ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to explore the actor-for-actor (A4A) logic supporting recent changes occurred within higher education institutions (HE), in light of the changes brought about by the recent digital revolution underway, partly accelerated by the recent Pandemic of COVID-19. The work starts from an analysis of recent advances in the literature on the theme of relationships between actors, and on a possible contribution coming from a systems perspective to identify what are the distinctive elements of a digital re-configuration of HE as inspired by A4A. The key elements of A4A are defined herein and applied to the new HE value proposal with evidence of aspects related to contents, conditions, opportunities, fulfilment, embeddedness, exchanges, self-feeding development. The HE Management can take advantage of the considerations set out here and also know how to look at mixed, perhaps modular, solutions that can respond to the changing needs of the varied users. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.
ABSTRACT
The aim of this conceptual paper is to understand if augmented intelligence may be considered a driver of antifragility that can be allegorically represented by the Japanese art of Kintsugi, which consists of the use of gold or silver to repair broken objects in ceramic to get a better aesthetic form. Covid-19, like a black swan, represented, for many companies, understood as systems, a complex situation capable of upsetting their equilibrium. It had thus forced them to accelerate the digitization process. Digitalization, based on artificial intelligence (AI) tools, brings in many fields new perspectives, such as new business scenarios and models. By using the Viable System Approach (vSa) lens, we investigated the impact of smart working, widely spread to manage a complex situation (Covid-19), in allowing companies to cope with changes and to be antifragile. A remote smart working model is proposed, as an evolution of smart working, based on a new culture of "doing business” to search for new viable conditions. It can allow companies a more efficient resources management, an endless orientation towards results, but also new synergies in new contexts thanks to new and increased networks, for new collaborations and new forms of interactions, as well as more profitable relationships with employees, based on a strong relationship of trust and on better opportunities for work-life balance. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
Purpose: The COVID-19 pandemic started a new era in understanding the topic of resilience and adaptability. The human society has not faced such a widespread global challenge until now. This paper aims to address a context change influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, using a case study in high education. While the character of the issues emerging is the same as in any other domain, in high education, the principles and consequences can be more directly studied and analyzed. Design/methodology/approach: This paper describes a framework to evaluate how the context of the tertiary education service has been disrupted and the influence on the adherence of the students to the educational process, via primary quantitative data collection. This paper tackles the problem of distinguishing the change in context and context change and the possibility of system reconfiguration. Findings: To properly face the evolving conditions induced by the pandemic, the education service system must be aligned to the imposed emergency situations, trying to "find” where the changes have emerged, i.e. what kind of reconfiguration is, whether it appears in the goals or in the service system itself. Furthermore, this study discusses how the findings can be valuable and applied to situations beyond the pandemic, in other cases of context disruption to highlight how general the service activities are within our reconfiguration approach. Originality/value: From a theoretical point of view, this work is in line with main assumptions of system thinking, by confirming several insights of service systems' behavior, even in a logic of B2B interactions (from the offer side);first in terms of openness and adaptation, in addition to readiness to change and – when and how – this change can occur. From a practical point of view, this paper's contribution is directed toward achieving the more successful change management process, as reached together by motivated partners working hard for a common final goal. Realizing that the pandemic has brought a completely new context of education, managers should focus now on monitoring all aspects of the education business, not only directly affected projects and processes. © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited.
ABSTRACT
Covid-19 has emphasized many gaps in complexity management studies in applied grounds. Data have been approached a lot in last decades. This work aims to analyze how innovative solutions can be designed and proposed in healthcare to manage critical contingences and may stimulate healthcare system, intended as a service ecosystem, to evolve, adapt, reconfigure, balance itself in terms of making decisions, and then to be resilient at first and viable consequently. The analysis starts from the description of the theoretical background and the definition of an interpretative framework and then proposes a series of illustrative cases on solutions that can stimulate data-driven management processes. This study confirms that data can support decision makers in addressing the surrounding complexity by making the healthcare service ecosystem more smart and resilient and promoting its renewal. However, data-driven decisions may be considered as driver for the service ecosystem well-being only when they imply an immediate improvement of patient’s health. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
An effective Healthcare Service Ecosystem must emphasize the notion of well-being co-creation which entails a dynamic interplay of actors, in face of the challenges, with their ability to use the available resource pools, at the different system levels. An appropriate response, largely avoiding any crisis, depends on a society's resilience and the related response of actors in the reconfiguration of resources. Originally considered luxury and for the fortunate few who could afford the learning curve, Hospitalization-at-Home (HaH) recently approached a new normal with a positive impact to health outcomes. Nowadays, hospitals have had to reconfigure their health services to reduce the workload of caregivers during the COVID-19 outbreak. Our use case can be a lesson for the adaptation of technology for patient empowerment allowing patients to interact with their care ecosystem while at their home.
ABSTRACT
We propose a service design for ethics framework that applies the four diamonds-of-context model for complex service design (4DocMod) framework to analyze, decompose, and interpret the main edicts of ethics (credibility, transferability, and validity) in data collection and use in public health complex service systems. We illustrate how different contexts of different actors can be accommodated ethically at the service design level. The paper explains the main artefacts of the 4DocMod framework (diamonds See, Recognize, Organize, Do) against community and individual ethics in several case studies related to the current COvID-19 pandemics facing the use of traceability technologies. The main contribution of the paper highlights how actions and goals in healthcare as a service ecosystem (H-SES) may have contexts, while contextual interpretation of activities constitutes the basis for ethical evaluation. © 2021 IEEE Computer Society. All rights reserved.