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This study aims to explore an emerging collection of smart building technologies, known as smart workplace solutions (SWS), in the context of facilities management (FM).

This study is based on semi-structured interviews with facility managers in Finland, Norway and Sweden who have deployed SWSs in their organizations. SWS features, based on empirical data from a previous study, were also used to further analyse the interviews.

It analyses the benefits that SWSs bring from the facility management point of view. It is clear that the impetus for change and for deploying SWS in the context of FM is primarily driven by cost savings related to reductions in office space.

This research has been conducted with a focus on office buildings only. However, other building types can learn from the benefits that facility managers receive in the area of user-centred smart buildings.

SWSs are often seen as employee experience solutions that are only related to “soft” elements such as collaboration, innovation and learning. Understanding the FM business case can help make a more practical case for their deployment.

SWSs are an emerging area, and this study has collected data from facility managers who use them daily.

Because of the global increase of climate change effects, floods are becoming more frequent and severer, especially in urban areas of coastal cities and islands where floodplains have turned into buildings because of rapid urbanisation, leading to a higher risk of damages. Urban heritage areas should be highly considered in the time of evacuation because of the vulnerability of streets and buildings and limitations on taking counteractions. Given these limitations, this study aims to propose a network of potential evacuation routes based on spatial configuration analysis of the heritage areas.

Penang Island's heritage site, namely, George Town, located on the northwest coast of Malaysia, is chosen as the case study. By using an approach of spatial configuration analysis using space syntax techniques in addition to considering the potential starting points for evacuation and flood risk map of the area, this study analysed the area's street network values for evacuation function during flood crisis time.

Potential evacuation routes were identified for flood disasters in the George Town heritage area. Furthermore, the proposed evacuation routes were evaluated in terms of time for evacuation by metric step-depth analysis of space syntax.

A few studies have focused on practical guidelines for evacuation routes based on spatial configuration analysis, an important yet neglected approach in this regard, especially concerning urban island areas. This study can contribute to providing strategies to reduce vulnerability and casualties in urban heritage areas.

This chapter is dedicated to understanding the idea of international as a key notion to the development of globalisation and to promoting the rescaling of spaces and subjects in contemporary higher education. The author discusses the concept of scale as a performative device that activates the capacities of bodies. Instead of seeing scale as a naturalised and hierarchical structure of spatial distribution, the author understands it as an ensemble of discourses and practices that produce scalar effects. Globalisation uses scale to promote the idea that subjects would become ‘international’ by being linked to privileged spaces and bodies in the Global North. In this sense, globalisation is not merely about nodes where certain flows converge. Rather, the author understands it as the political conditions that control and constrain the space for certain flows to occur and not others. Using assemblage analysis, the author presents and analyses three scenes taken from his ethnographic records that have as a guiding line the materialisation of the international. These scenes report the experience of being a Latin American doctoral student attending a congress in the United States, a tense situation experienced at a Chilean university academic event, and the unpretentious manifestation of an elaborate idea of internationality from a personal experience of a trip to India. The results point to three elaborations of the international: an optimistic view of a shared world, a geopolitical internationality and the production of a global corporeality.

This paper aims to propose a new method to derive custom dynamic cyber risk metrics based on the well-known Goal, Question, Metric (GQM) approach. A framework that complements it and makes it much easier to use has been proposed too. Both, the method and the framework, have been validated within two challenging application domains: continuous risk assessment within a smart farm and risk-based adaptive security to reconfigure a Web application firewall.

The authors have identified a problem and provided motivation. They have developed their theory and engineered a new method and a framework to complement it. They have demonstrated the proposed method and framework work, validating them in two real use cases.

The GQM method, often applied within the software quality field, is a good basis for proposing a method to define new tailored cyber risk metrics that meet the requirements of current application domains. A comprehensive framework that formalises possible goals and questions translated to potential measurements can greatly facilitate the use of this method.

The proposed method enables the application of the GQM approach to cyber risk measurement. The proposed framework allows new cyber risk metrics to be inferred by choosing between suggested goals and questions and measuring the relevant elements of probability and impact. The authors’ approach demonstrates to be generic and flexible enough to allow very different organisations with heterogeneous requirements to derive tailored metrics useful for their particular risk management processes.

This paper aims to investigate how congruent keywords are used in information security policies (ISPs) to pinpoint and guide clear actionable advice and suggest a metric for measuring the quality of keyword use in ISPs.

A qualitative content analysis of 15 ISPs from public agencies in Sweden was conducted with the aid of Orange Data Mining Software. The authors extracted 890 sentences from these ISPs that included one or more of the analyzed keywords. These sentences were analyzed using the new metric – keyword loss of specificity – to assess to what extent the selected keywords were used for pinpointing and guiding actionable advice. Thus, the authors classified the extracted sentences as either actionable advice or other information, depending on the type of information conveyed.

The results show a significant keyword loss of specificity in relation to pieces of actionable advice in ISPs provided by Swedish public agencies. About two-thirds of the sentences in which the analyzed keywords were used focused on information other than actionable advice. Such dual use of keywords reduces the possibility of pinpointing and communicating clear, actionable advice.

The suggested metric provides a means to assess the quality of how keywords are used in ISPs for different purposes. The results show that more research is needed on how keywords are used in ISPs.

The authors recommended that ISP designers exercise caution when using keywords in ISPs and maintain coherency in their use of keywords. ISP designers can use the suggested metrics to assess the quality of actionable advice in their ISPs.

The keyword loss of specificity metric adds to the few quantitative metrics available to assess ISP quality. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, applying this metric is a first attempt to measure the quality of actionable advice in ISPs.

The purpose of this case study was to complement existing weeding and retention criteria beyond the most used methods in academic libraries and to consider citation counts in the identification of important scholarly works.

Using a small sample of items chosen for withdrawal from a small liberal arts college library, this case study looks at the use of Google Scholar citation counts as a metric for identification of notable monographs in the social sciences and mathematics.

Google Scholar citation counts are a quick indicator of classic, foundational or discursive monographs in a particular field and should be given more consideration in weeding and retention analysis decisions that impact scholarly collections. Higher citation counts can be an indicator of higher circulation counts.

The authors found little indication in the literature that Google Scholar citation counts are being used as a metric for identification of notable works or for retention of monographs in academic libraries.

This paper presents a new and well-structured framework that aims to assess the current environmental impact from a Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions perspective. This tool includes a new set of Lean Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which translates the well-known logic of Overall Equipment Effectiveness in the field of GHG emissions, that can progressively detect industrial losses that cause GHG emissions and support decision-making for implementing improvements.

The new metrics are presented with reference to two different perspectives: (1) to highlight the deviation of the current value of emissions from the target; (2) to adopt a diagnostic orientation not only to provide an assessment of current performance but also to search for the main causes of inefficiencies and to direct improvement implementations.

The proposed framework was applied to a major company operating in the plywood production sector. It identified emission-related losses at each stage of the production process, providing an overall performance evaluation of 53.1%. The industrial application shows how the indicators work in practice, and the framework as a whole, to assess GHG emissions related to industrial losses and to proper address improvement actions.

This paper scrutinizes a new set of Lean KPIs to assess the industrial losses causing GHG emissions and identifies some significant drawbacks. Then it proposes a new structure of losses and KPIs that not only quantify efficiency but also allow to identify viable countermeasures.

The purpose of this study is to highlight and demonstrate how the study of stress and related responses in construction can best be measured and benchmarked effectively.

A range of perceptual and physiological measures are obtained across different time periods and during different activities in a fieldwork setting. Differences in the empirical results are analysed and implications for future studies of stress discussed.

The results of this study strongly support the use of multiple psychometrics and biosensors whenever biometrics are included in the study of stress. Perceptual, physiological and environmental factors are all shown to act in concert to impact stress. Strong conclusions on the potential drivers of stress should then only be considered when consistent results apply across multiple metrics, time periods and activities.

Stress is an incredibly complex condition. This study demonstrates why many current applications of biosensors to study stress in construction are not up to the task and provides empirical evidence on how future studies can be significantly improved.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to focus explicitly on demonstrating the need for multiple research instruments and settings when studying stress or related conditions in construction.

Organisational strategy becomes reality by connecting organisation’s resources and capabilities in daily operations, and physical workspace is one of the environments in which this takes place. This study aims to explore to what extent factors required for successful strategy implementation are considered when designing, using and managing workspaces of knowledge-intensive organisations.

For the study, managers in 25 large and medium-sized knowledge-intensive organisations were interviewed. The semi-structured interviews focused on organisation’s strategy, strategy implementation practices and workspace design and management. To form a comprehensive framework of strategy implementation success factors for the study, the factors of 11 frameworks were analysed, grouped and renamed.

Current workspace design, usage and management mainly support human-related strategy implementation factors. However, both organisation- and human-related factors are needed for the strategy implementation to be successful. Therefore, the organisations studied may have unused potential in their workspaces to ensure strategy-aligned operations and behaviour.

Due to the potential imbalance between organisation- and human-related strategy implementation factors, a more holistic, organisational-level approach to workspace design, usage and management is recommended to ensure the success of strategy implementation.

Workspaces have extensively been studied from individual strategy implementation factors’ as well as employees’ perspectives. Prior to this work, there are only few studies exploring workspace in the holistic, strategy implementation context.

This study is focused to support an ongoing development project of the case company's current state and the challenges of the order-to-cash (O2C) process. The O2C process is the most visible process to the customer, and therefore, its punctual and fluent order management is vital. It is observed that the high degree of manual work in the O2C process causes mistakes, delays and rework in the process. The purpose of this article is therefore to analyze the case company's current state of the O2C process as well as to identify the areas of development in this process by deploying the means of Lean Six Sigma tools such as value stream mapping (VSM).

The study was conducted as a mix of quantitative and qualitative analysis. Based on both the quantitative and qualitative data, a workshop on VSM was organized to analyze the current state of the O2C process of a case company, engaged in the energy and environment sector in Finland.

The results found that excessive manual work was highly connected to inadequate or incorrect data in pricing and invoicing activities, which resulted in canceled invoices. Canceled invoices are visible to the customer and have a negative impact on the customer experience. This study found that by improving the performance of the O2C process activities and improving communication among the internal and external stakeholders, the whole O2C process can perform more effectively and provide better customer value.

The O2C process is the most visible process to the customer and therefore its punctual and fluent order management is vital. To ensure that the O2C process is operating as desired, suitable process performance metrics need to be aligned and followed. The results gathered from the case company's data, questionnaire interviews, and the VSM workshop are all highlighted in this study. The main practical and managerial implications were to understand the real-time O2C process performance, which is necessary to ensure strong performance and enhance continuous improvement of the O2C process that leads to operational excellence and commercial competitiveness of the studied case company.