PhD

Since December 10th, I have been enrolled as PhD student with Knowledge Lab, the Unit of Knowledge Management.

The PhD project is based upon the following general question:

How may business enterprises benefit from adaptive business intelligence systems?

This question is posed against the backdrop of the reciprocal relationship between business performance and information technology (IT), and issues pertaining to how developments in either one, affects the other. Consider the following propositions:

IT has migrated from being a supportive tool into becoming an integral and essential part of business operations. A trend spreading from knowledge and service intensive businesses to other business areas is for IT-functions to constitute the business operation, or significant parts hereof (du Plooy (2003, p.42)).

The drive for data integration and exchange in the IT-domain, across both application and enterprise boundaries, is resulting in information that is ubiquitously available.

The combination of the above two developments is the main contributor to the fact that critical information concerning the business operation is: 1) migrating from the domain of humans into that of software systems and 2) generated on a scale and of a complexity, which defy human grasp.

It is anticipated that the availability of ubiquitous information, in combination with other contributing factors such as global wide competition and investment, will drive a development that require businesses to adapt, decide and act even faster. This state of business operation is referred to as the “Real-Time Business” (Flint (2004)).

The key research question therefore becomes how such technological changes can change the organization and strategies of business firms.

The general question will be addressed by combining results from several research areas, foremost organizational theory and software architecture design. Substantial bodies of scientific knowledge exist concerning the design, implementation and life cycles of organizations and software systems, respectively. This project integrates theories from both the technological and organizational domains and puts forward the proposition, that the complexity of both regarding commercial organizations is to be found at their intersection

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