arXiv subjects

Eric Monteiro

Publications and source records attributed to Eric Monteiro.

15 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

Single Atom Convolutional Matching Pursuit: Theoretical Framework and Application to Lamb Waves based Structural Health Monitoring

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) aims to monitor in real time the health state of engineering structures. For thin structures, Lamb Waves (LW) are very efficient for SHM purposes. A bonded piezoelectric transducer (PZT) emits LW in the structure in the form of a short tone burst. This initial wave packet (IWP) propagates in the structure and interacts with its boundaries and discontinuities and with eventual damages generating additional wave packets. The main issues with LW based SHM are that at least two LW modes are simultaneously excited and that those modes are dispersive. Matching Pursuit Method (MPM), which consists of approximating a signal as a sum of different delayed and scaled atoms taken from an a priori known learning dictionary, seems very appealing in such a context, however is limited to nondispersive signals and relies on a priori known dictionary. An improved version of MPM called the Single Atom Convolutional Matching Pursuit method (SACMPM), which addresses the dispersion phenomena by decomposing a measured signal as delayed and dispersed atoms and limits the learning dictionary to only one atom, is proposed here. Its performances are illustrated when dealing with numerical and experimental signals as well as its usage for damage detection. Although the signal approximation method proposed in this paper finds an original application in the context of SHM, this method remains completely general and can be easily applied to any signal processing problem.

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arXiv2023

Design Theory for Societal Digital Transformation: The Case of Digital Global Health

With societal challenges, including but not limited to human development, equity, social justice, and climate change, societal-level digital transformation (SDT) is of imminent relevance and theoretical interest. While building on local-level efforts, societal-level transformation is a nonlinear extension of the local level. Unfortunately, academic discourse on digital transformation has largely left SDT unaccounted for. Drawing on more than 25 years of intensive, interventionist research engagement with the digital transformation of public healthcare information management and delivery in more than 80 countries in the Global South, we contribute to theorizing SDT in the form of a design theory consisting of six interconnected design principles. These design principles articulate the interplay and tensions of accommodating over time increased diversity and flexibility in digital solutions, while simultaneously connecting local, national, and regional/ global efforts.

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arXiv2021

Digital Resilience to Covid-19: A Model for National Digital Health Systems to Bounce Forward From the Shock of a Global Pandemic

COVID-19 represented a major shock to global health systems, not the least to resource-challenged regions in the Global South. We report on a case of digital, information system resilience in the response to data needs from the COVID-19 pandemic in two countries in the Global South. In contrast to dominant perspectives where digital resilience enables bounce back or maintenance of a status quo, we identify five bounce forward resilience preconditions (i) distributed training, (ii) local expertise (iii) local autonomy and ownership (iv) local infrastructure and (v) platform design infrastructure. These preconditions enable an elevated degree of resilience that in the face of an external shock such as COVID-19 can deliver a bounce forward or strengthening of the information system beyond its pre-shock state.

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arXiv2020

Digital Sand: The Becoming of Digital Representations

The versatility of digital technologies relies on a capacity to represent and subsequently manipulate algorithmically selected physical processes, objects or qualities in a domain. Organizationally real digital representations are those that, beyond the mere capacity to, actually get woven into everyday work practices. Empirically, we draw on a four-year case study of offshore oil and gas production. Our case provides a vivid illustration of Internet of Things (IoT) based visualizations and data driven predictions characteristic for efforts of digitally transforming industrial process and manufacturing enterprises. We contribute by identifying and discussing three mechanisms through which digital representations become organizationally real: (i) noise reduction (the strategies and heuristics to filter out signal from noise), (ii) material tethering (grounding the digital representations to a corresponding physical measurement) and (iii) triangulating (in the absence of a direct correspondence, corroborating digital representations relative to other representations).

