According to W. Edwards Deming, American companies require nothing less than a transformation of management style and of governmental relations with industry. In Out of the Crisis, originally published in 1982, Deming offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management. Management's failure to plan for the future, he claims, brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but by innovative plans to stay in business, protect investment, ensure future dividends, and provide more jobs through improved product and service. In simple, direct language, he explains the principles of management transformation and how to apply them.

Out of the Crisis

How have Japanese companies become world leaders in the automotive and electronics industries, among others? What is the secret of their success? Two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, are the first to tie the success of Japanese companies to their ability to create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. In The Knowledge-Creating Company, Nonaka and Takeuchi provide an inside look at how Japanese companies go about creating this new knowledge organizationally. The authors point out that there are two types of knowledge: explicit knowledge, contained in manuals and procedures, and tacit knowledge, learned only by experience, and communicated only indirectly, through metaphor and analogy. U.S. managers focus on explicit knowledge. The Japanese, on the other hand, focus on tacit knowledge. And this, the authors argue, is the key to their success--the Japanese have learned how to transform tacit into explicit knowledge. To explain how this is done--and illuminate Japanese business practices as they do so--the authors range from Greek philosophy to Zen Buddhism, from classical economists to modern management gurus, illustrating the theory of organizational knowledge creation with case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, Nissan, 3M, GE, and even the U.S. Marines. For instance, using Matsushita's development of the Home Bakery (the world's first fully automated bread-baking machine for home use), they show how tacit knowledge can be converted to explicit knowledge: when the designers couldn't perfect the dough kneading mechanism, a software programmer apprenticed herself withthe master baker at Osaka International Hotel, gained a tacit understanding of kneading, and then conveyed this information to the engineers. In addition, the authors show that, to create knowledge, the best management style is neither top-down nor bottom-up, but rather what they call "middle-up-down," in which the middle managers form a bridge between the ideals of top management and the chaotic realities of the frontline. As we make the turn into the 21st century, a new society is emerging. Peter Drucker calls it the "knowledge society," one that is drastically different from the "industrial society," and one in which acquiring and applying knowledge will become key competitive factors. Nonaka and Takeuchi go a step further, arguing that creating knowledge will become the key to sustaining a competitive advantage in the future. Because the competitive environment and customer preferences changes constantly, knowledge perishes quickly. With The Knowledge-Creating Company, managers have at their fingertips years of insight from Japanese firms that reveal how to create knowledge continuously, and how to exploit it to make successful new products, services, and systems.

The knowledge-creating company

This is a survey on graph visualization and navigation techniques, as used in information visualization. Graphs appear in numerous applications such as Web browsing, state-transition diagrams, and data structures. The ability to visualize and to navigate in these potentially large, abstract graphs is often a crucial part of an application. Information visualization has specific requirements, which means that this survey approaches the results of traditional graph drawing from a different perspective.

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Graph visualization and navigation in information visualization: A survey

It is assumed that serious games influences learning in 2 ways, by changing cognitive processes and by affecting motivation. However, until now research has shown little evidence for these assumptions. We used meta-analytic techniques to investigate whether serious games are more effective in terms of learning and more motivating than conventional instruction methods (learning: k = 77, N 5,547; motivation: k = 31, N 2,216). Consistent with our hypotheses, serious games were found to be more effective in terms of learning (d= 0.29, p .05) than conventional instruction methods. Additional moderator analyses on the learning effects revealed that learners in serious games learned more, relative to those taught with conventional instruction methods, when the game was supplemented with other instruction methods, when multiple training sessions were involved, and when players worked in groups.

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A meta-analysis of the cognitive and motivational effects of serious games

Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

With the increasing focus on early development as a major factor in determining overall quality, many researchers are trying to define what makes a good conceptual model. However, existing frameworks often do little more than list desirable properties. The authors examine attempts to define quality as it relates to conceptual models and propose their own framework, which includes a systematic approach to identifying quality-improvement goals and the means to achieve them. The framework has two unique features: it distinguishes between goals and means by separating what you are trying to achieve in conceptual modeling from how to achieve it (it has been made so that the goals are more realistic by introducing the notion of feasibility); and it is closely linked to linguistic concepts because modeling is essentially making statements in some language. >

Understanding quality in conceptual modeling

Use cases have become increasingly common during requirements engineering, but they offer limited support for eliciting security threats and requirements. At the same time, the importance of security is growing with the rise of phenomena such as e-commerce and nomadic and geographically distributed work. This paper presents a systematic approach to eliciting security requirements based on use cases, with emphasis on description and method guidelines. The approach extends traditional use cases to also cover misuse, and is potentially useful for several other types of extra-functional requirements beyond security.

Eliciting security requirements with misuse cases

A semiotic framework for evaluating the quality of conceptual models was proposed by (Lindland OI, Sindre G and Solvberg A (1994) Understanding Quality in Conceptual Modelling, IEEE Software 11(2), 41-49) and has later been extended in several works. While the extensions have fixed some of the limitations of the initial framework, other limitations remain. In particular, the framework is too static in its view upon semantic quality, mainly considering models, not modelling activities, and comparing these models to a static domain rather than seeing the model as a facilitator for changing the domain. Also, the framework's definition of pragmatic quality is quite narrow, focusing on understanding, in line with the semiotics of Morris, while newer research in linguistics and semiotics has focused beyond mere understanding, on how the model is used and impact its interpreters. The need for a more dynamic view in the semiotic quality framework is particularly evident when considering process models, which themselves often prescribe or even enact actions in the problem domain, hence a change to the model may also change the problem domain directly. This paper discusses the quality framework in relation to active process models and suggests a revised framework based on this.

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Process models representing knowledge for action: a revised quality framework

Use case diagrams (L. Jacobson et al., 1992) have proven quite helpful in requirements engineering, both for eliciting requirements and getting a better overview of requirements already stated. However, not all kinds of requirements are equally well supported by use case diagrams. They are good for functional requirements, but poorer at e.g., security requirements, which often concentrate on what should not happen in the system. With the advent of e- and m-commerce applications, security requirements are growing in importance, also for quite simple applications where a short lead time is important. Thus, it would be interesting to look into the possibility for applying use cases on this arena. The paper suggests how this can be done, extending the diagrams with misuse cases. This new construct makes it possible to represent actions that the system should prevent, together with those actions which it should support.

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Eliciting security requirements by misuse cases

Use cases have proven helpful for eliciting, communicating and documenting requirements. But whereas functional requirements are well supported, use cases provide less support for working with extra-functional requirements, such as security requirements. With the advent of e-commerce applications, security and other extra-functional requirements are growing in importance. In an earlier paper, the authors have introduced the concept of misuse cases – inverted use cases to denote functions that should not be possible to perform in a system. In this paper, security related misuse cases are elaborated in further detail through a discussion of templates for their textual description.

Guttorm Sindre

Papers

Understanding quality in conceptual modeling

Eliciting security requirements with misuse cases

Process models representing knowledge for action: a revised quality framework

Eliciting security requirements by misuse cases

Templates for Misuse Case Description