The current Covid-19 pandemic has tremendous effects on labour markets worldwide. While we observe a rapid change to work from home, an increase in unemployment is expected, too. This research ...article reports on results of a research project on the effect of the pandemic on the public sector labour market. We systematically study public sector job openings in Germany with a focus on the development of certain job types. For this purpose, we used the central German provider for e-recruiting in the public sector as a unique database that documents the current personnel demand. We comparatively analyse snapshots of this database using quantitative text analysis and descriptive statistics. Our results show that public institutions, besides a significant increase in work from home jobs, have a substantial demand for IT jobs, but that these IT vacancies do not have a focus on work from home technology.
Public administration institutions increasingly use business process management (BPM) to innovate internal operations, increase process performance and improve their services. Research on private ...sector companies has shown that organizational culture may impact an organization's BPM and this culture is often referred to as BPM culture. However, similar research on public administration is yet missing. Thus, this article assesses BPM culture in Germany's municipal administration. 733 online survey responses were gathered and analyzed using MANOVA and follow-up discriminant analyses to identify possible determinants of public administration's BPM culture. The results indicate that the employees' professional experience and their responsibility influence the assessment of BPM culture, as does the size of a municipality. Based on these findings, the article proposes testable relationships and an agenda for further research on BPM culture in public administration.
Purpose
The current evaluation standards in German higher education institutions (HEIs) do not often lead to measurable quality improvement. The purpose of this paper is to critically evaluate ...whether Kaizen can improve the quality of teaching. The presented concept illustrates the evaluation of each course unit to continuously encourage quality feedback from the learners and intensify the exchange with lecturers.
Design/methodology/approach
Action research is used to combine the continuous improvement philosophy of Kaizen with student course evaluations. A pilot study of the concept provides data from four course cycles to analyze learnings and setbacks.
Findings
Learners in the pilot courses welcomed the intense participation and allowed improvements to elements such as course concept, course material, presentation style and content or detail selection. The participation rate declined during each term and was highly influenced by triggers like exam and grade relevance. Kaizen could successfully improve course quality, especially in the first two years of newly developed courses.
Research limitations/implications
The presented results have been collected from one course over four years in one institution. The next stage of research would be the application of the approach in other institutions to validate results and make potential adjustments to the concept, for example, toward continuous learning.
Originality/value
Although course evaluation has become standard in German HEIs, most institutions only implement it once per term or year. This paper discusses a new approach to expedite the evaluation of teaching quality at the point of action (Gemba) to facilitate the short-term reactions of lecturers.
PurposeCurrent research suggests culture as a driving force of successful digital innovation (DI) that may not only built an organization's capability to digitally innovate but also reduce impeding ...factors within the organization. Only few empirical accounts support this hypothesis so far. Details of how culture supports DI are yet under-researched. This article aims to investigate the relationship between culture, organizational DI capabilities and DI barriers.Design/methodology/approachThe authors address this issue by using survey data from German municipalities (n = 668), build a structural equation model (SEM) and analyze data using partial least squares SEM.FindingsResults indicate that the business process management (BPM) culture dimensions continuous improvement and process innovation support DI capabilities. Barriers exist that partially mediate the impact of culture on capabilities.Originality/valueThe results of this study show that BPM culture is not a uniform construct and that its dimensions have both positive and negative impact on the building of organizational digitalization capabilities.
Purpose
Requirements for business improvement professionals depend on different job characteristics. By focussing on lean management, the purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to provide a ...comprehensive conceptualisation of competencies relevant for lean professionals by comparing them to an existing project management competency framework; and second, to identify their similarities and differences in three different analysed countries.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper investigates 2,701 online published job advertisements in the USA, UK and Germany by means of a content analysis to compare and contrast the respective job profiles.
Findings
Main findings are similarities and differences in the specification and perception of lean professional’s roles among the three countries. Strikingly, four out of eight considered competency categories comprise 74 per cent of the profiles’ most relevant keywords. Additionally, with the help of a latent semantic analysis, 16 specific competencies can be summarised in a lean professional’s competency taxonomy.
Research limitations/implications
The collected data only represent a snapshot of lean professionals’ advertisements. Also, text mining results from job profiles could largely differ from other techniques like recruiter interviews or company surveys. Further research could use different methods or combine them to construct a more complete model.
Practical implications
Lean education and training as well as the respective candidate selection processes can benefit from these studies’ results.
Originality/value
Requirements and job contents for lean professionals have not been empirically researched on a comparable in-depth level before, even though their expertise is in high demand in any kind of business sector.
The perception of emerging technologies such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA) goes through the phases of emergence, growth, and maturity. In the emergence phase, potential users of the technology ...naturally have unrealistic expectations of high performance. The expected positive impact of the technology drives the subsequent growth phase. Later, these exaggerated expectations increasingly give way to realistic assessments until a maturity phase is reached. The current academic debate on RPA argues that there is also a fear narrative that hinders wider adoption of this technology. In this article, we present an analysis of over 95,000 news articles on RPA published between 2015 and September 2020 to study the public perception of RPA. We employ sentiment analysis and topic modeling to evaluate positive/negative and subjective/objective views as well as major topics identified in news media. Based on this analysis, we demonstrate that RPA can now be considered a mature technology which seems to have passed a hype without enduring a large dip in expectations. Building on these insights, this article discusses some potential avenues for future research "beyond the hype".
Purpose
This paper aims to expand the knowledge about Lean Six Sigma (LSS) implementation in the public sector. By analyzing an LSS improvement initiative in a German municipality, examples of ...success, barriers and challenges are discussed. A comparison with literature regarding the production and service sectors unfolds similarities and differences.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper applies the action research method. Especially for the broad field of project management, methods focusing on actual experience from practice have been recommended by many researchers.
Findings
Implementations of LSS in the public sector seem to be particularly challenging and lengthy. Change and communication management have proved to be the most important aspects to successful acceptance, cooperation and improvement sustainability. In the analyzed cases, the needed volume of data could often not be procured. The applied Six Sigma methodology primarily included the DMAIC project phases as well as selected standard instruments. In contrast, the lean elements of LSS achieved more results and were appreciated by project team members.
Originality/value
The LSS application in this paper provides insights into practical implementation experience in a municipality, as well as lessons learned. Until now, most research addressed the single application of lean, continuous improvement or Six Sigma. This paper represents the first academic report of a LSS program in a German municipality and underlines the need for scientific support of those initiatives in further municipalities worldwide.
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