Even though the question as to whether optimal organizational structures exist has been asked repeatedly, organization theory has not been able to answer it in general form. Over time, several useful heuristic principles to direct the structuring of organizations have emerged. Moreover, powerful models, inspired by general systems theory and cybernetics, have been elaborated, which establish th...

The need of the IS-community to theorize the IT-artifact has been claimed by several authors. It has been somewhere between difficult and impossible to unequivocally agree on what the IT-artifact is. This paper argues that this is even more challenging when considering inter-organizational information systems (IOIS). After pointing to methodological and theoretical problems of researching IOIS ...

This chapter presents an approach to organizational-self design (OSD), a method of designing organizations at run-time in which the agents are responsible for generating their own organizational structures. OSD is especially suitable for environments that are dynamic, albeit slowly changing. Such environments preclude the use of static, design-time generated, organizational structures, and yet ...

Organizational wellness programs are on or off-site services sponsored by organizations which attempt to promote good health or to identify and correct potential health related problems (Wolfe, Parker, & Napier, 1994). The authors conducted a meta-analysis on studies that examined the effects of participation in an organizational wellness program (fitness or comprehensive) on absenteeism and jo...

Agile methods emerge as an alternative to improve quality and performance in software development processes. However, as agile methods are essentially focused on human aspects, their application in companies depends mostly on their adequacy to the current organizational culture. This study explores the view of the organizational culture in three levels as a theoretical framework to allow early ...

The CEC GOAL Project (Esprit 6283) aims to develop generic software tools to support inter-organizational project management. Some distinguishing characteristics of inter-organizational projects are that they are collaborative, decentralised and heterogeneous. This means that generic issues in project management (such as risk and uncertainty) take on an extra dimension, and there are many new p...

In today’s work environment employees face many problems such as distrust, disempowerment, poor leadership and lack of support from the organization, the consequence of these factors is low commitment of employees towards their organization. Therefore, the basic objective of this paper is to examine the relationship of perceived organizational support, empowerment, perceived leadership behavior...

The problems associated with the development of hospital information systems and their implementation in organizations have been the subject of much literary debate. The perspectives taken in regards to this phenomenon are often similar to the debate in IS design in general, in that the overseen social and organizational factors of IS implementation are mainly addressed. However, from our exper...

Deployment of software processes based on reference models is a knowledge-intensive task, i.e., a great amount of technical knowledge must be applied in order to guarantee conformance and adherence of processes deployed to the reference models adopted. Moreover, software process deployers have to deal with organizational and individual cultural problems on a regular basis, for instance, resista...

WHAT DO WE KNOW AND HOW can we manage our knowledge assets to fulfill our organizational objectives? These are important questions for an organization. Knowledge management should enhance individual, group, and organizational learning; improve information circulation; and even support innovation. It aims to capture and represent an organization’s knowledge assets to facilitate knowledge access,...