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The purpose of this paper is to propose a strategic conflict analysis, based on the graph model for conflict resolution (GMCR), that is applied to information technology outsourcing (ITO) in a real-world software development and implementation process in Brazil.

Because the idea of this study is to answer “why” the ITO conflicts occur and “how” they can be avoided, the case study methodology was adopted. The software GMCR II was used to analyze the interactions between an IT vendor and an IT client.

The results suggest that a lack of relational governance is a critical issue that could be handled to improve the interaction between those involved.

The main results are restricted to the case study and cannot be generalized. Moreover, a specific limitation of this paper pertains to the use of the GMCR and the consequent difficulty for IT vendors and IT clients to work with a large number of actions and to set preferences for several states of conflict.

The strategic analysis of outsourcing conflicts provides a holistic view of the current situation that may assist the client and vendor in future decisions and identify guidelines to ensure successful ITO. Therefore, this paper provides an effective guide for clients and vendors to better manage conflicts and establish a contingency vision to avoid such disputes.

The ITO conflict is analyzed using the GMCR, considering both perspectives of the outsourcing process (vendors and clients).

Understanding the relational factors in information technology outsourcing (ITO) processes is essential for managers to exercise successful governance over their relationship. Based on this premise, this paper aims to present a study about relational factors using judgments of managers from small and medium-sized supplying and contracting companies involved in ITO relationships, helping to understand the differences between what they believe to be relevant for maintaining the relationships.

The analytical approach consisted of applying fuzzy sets theory elements, converting the managers' judgments into crisp values through a defuzzification process, and the multicriteria method ELECTRE IV that created the rankings of the relational factors according to the defuzzified judgments. The approach was applied with 16 managers from supplying companies and 34 from contracting companies, in both cases located in a large Brazilian pole of information technology.

The main findings indicate that suppliers are initially more concerned with contractual aspects, being in the highest positions in the ranking: detailed contract, service level agreement and costs. Only after these elements, suppliers prioritize aspects less linked to the contract. For contractors, customer relationship management is the most important, followed by costs and commitment by managers, which indicates more openness to issues-oriented to relational development.

The approach adopted in this article is differentiated by prioritizing relational factors that are not always directly perceived in ITO relationships. Another important consideration is that most studies focus only on the perspective of supplier selection by contracting companies. In this paper, both suppliers' and contractors' judgments on the importance of ITO relational factors were analyzed, creating rankings that supported understanding the difference between the two perspectives.

This article presents two Brazilian Portuguese corpora collected from different media concerning public security issues in a specific location. The primary motivation is supporting analyses, so security authorities can make appropriate decisions about their actions.

The corpora were obtained through web scraping from a newspaper's website and tweets from a Brazilian metropolitan region. Natural language processing was applied considering: text cleaning, lemmatization, summarization, part-of-speech and dependencies parsing, named entities recognition, and topic modeling.

Several results were obtained based on the methodology used, highlighting some: an example of a summarization using an automated process; dependency parsing; the most common topics in each corpus; the forty named entities and the most common slogans were extracted, highlighting those linked to public security.

Some critical tasks were identified for the research perspective, related to the applied methodology: the treatment of noise from obtaining news on their source websites, passing through textual elements quite present in social network posts such as abbreviations, emojis/emoticons, and even writing errors; the treatment of subjectivity, to eliminate noise from irony and sarcasm; the search for authentic news of issues within the target domain. All these tasks aim to improve the process to enable interested authorities to perform accurate analyses.

The corpora dedicated to the public security domain enable several analyses, such as mining public opinion on security actions in a given location; understanding criminals' behaviors reported in the news or even on social networks and drawing their attitudes timeline; detecting movements that may cause damage to public property and people welfare through texts from social networks; extracting the history and repercussions of police actions, crossing news with records on social networks; among many other possibilities.

The work on behalf of the corpora reported in this text represents one of the first initiatives to create textual bases in Portuguese, dedicated to Brazil's specific public security domain.

The information technology (IT) outsourcing (ITO) decision is a key issue in strategic and operational management and is considered a main critical factor influencing successful organizational performance and technology assessment. The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework combining value-focused thinking (VFT) methodology and the FITradeoff method to support decisions regarding ITO.

