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The purpose of this paper is to present the development of the relationship management maturity model (RMMM), the output of an initiative aimed at bridging the gap between business units and the IT organisation. It does this through improving and assessing knowledge sharing between business and IT staff in Finco, a large financial services organisation.

The objectives were achieved by undertaking ethnographic research with the relationship managers (RMs) as they carried out their activities, and developing the RMMM by visualizing the development of a community of practice (CoP) between business and IT.

The RMMM demonstrates a learning mechanism to bridge the business/IT gap through an interpretive approach to knowledge sharing by defining knowledge sharing processes between business and IT and defining the tasks of the relationship managers as facilitators of knowledge sharing.

More research is necessary to determine whether the RMMM is a useful tool on which Finco can base the development of RM over the next few years.

The RMMM acts as a practical knowledge management tool, and will act as a future reference for the RMs as they attempt to further develop the business/IT relationship.

The findings provide an initial endorsement of the knowledge sharing perspective to understand the business/IT relationship. Also, the RMMM can be used to identify problematic issues and develop processes to address them.

This paper argues that enterprise scale information systems integration should be driven by business value propositions rather than system level requirements. It reviews the existing literature of value and presents a summary of the issues and insights. A study of attitudes and perceptions from an enterprise system vendor organisation is presented. The study uses cognitive mapping to analyse the data and grounded theory to derive the concept of value proposition as a suitable concept for comprehending integration. The concept is further developed from a synthesis of the issues from literature with the results. The determination of a value proposition is argued to be a process of defining the consumer and providing perspectives. The provider perspective of value proposition is shown to be competency based whilst the consumer is results oriented. Discussion of the implications of value proposition driven integration projects leads onto recommendations for industry and implications for further academic research.

The purpose of the research is to speed up the process of semantic web services by transformation of current Web services into semantic web services. This can be achieved by applying ontology learning techniques to automatically extract domain ontologies.

The work here presents a Service Ontology Learning Framework (SOLF), the core aspect of which extracts Structured Interpretation Patterns (SIP). These patterns are used to automate the acquisition (from production domain specific Web Services) of ontological concepts and the relations between those concepts.

A Semantic Web of accessible and re‐usable software services is able to support the increasingly dynamic and time‐limited development process. This is premised on the efficient and effective creation of supporting domain ontology.

Though WSDL documents provide important application level service description, they alone are not sufficient for OL however, as: they typically provide technical descriptions only; and in many cases, Web services use XSD files to provide data type definitions. The need to include (and combine) other Web service resources in the OL process is therefore an important one.

Web service domain ontologies are the general means by which semantics are added to Web services; typically used as a common domain model and referenced by annotated or externally described Web artefacts (e.g. Web services). The development and deployment of Semantic Web services by enterprises and the wider business community has the potential to radically improve planned and ad‐hoc service re‐use. The reality is slower however, in good part because the development of an appropriate ontology is an expensive, error prone and labor intensive task. The proposed SOLF framework is aimed to overcome this problem by contributing a framework and a tool that can be used to build web service domain ontologies automatically.

The output of the SOLF process is an automatically generated OWL domain ontology, a basis from which a future Semantic Web Services can be delivered using existing Web services. It can be seen that the ontology created moves beyond basic taxonomy – extracting and relating concepts at a number of levels. More importantly, the approach provides integrated knowledge (represented by the individual WSDL documents) from a number of domain experts across a group of banks.

This study conducts a systematic literature review (SLR) on serious games in the BPM domain, in order to answer: RQ1 – what are BPM games' learning objectives and design characteristics? RQ2 – How rigorously each BPM game was evaluated in terms of their effectiveness and entertainment?.

We followed the PRISMA statement method and systematic literature review standards. Selected studies were analyzed using qualitative evidence synthesis.

We found 37 references that describe 15 serious games within the BPM domain. Games are diverse, ranging from analog games that need a few hours to complete to complex digital games that require many sessions. Game evaluation should be generally improved as 27 publications can be considered as quasi-experimental or nonexperimental and potentially biased.

Future research should focus on developing new games about process implementation and using other notations besides BPMN. More studies testing the reliability and validity of existing games in different settings and using more rigorous experimental designs are also necessary. Practitioners can identify thoroughly evaluated games relevant to their learning objectives.

This is the first SLR about BPM games. It consolidates the literature, analyzes, describes and categorizes 15 games with respect to their internal characteristics and evaluation reliability.

Teams in organizations have weekly – or even daily – meetings to exchange information, generate ideas, solve problems, and make decisions. Yet, many team meetings are described as ineffective by the participants, due to either their design or dysfunctional communication practices within the meeting. To gain new insights into addressing these issues, this chapter goes back deep in history and discusses the origins and functions of group meetings. Building upon evolutionary theories of human behavior, the authors examine the evolutionary significance of meetings and the ways in which they were adaptive for our human ancestors. Drawing from this evolutionary perspective, we then compare meetings in ancestral times with their modern-day counterparts. Using evidence from (a) ethnographic studies of small-scale societies that model ancestral group life and (b) organizational and team science, we contrast the typical workplace meeting with its ancient counterpart. In this review of ancient and modern meetings, we identify meeting characteristics that have been maintained through time as well as those that are unique/new in the modern time. In doing so, we inspect to what extent meeting practices in ancestral environments are aligned or at odds with meeting practices in contemporary organizations (the notion of mismatch). From these similarities and differences, we derive novel theoretical insights for the study of workplace meetings as well as suggestions for improving contemporary meeting practice. We also include a series of testable propositions that can inform future research on team meetings in organizations.

Parents and children can drive each other mad. At one moment, a parent may be encouraging and affectionate toward the child; in the next, the parent may be sending the child to his or her bedroom. Similarly, a child who seems helpful and cooperative can suddenly turn belligerent. Parents and children may partly resolve the mixture of negative and positive feelings they experience in such situations by remembering their basic love for each other. Nevertheless, the conflicting sentiments will be stored in the memory of both parties, contributing to a long-lasting melange of conflicting beliefs, feelings, and behaviors. What are the psychological consequences of this state of affairs in relationships?

The Secretary of State for Trade and Industry has authorised the appointments of Mr K. M. McLeod, Mr N. J. Payne and Mr C. D. Waldron as full time Board Members of The British Airports Authority for a period of five years as from 1st April, 1971. Mr McLeod, Mr Payne and Mr Waldron already hold the posts of Director of Finance, Director of Planning and Deputy Chief Executive (Airports) respectively in the Authority.

Factors which influence consumer spending, among the most sought after in any field of market research, things people buy and why, is valuable data on which much industrial planning, advertising techniques and marketing is based, but in no other field of trade is consumer preference so closely related to pure economics, i.e., value received in money terms, as in food. With most other commodities, from clothes to cars, hair‐do's to houses, factors affecting consumer choice have different results; appearance, aesthetic quality and neighbourly competition, all play a part, though appearance in a few foods is not entirely without significance, e.g., white bread. Present high levels of consumer spending are said by politicians to be a danger to the country's economy; a more prosaic thought would be that Government spending, or squandering, constituted the greater threat. In the main, factors which influence household food expenditure are essentially down to earth—palatability, digestibility, keeping quality and how far a food will go in the preparation of meals, its value in money terms. The king‐pin in all market research on food must be the woman of the house; it is her laying out of the household purse that determines the amount of food expenditure and the varieties purchased week by week. A housewife's choice, however, is a complex of her family's likes and dislikes, rarely her own, and also determined by the amount allocated from her purse for this part of the household budget and the number of mouths she has to feed. Any tendency to experiment, to extend the variety of food, is only possible with a well‐filled purse; with a large family, a common complaint is of monotony in the diet. A factor of immense importance nowadays is whether the housewife is employed or not, and whether whole‐time or part‐time, and which part of the day she can be in her own home. To this may be attributed, as much as anything, the rise in consumption of convenience foods. Fortunately for the purposes of reasonable accuracy in the results of enquiries, housewives form a class, reliable and steady, unlikely to be contaminated by the palsied opinions of the so‐called lunatic fringe in this unquiet age. Any differences in food choice are likely to be regional, and settled dietary habits, passed on from one generation to another. Statistics from the National Food Surveys show the extent of these, and also consumer preferences as far as food commodity groups are concerned. The Surveys have been running long enough to show something of consumer trends but, of course, they do not exhibit reasons—why consumers buy and use certain foods, their attitudes to food marketing practices, and, in particular, to advertising. Advertising claims, misleading undoubtedly but within the law, have long been a source of controversy between those who worship at the shrine of truth and others less particular. Elsewhere, we review a special study of consumer reactions to aspects of the grocery trade in the U.S.A., and note that 32 per cent do not accept advertisements as being true, but 85 per cent find them interesting and informative. Advertising practices are probably subject to less statutory control in the United States than here, and the descriptions and verbiage certainly reach greater heights of absurdity, but the British housewife is likely to be no more discerning, able “to read between the lines”, than her counterpart in that country. A major difference, however, is that in Britain, more houswives prepare and cook meals for their families than in the United States. The greatest importance of advertising is in the introductory phase of a commodity; new and more vigorous advertising is necessary later to delay the onset of the decline phase of the commodity's life cycle; to ensure that sales can be maintained to prevent rises in supply costs. Advertising helps considerably in the acceptance of a branded food, but housewives tend to ignore cut‐throat competition between rival brands, and what weans a consumer from a brand is not competition in advertising, nor even new and more attractive presentation, but reduction in real price. The main pre‐occupation of the woman of the house is food adequacy, and especially that her children will have what she considers conforms to a nutritious diet, without argument or rebellion on the part of her progeny and without distinction. She knows that bulk foods, carbohydrates, are not necessarily nutritious, although her ideas of which foods contain vitamins or minerals or other important nutrient factors tends to be hazy. She does not pretend to enjoy shopping for food and therefore tends to follow a routine; it saves time and worry. Especially is this so with young married women, who may have to take small children along. Each housewife has her own mental standard of assessing “value”, and would have difficulty in defining it. Nutritional value forms part of it, however, in most women, who connote their food provision with health. The greatest concern is not necessarily positive health, but prevention or reduction of obesity, which is seen among adult members of the family, especially growing girls, as an adverse effect on their appearance, and the types of clothes they can wear. A few of the more intelligent families have an indefinable fear of ischaemic heart disease and its relation to food. When they take positive steps to control the diet for these purposes, they are quite frequently in the wrong direction and rather confused even when this is done on medical advice.

The work of protecting the public food supply during the pre‐Christmas rush period can be exhausting, although food inspectors and others engaged nowadays may have achieved the proletarian distinction of the shift system and perhaps, overtime pay, but in the old days, we had none of these blessings and supervising the Christmas fare could indeed be a “dog's life”.

Although ambivalence is a common experience in family relations, the conceptualization of these relations has been focused on solidarity, closeness, and attraction on one hand, and on stress, distance, disruption, and abuse on the other. Ambivalence has not often been considered systematically for the analysis of intergenerational relations. Measurement instruments are not widely available for this purpose, because they tend to focus on one dimension at a time (Berscheid, 1983, pp. 115–116).