Dr. Slosar is director, ethics, Ascension Health, St. Louis. I t is sometimes said that health care ethics as a profession is in an early stage of its maturation process. If this is true, it can also be said that organizational ethics in health care is just now beginning to emerge from its earliest stage of development. In its infancy, organizational ethics was generally viewed as synonymous wi...

Although much has been written about better aligning Information Systems (IS) with the business, too often organizations perceive software development as though it exists in its own little cocoon. Selection of a formal software development methodology (FSDM) is usually left to the IS area which focuses on the detail component levels and features of an FSDM. The authors instead approach an FSDM ...

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...

INTRODUCTION The variable success of integrated care initiatives has led experts to recommend tailoring design and implementation to the organizational context. Yet, organizational contexts are rarely described, understood, or measured with sufficient depth and breadth in empirical studies or in practice. We thus lack knowledge of when and specifically how organizational contexts matter. To fac...

The paper at hand presents a new competence focused management approach which is called competence based business development (CbBD). CbBD should support organizations of all kinds in the effective identification, measurement, combination and integration of organizational competences, which can be seen as a bundle of human competencies, tools and material. The creation of new business fields, p...

Organizational multiagent system (OMAS) are rapidly emerging as a powerful paradigm for developing complex systems. Their development process implies specific requirements and software engineering tools. Recently a great number of methods and frameworks to develop OMAS have appeared. Each of them offers different functionality and they have distinct characteristics and perspectives. The main co...

698 • JAOA • Vol 101 • No 12 • December 2001 sponsible for communicating with IRBs/IECs, for ensuring that the approved procedures of obtaining informed consent are followed, for determining that protocols are followed, and for reporting adverse events. IRBs/IECs are responsible for scrutinizing proposed research and ascertaining that both the work and the workers comply with agreed-upon standa...

A case study of an organizational memory information system located within a Portuguese bank is described and analyzed. It shows how the development of effective organizational memory and performance can be rendered problematic by such a system and how such problems were alleviated through the provision of formal and informal back up mechanisms, and improvisations. The paper concludes with a co...

We introduce the observe-mine-adopt (OMA) paradigm that assists organizations in making improvements to their software development processes without committing to and undertaking large-scale sweeping organizational process improvement. Specifically, the approach has been applied to improve software practices focused on maintainability. This novel approach is based on the theory that software te...