Abstract
Digitization of everything is the main driver in today’s economy. The constantly growing proliferation of digital tools makes it increasingly important to properly analyze and document which information is needed in which processes throughout a company. Information management competencies are a key enabler on the path to data generated value creation.
The FlexIA toolkit described in this paper assists in such an analysis. One of its highlights is that it comprises both a method and a tool to investigate information flows within small and medium-sized companies. It focuses on pragmatic objectives and aims to empower workers in the domain of mechanical engineering to create an analysis independently. Starting out as paper-based prototype it soon became necessary to transform the tool into a digital web app.
The first section of this paper illustrates the context in which the FlexIA toolkit was created and describes its core concepts. Afterwards, related work is reviewed and the FlexIA is delineated from other tools and methods. The third section discusses the motivation behind the FlexIA toolkit, elaborates on further use cases and reasons why a digital tool was needed. The major part of this paper covers the step wise process of digitizing the FlexIA toolkit. Mock ups and wire framing were used to capture the user requirements. Subsequently, implementation aspects are illustrated. A short discussion as well as an overview of future steps concludes this article.
This research and development project is funded by the European Social Fund (ESF) and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) within the program “Future of work” (02L18B000) and implemented by the Project Management Agency Karlsruhe (PTKA). The authors are responsible for the content of this publication.
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Notes
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Advanced Message Queuing Protocol https://www.amqp.org/.
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The activity on the information object.
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Disruptive events.
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See Sect. 4.7.
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See Sect. 4.6.
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Analytic Hierarchy Process.
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Kruse, C., Becks, D., Venhuis, S. (2021). Digitizing the FlexIA Toolkit - Transforming a Paper-Based Method into a Flexible Web App. In: Yamamoto, S., Mori, H. (eds) Human Interface and the Management of Information. Information-Rich and Intelligent Environments. HCII 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12766. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78361-7_19
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