Högskolan i Skövde

Two extreme case studies are highlighted in this follow-up chapter (this is a practical case study following up on Chap. 4 with a theoretical base) on how facilitators can enhance learning via interventions. Case study 1 consists of a positive open simulation game (learning results and goals achieved), containing optimized conditions for learning and several facilitated interventions per game phase. The open simulation game case study delivered learning early on in the gameplay and resulted in mainly third-order learning (learning to learn, a well-developed role perspective on how one can add value from their role). Case study 2 consists of a negative rule-based simulation game (goals were not achieved, few learnings) with diminished learning conditions and the lack of impact of facilitated interventions per game phase. The learning results of the negative case study 2 were limited because participants did not perceive the game as useful and experienced the mainly content-oriented interventions by the facilitator not as helpful. The extraneous cognitive load resulting from the gameplay disturbed the effect of the process interventions by the facilitator, so participants did not learn from the guidance the facilitator tried to provide. Discussing these two opposite extreme case studies provides an overview of what conditions favour learning and what interventions contribute to learning. In the previous chapter, it was highlighted that facilitators can enhance learning complexity reduction (or attenuation) and skill enlargement (amplification). In the case studies, the types of interventions performed are highlighted and explained so they provide two contextualized examples of how interventions added or left out have effect on learning combined with the internal conditions of the rule-based and the open simulation game.

Studies on Critical Success Factors (CSFs) in Healthcare Information Systems (HIS) development projects have traditionally often been limited to retrospectively identifying CSFs in a finished project. In this paper, we focus on how to prospectively apply and manage CSFs in HIS projects. Based on a holistic perspective and systems thinking, an inductive research strategy was applied and a single in-depth case study was conducted. The findings include detailed descriptions that contribute to further understanding of how to prospectively apply and manage CSFs in HIS projects. The analysis reveals that CSFs must be applied differently and managed on various system levels. Furthermore, it shows how interactions exist between different system levels, both in the case of a specific CSF and between different CSFs on various system levels. Our analysis framework and findings indicate new directions for future research: how to prospectively apply and manage CSFs in HIS development projects can now be investigated both in a more holistic way and more in detail. Finally, healthcare practitioners can use the descriptions as practical checklists for guiding them in how to realize situational adaptation of CSFs in HIS projects across different system levels.

Self-service business intelligence (SSBI) enables all users, including those with limited technical skills, to perform business intelligence (BI) tasks without the support of BI experts. SSBI reduces pressure on BI experts, gives more freedom to self-reliant users and speeds up decision-making. Recent research has illustrated how organisations experience numerous challenges when trying to obtain SSBI benefits. The AQUIRE framework organises 37 identified SSBI challenges in five categories: Access and use of data, Data Quality, User Independence, creating Reports and Education. SSBI literature does poorly address how these challenges can be tackled. This research study aimed to identify strategies on how to manage those 37 SSBI challenges. The performed case study includes 24 semi-structured interviews with respondents from two organisations which have been heavily involved in SSBI implementation. The results reveal how nine identified SSBI success factors are related to the 37 AQUIRE challenges and how they can be addressed over time.

This paper presents a quantitative agent-based simulation model of the everyday payment system used to simulate the business and consumer consequences of loss of functionality, or disruptions of the payment system for the food and fuel retailing markets as well as the bank sector in order to address resilience. The simulation model is used in a gaming simulation approach that couples a role-playing game with the simulation model in order to provide crisis management team-training to decision-makers in a multi-organisational context. Drawing primarily on resilience engineering and crisis response, the concepts of core values, coping strategies, and resilience value networks were used to guide the design of the simulation model. The ultimate aim of this study is to explore the collaborative responses from the key actors during the disruption scenario in order to evoke and facilitate collective resilience.

Situation pictures are helpful to make sense of what is happening and to prevent further escalation. These situation pictures are typically text- or map-based and focus on the current effects of the crisis. For long-lasting transboundary crises that impact many critical infrastructures and different parts of society directly and indirectly, such situation pictures have limitations. Crisis management teams might benefit from continuous monitoring of societal performance indicators, so the current situation can easily be compared with historical and future data to reveal trends and escalations. This research project explored how a successful approach for systematic monitoring of indicators in crime prevention could be transferred to crisis management. Several pilot studies revealed nine challenging pitfalls and six promising possibilities. The findings of this study can inform future research on how continuous systematic situation monitoring can strengthen societal resilience.

A definition of information fusion (IF) as a field of research can benefit researchers within the field, who may use such a definition when motivating their own work and evaluating the contributions of others. Moreover, it can enable researchers and practitioners outside the field to more easily relate their own work to the field and more easily understand the scope of IF techniques and methods. Based on strengths and weaknesses of existing definitions, a definition is proposed that is argued to effectively fulfill the requirements that can be put on a definition of IF as a field of research. Although the proposed definition aims to be precise, it does not fully capture the richness and versatility of the IF field. To address that limitation, we highlight some topics to explore the scope of IF, covering the systems perspective of IF and its relation to ma-chine learning, optimization, robot behavior, opinion aggregation, and databases.

Background: Describing the role of a facilitator often results in to-do lists resembling a recipe or a laundry list to follow. Such lists fail to grasp the inherent complexity of facilitation and are not very useful in guiding facilitators when, why and if they should intervene in the unfolding live performance of that day.

Aim: To develop a deeper understanding of on-the-fly facilitation by analyzing rich empirical accounts of in-situ facilitation episodes.

Intervention:Six facilitation episodes were through purposeful sampling selected from a body of hundreds of interventions in forty-seven performed crisis management training exercises in Swedish municipalities. Each full-day crisis management simulation-game had between fifteen and fifty participants involving politicians, administrative managers and crisis management staff.

Method: An auto-hermeneutical phenomenological analysis of six lived experiences of facilitation episodes was conducted to understand what the facilitator observed and how a facilitation intervention was applied.

Results: On-the-fly-facilitation is instantaneous, but draws simultaneously on awareness of the past, present and future. Facilitation needs are foreseen during design and they influence current attentiveness and coaching. Unfolding game-play needs to be grasped quickly. Potential future consequences of intervening or not intervening are evaluated within a limited window of opportunity. Due to these circumstances, facilitation is multi-skilled, arbitrary and fallible. Such muddiness of on-the-fly facilitation requires courage from the facilitator.

Conclusions: In order to better understand how facilitation skills and roles actually are performed, the facilitation literature desperately needs a larger number of rich empirical accounts of interesting in-situ facilitation. Elaborate analysis of such lived experiences could develop understanding as to how available skills, situational circumstances as well as the unfolding interaction between players and facilitators actually develop into a facilitation intervention. This could generate more complex theoretical understanding of how to apply facilitation skills, in addition to theories that list what skills a facilitator should master.

This paper reports on experiences of creating resilience-empowering simulation-gaming exercises concerning disruptions in the payment system. The aim of the exercises was to utilize gaming-simulation as a training environment where teams of practitioners can learn to develop in-depth understanding of systemic interaction (i.e., cascading effects of disruptions) and learn how to develop collaborative resilience across many different critical infrastructures. Interaction between different stakeholders in the payment system, such as business owners, banks, municipality crisis managers are considered as the foundation for building collaborative resilience. Designing the exercises in such a way that they encourage and support such interactions are therefore seen as a primary design goal. This paper describes lessons learned from the process of conducting the 17 exercises in terms of creating a well-balance simulation and an immersive experience. 

Self-service Business Intelligence (SSBI) allows non-technical users to use Business Intelligence in a self-reliant manner without the support of technical users. Many organizations struggle to utilize the potential of SSBI and experience implementation challenges. This study aims to explore user-related SSBI challenges by conducting 30 qualitative interviews with 2 SSBI implementation projects. Analysis revealed challenges that can help practitioners to avoid unnecessary obstacles when implementing and using SSBI, and guide researchers in simplifying the implementation process.

In this paper, we describe a work in progress where a mixed methods approach is used to increase insight into what kind of consequences a temporal disruption or total breakdown of the payment system creates for a large variety of societal actors and to increase insight in how their collaborative behaviour can be guided to be more resilient. This approach includes data from different types of data collections; workshop with high-level decisionmakers from involved sectors, interviews with citizens, representatives from the fuel, foods, and finance sectors, as well as experiences from 15 simulation game exercises with stakeholders. The triangulated and aggregated outcomes of the different data collections resulted in a set of recommendations on how to cope with disruptions in the card payment system.