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arXiv2019

Synthetic Knowing: The Politics of the Internet of Things

All knowing is material. The challenge for Information Systems (IS) research is to specify how knowing is material by drawing on theoretical characterizations of the digital. Synthetic knowing is knowing informed by theorizing digital materiality. We focus on two defining qualities: liquefaction (unhinging digital representations from physical objects, qualities, or processes) and open-endedness (extendable and generative). The Internet of Things (IoT) is crucial because sensors are vehicles of liquefaction. Their expanding scope for real-time seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching increasingly mimics phenomenologically perceived reality. Empirically, we present a longitudinal case study of IoT-rendered marine environmental monitoring by an oil and gas company operating in the politically contested Arctic. We characterize synthetic knowing into four concepts, the former three tied to liquefaction and the latter to open-endedness: (i) the objects of knowing are algorithmic phenomena; (ii) the sensors increasingly conjure up phenomenological reality; (iii) knowing is scoped (configurable); and (iv) open knowing/data is politically charged.

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arXiv2018

Reflections on digital innovation

The paper by Henfridsson et al. opens up a new agenda for IS research on the content and process of digital innovation. The crucial element in their perspective is the role of recombination in innovation. They supplement an emphasis on design recombination with a symmetrical emphasis on use recombination. While supporting Henfridsson et al.s overall argument, I point out how central parts overlap with and are extended in disciplines outside IS research.

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arXiv2018

Mechanisms for producing a working knowledge: Enacting, orchestrating and organizing

Given that knowledge (intensive) work takes place immersed in truly heterogenous networks of knowledge representations (codified, narrative, embedded in routines, inscribed in artefacts), our analysis is geared towards how the transformation of these resources are enacted in the practise of everyday, knowledge work. First, we discuss the work, strategies and mechanisms implied in rendering knowledge as credible, trustworthy and relevant. Second, we analyse how sediments of historically superimposed layers of knowledge representations need to be enacted through selective repetitions, omittance and highlighting to preserve it as living knowledge. Third, supplementing the more cognitivelly oriented aspects of knowledge work, we discuss how codified knowledge representations organise, coordinate and delegate work. Empirically, we study clinical work in large hospitals, a type of work, we argue, that unduely has been left out of traditional listings of knowledge work

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arXiv2018

The nested materiality of environmental monitoring

Present knowledge about the marine ecosystem on the Norwegian Continental Shelf towards the Arctic is sparse. These areas are vast, remote and subject to harsh weather conditions. We report from a three-year case study of an ongoing effort for real-time, subsea environmental monitoring by an oil and gas operator. The facts about the subsea environment are anything but neutral; they are intrinsically caught up with the material means by which they are known. The marine ecosystem is monitored through a network of sensors, communication links, visualisation and analysis tools. Our concept of nested materiality draws heavily on perspectives in sociomateriality but highlights (i) the distributed and interconnected infrastructure of the material means (as opposed to artefact-centric) and (ii) in-the-making (as opposed to black-boxed) technology.

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arXiv2018

The organizing vision of integrated health information systems

The notion of integration in the context of health information systems is ill-defined yet in wide-spread use. We identify a variety of meanings spanning from purely technical integration of information systems to integration of services. This ambiguity (or interpretative flexibility), we argue, is inherent rather accidental: it a necessary prerequisite for mobilising political and ideological support among stakeholders for integrated health information systems. Building on this, our aim is to trace out the career dynamics of the vision of integration/ integrated. The career dynamics is the transformation of both the imagery and material (technological) realisations of the unfolding implementation of the vision of integrated care. Empirically we draw on a large, ongoing project at the University hospital of North Norway (UNN) to establish an integrated health information system

