Defining useful metrics to measure the goals of a software organisation is difficult. Defining useful metrics to measure the causes of the (failure) to fulfil those organisational goals is even more difficult, as the diversity of potential causes makes their measurement illusive. In this article, we describe a method to select useful software metrics based on findings from qualitative research....

The economic importance of franchising in service provision, job creation and self employment opportunities is widely reported. However the factors influencing franchise unit success has received little academic attention. This represents an important gap in the literature. Previous research has tended to focus upon system-level operations and recently upon the reasons for franchisor discontinu...

Research on business value of information technology (IT) has recognised that organisational factors play critical roles in affecting how IT impacts on firm performance. However, the conceptualisation of organisational factors and their relationship with IT and firm performance has not been extensively developed in the literature. There is neither a coherent way of specifying organisational fac...

Autobiographical memory impairments in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have been attributed to a failure in using the self as an effective memory organisational system. To explore this hypothesis, we compared self-defining and everyday memories in adults with and without ASD. Results demonstrated that both groups were able to distinguish between self-defining and everyday memories, although the...

This paper presents a practical risk analysis method for critical, large-scale IT systems in an organisation. The method is based on reliability block diagram modelling and was adapted to fit the requirements of governmental organisations and to reduce the effort required to capture complex failure behaviour. Through the use of different failure categories the risk analysis can be simplified, t...

As a result of the ever-changing environment and the demands of organisations’ customers, it is important to recognise the importance of some important managerial challenges. It is the sincere belief that failure to meet these challenges, will ultimately contribute to inevitable problems for organisations. This recognition requires from managers and by implication organisations to be engaged in...

Context There is a growing body of evidence linking professional work environments to improved patient, personnel and organisational outcomes. Since autonomy has been identified as an important attribute of a professional work environment for enhancing patient safety, a proven association between autonomy and patient-outcomes might be expected but, until now, had not been examined. This study b...

The paper examines the role of leadership in facilitating collective learning and capacity building by utilising ideas from the fields of evolutionary learning, operations strategy, quality, project and risk management. Two contrasting cases are chosen to show how success and failure can depend upon collective capacity building through participative leadership and Organisational Learning (OL). ...