business or politics, there are a wide range of micro- and macro-economic factors involved. One of the most often used concepts in business literature is the so called PESTEL framework (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental, Legal) – some variations on this are PEST and PESTLE. The PESTEL framework is used for environmental scanning of risks and trends in strategic management. Despite its worldwide distribution there are known to be a couple of flaws with this framework. The selection of categories is questionable; the categories are often discussed in separate boxes and important interconnections between variables are lost. What is needed is a more systemic approach that does not cut complex issues into fragmented pieces but provides a more coherent picture. However it must still be easy and efficient to use in business practice. The goal of this current project is to build on the tradition of PESTEL but also to suggest some adjustments that would lift the concept up to new levels of analysis, application and visual representation. The new framework is the result of a cross-comparison of several dozen category frameworks used in business, politics and sustainability. The criteria for the development process and present version were a well-balanced selection of categories, practically useful for team work in the business context and beyond, and providing a better representation of important interconnections. The result is establishing a bridge between the PESTEL tradition and systems methods such as causal loop diagrams and thus allowing a more holistic view of complex issues. It allows visualizing global risks, megatrends or other topics of interest on the global or local level. Keywords: Problem solving, management, strategy, decision making, sustainable development, visualization, causal loop diagram, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinarity