The photos app on my mobile phone often shows me photographs taken one, two or three years ago on this day (similar to my 'this day in history' links in the blogs). Today I was shown some pictures from a plant nursery from six years ago; I don't know why I kept these pictures in the phone's memory as I'm not at all interested in plant nurseries, but I do remember that day very well.
Instead of looking at plants, I was deep inside my head, trying to figure out a new direction for my doctoral studies, as my first attempt had foundered on not being able to find sufficient participants for my proposed statistically-based research. After no small amount of thinking, I wrote this paragraph: a possible title would be "Benefits of user extensions to post-implementation ERP systems", where the word 'extensions' is comparable to what has been called 'customising' in my thesis. There are different levels of extensions....
The blog went on to denote different types of extensions, but that was intended more to help my thinking than as a title for the research. The following day, I wrote this: today I want to leave the taxonomy of enhancements and think about what results I am supposed to achieve from the research. The title states that "benefits" - whatever they are - are to be examined. As one reviewer overlooking my work wrote at one stage (I don't remember exactly where), let us not forget that this is a doctorate in Business Administration; there should be some effect on the bottom line.
In other words, the technical side is not particularly relevant; what is relevant is the management of such enhancements ... and that is the crux of my research topic. Six years later, I think that I have completed what is effectively my third attempt. A week and a half ago, I wrote about transferring an interview for the fourth case study that I had conducted from my phone to the computer. A few days ago, I conducted another interview for the same case study and transferred it painlessly.
But the point is not the data transferral, but rather that I had conducted another interview (the fourth vocal interview, along with my own 'self-interview' that was of course written), this time with the line manager. There are two reasons why this interview is important: firstly, it increases the number of interviews that I can report upon, and secondly, it is with someone who was not part of the original design team and so comes to the enhancement with a completely different point of view. Unfortunately, as I suspected in advance, the interviewee had difficulty in distinguishing between the technical points of the enhancement (which does not interest me, or at least, the research) and the way that the enhancement was managed (that does interest the research very much). As such, the interview didn't bring much value, although the interviewee did make the interesting point that the enhancement deals with only one part out of many, and so this is a partial enhancement. The other case studies examined complete solutions.
I had written several times in the thesis that this fourth case study is a validating study, in that the enhancement was managed as much as possible on the basis of the model that had been developed as a result of the earlier case studies and that this case study could validate the model. I had also written that the main critical success factor (CSF) is active user participation (or a lack of user resistance); the fourth case study showed abundant existing user participation and so there was no need to overcome any resistance. As such, this doesn't really validate the model, although it does strengthen the case for the CSF.
I don't recall if I have written here about a kind of measure that I invented, the net overhead score (NOS). The idea is that a successful enhancement reduces overhead, and so I evaluated how much overhead there was before the enhancement was enacted, and how much there is afterwards. As I noted in the methodology chapter, this score is entirely subjective, based on my evaluation. Each time the NOS was mentioned, I called it 'calculating the NOS'; my supervisor made a general remark about the NOS, but when I looked closely at the subject, I realised why there was some concern about this. No 'calculation' is involved at all - it's all 'estimating'. So I ran a global search/replace on the thesis and changed most of the calculats to estmats.
Once I had written up the interview and made some more observations, I sent the latest version of the thesis off to my supervisor for his input. As far as I am concerned, the thesis is now complete, so there is a month left for polishing. In fact, the day after sending it, I started going through the thesis once more with a very critical eye; so far I've found one grammatical mistake (a word should have ended with 'ed' but I left that out) and I've added a few sentences here and there - and I've only finished the second chapter!
So: six years from first articulating the idea to completion.
| Blog # | Date | Title | Tags |
|---|---|---|---|
| 66 | Another one bites the dust | Obituary, King Crimson | |
| 1010 | 25/02/2017 | New direction for doctorate? | DBA |
| 1011 | 25/02/2017 | Visiting a plant nursery | Personal |
| 1473 | 25/02/2022 | Mint chocolate ice cream comes to Bet Shemesh! | Peppermint, Weather |
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