This study answers the following questions: How to identify, in a structured way, the objectives that should be considered in an ITO decision process in a changing environment? How to identify new IT services to be outsourced from the established objectives? The VFT method is recommended in this case to structure and model the problem. Moreover, the FITradeoff multicriteria method was considered in this study to support the evaluation and prioritization of IT services in an ITO decision

The framework provides promising results for ITO decisions. This study revealed that a lack of strategic and fundamental objectives is a critical issue in making ITO decisions. Although the VFT methodology is subjective in nature, it promotes a better understanding of goals and values, and FITradeoff allows the decision-maker to make comparisons of consequences based on his/her preferences.

The recommendations of the study are restricted to the case study and cannot be generalized. In addition, applying the method requires attention in determining the criteria used for outsourcing IT.

The strategic analysis of ITO provides a holistic view of the current situation since (i) the VFT methodology enables the IT manager to generate new alternatives to assist future decisions and (ii) FITradeoff has been demonstrated as a suitable option to evaluate ITO decisions.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to utilize a problem structuring method (VFT) to identify criteria and alternatives based on the organizational values and objectives. This is integrated with a multicriteria method that uses partial information and may consequently lead to fewer inconsistencies (FITradeoff) in the context of ITO.

This paper aims to introduce a negotiation support system (NSS) with a theoretical modeling that considers the aspects of human personality and negotiator’s behavior to assist the decision-making of public managers and stakeholders in democratic bargaining processes and support social-efficient outcomes.

A game theoretical modeling of public participatory negotiations characterized by complete and perfect information is explored with the inclusion of personality aspects and negotiation styles. The importance of the negotiation knowledge disclosure in the sequential bargains of participative budgeting is highlighted by an experiment with 162 state-owned companies’ managers and graduate students to present the contribution of the system’s applicability.

A considerable number of Pareto-efficient deliberation agreements are obtained with few interactions when the negotiation strategies and the personality aspects of opponents and stakeholders are freely available (a symmetry in the public negotiation knowledge). In addition to the set of Pareto-efficient agreements, those with the best social outcome (i.e. that maximize the group satisfaction despite individual losses) are observed when the informational tool for personality and negotiation style inference is enabled.

Many scholars argue for Pareto-efficient allocation instead of equal divisions of resources within participative democracies and public governance. This work provides a new system with an empirical application and theoretical modeling which may support those arguments based on the nonverbal negotiation aspects.

Over the years, several business process management maturity models (BPM-MMs) have been proposed. Despite great advances, some issues concerning the effectiveness of their practical functionality still need to be addressed. These are related to three important aspects of BPM maturity assessment and improvement: their mechanisms for evaluating maturity (clarity, availability and accuracy), their flexibility (compliance) and their structure (path to maturity). The main goal with this article is to address such issues by introducing a new concept to evaluate and improve BPM maturity.

The authors proceed in accordance with a design science research (DSR) integrating multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) with intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IFSs).

The authors’ proposal provides a practical BPM maturity framework and its assessment procedure to support organizations to determine and improve their initiatives appropriately, which means that it fully or partially addresses all the issues raised. To demonstrate the applicability of this framework, a real application was conducted, and a parallel between existing BPM-MMs is presented to emphasize its advances.

It is the first time that the MCDM approach has been used to support BPM maturity assessment. This approach not only takes into account the uncertainties and subjectivities inherent to this type of decision problem but also allows it to be treated quantitatively, thus making it possible to obtain more accurate results even with less experienced teams.

This paper aims to present the results of an analysis of two hypotheses on maintenance in manufacturing industries: the first hypothesis refers to managers' perception of planning maintenance when undertaking certain practices, and the second hypothesis to the behavior of manufacturing companies that consider their maintenance sector a source of competitive advantage for their organization.

The research study is carried out in medium‐sized and large manufacturing companies in a large metropolitan area of Northeastern Brazil. An exploratory analysis is made of the variables considered representative for this study. Data are collected from a probability sampling of companies selected randomly and in which interviews are later held. Analyses are performed in order to identify associations that validate the hypotheses constructed. The hypotheses are tested and can be explained by variables presented in the paper.

It is observed that some maintenance practices are currently correlated to the manager's perception of planning for maintenance and the treatment given to the area of maintenance displays a positive relationship with the perception of management in relation to maintenance as a source of competitive advantage for the organization.

The results obtained from this paper will assist maintenance engineers with understanding how the maintenance manager perceives planning and competitiveness and also what maintenance actions should in fact be implemented. The findings have yielded more knowledge of the maintenance environment and using this knowledge will be able to improve maintenance performance.

The results of this study are relevant for the maintenance area and will enable it to pay more attention to issues relating to planning and to the competitiveness of organizations. The advantages of probability sampling are also demonstrated, as is the fact that the findings from the statistical analysis can be generalized to the population investigated.