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arXiv2018

Cross-contextual use of integrated information systems

Large-scale organizations are increasingly promoting more collaborative and collective work practices across organizational boarders. A predominant way to achieve better collaboration in large- scale heterogeneous contexts is to establish an integrated and standardized technological infrastructure. Ethnographically inspired studies, on the other hand, have challenged such perspective and illustrated that generic technology does not fit in local contexts and needs to be worked-around. Similarly, this paper empirically exemplifies local workarounds and illustrates ongoing and persistently imperfect integration of a collaborative infrastructure in a global oil and gas company. More importantly, however, our analysis focuses on how integrated technology is used across contexts. We illustrate how local workarounds, as a result of tight technological integration, shape use patterns across contexts. Integrated systems establish interdependencies across contexts, thus, the use implies cross-contextual rather than local enactment. Since the trajectory of enactment is influenced by cross-contextual constrains, our study is addressing the existing overemphasis on studying/analysing the use of technology in isolated local contexts. Practically, our study suggests considering workarounds as an intrinsic part of every day work, which should be calculated as additional costs of making the generic technology to work in practice.

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arXiv2018

Living with technology

Our use of IT has, broadly speaking, until recently evolved around work-oriented tasks. This is or, indeed, has been changing. IT has moved beyond the workplace and into leisure, entertainment, games and our homes. It has in short moved into our everyday life. My retired father and oldest daughter use it. Use is no longer delineated but seeps into and get intervowen with a number of my activities: while paying for my groceries, planning this summer vacation and so forth.

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arXiv2018

Social shaping of information infrastructure: on being specific about the technology

We are in this paper discussing conceptualisations of the relationship between IT and organisational issues. To move beyond an IT enables/ constrains position, we argue that it is necessary to take the specifics of an information system (IS) more serious. A theoretical framework called actor network theory from social studies of science and technology is presented as promising in this regard. With respect to new organisational forms, the class of ISs which need closer scrutiny is information infrastructures (INIs). They have characteristics which distinguish them from other ISs, namely the role and pattern of diffusion of standards. These standards are neither ready-made nor neutral: they inscribe organisational behaviour deeply within their technical details. Diffusion and adoption of standards depart from other kinds of ISs by requiring the coordination of the surrounding actors, institutional arrangements and work practices.

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arXiv2018

The family resemblance of technologically mediated work practices

Practice-based perspectives in information systems have established how, in every instance of use i.e., work practices, the user exercises considerable discretion in their appropriation of the technology with local workarounds and situated improvisations. We analyse the relationship between technologically mediated work practices separated in time and space. Specifically, we analyse how similarity in work practices is achieved. Achieving absolutely similar or best practices is unattainable. Drawing on a longitudinal 2007 to 2011 case of ambulatory maintenance work in the oil and gas sector, we identify and discuss three constituting strategies called differentiation, assembling and punctuation through which a family resemblance of similar but not the same work practices is crafted. We discuss how, in the absence of an essentialist criterion, similarity is subject to pragmatic but also political negotiations.

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arXiv2018

Standardization of work: co-constructed practice

There is strong pressure to achieve greater uniformity, standardisation and application of best practices in the service professions, a sector which is growing in presence and importance. At the same time, there is a conflicting demand for the delivery of high quality or highly priced or knowledge intensive specialised or localised services. Our paper analyses information systems embedded efforts of standardising service work through an indepth interpretative study of an ongoing standardisation initiative within the field of nursing. Nursing provides a graphic illustration of the dilemmas involved in the standardisation of service work. In nursing, standardisation is commonly a feature of projects to improve both efficiency and quality in health care. In contrast to the dominant conception of standardisation as a largely topdown, imposed process, we offer a view of standardisation as incomplete, co-constructed with users and with significant unintended consequences. The paper contributes by developing a theoretical perspective for the standardisation of information-system-embedded service work and operational and practical implications for system design and health care management.

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arXiv2018

Social software and strategy

Aligning interests, motivating contributions to knowledge work, and giving direction to multiple business units and market initiatives represent daily challenges facing the strategist in most companies. The diversity of contexts within an organization has thus led critical management thinkers to suggest that in the presence of multiple initiatives and discourses, the introduction of a new technology has multiple unintended consequences for organization. New technology is regularly subject to power struggles, conflicting goals, and discrepant events (Markus, 1983; Barley, 1986; Orlikowski, 1992; Ciborra, 1996; Leonardi, 2008) which impact on how strategies are shaped within organizations.

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