IT Research Consortium

Pattern number within this pattern set: 
103
Aake Walldius
CID/NADA/KTH
Yngve Sundblad
CID/NADA/KTH
Problem: 

Quality arguments and evaluations always depend on broad spectra of underlying social values and world-views. In order to make these underlying values perceptible, they have to be contrasted to conflicting values. The way of the university is to make this reasoning in an open and traceable manner. But the way of the marketplace is very different, and often more influential.

Context: 

In areas where quality issues are intensely debated, different interest groups search for hard facts and plausible arguments that support or extend their interpretations of quality dimensions.

Discussion: 

Example
The research groups behind the Stockholm School of Economics customer satisfaction index, Ann Arbour customer satisfaction research, Chalmers Institute of Technology automotive safety research, UsersAward's user-driven software quality certification method.

The UsersAward's research consorium is a group of researchers from different disciplines and universities (Stockholm, Uppsala, Gävle) who formed a consortium to support the quality network with overviews of state-of-the-art methods and focussed investigations. These overviews and investigations are based in research projects that result in presentations which are used by Users' Award Development company in their organizing work, at quality conferences, in quality surveys, and in certifications of IT services.

Pro-forces
- Groups at the edges of neighbouring disciplines meet
- interdisciplinary research-groups select common usability issues
- conflicting usability issues get analysed, tested, and partially resolved

Dependencies
From APL (1): Network of learning, University as marketplace, Master and apprentice.
From this proposed language: IT quality survey (101), IT quality conference (383), Users' IT quality certification (384)

Solution: 

Initiate, join, or support activities in university and research settings where different sets of user preferences are empirically tested, discussed and generalised from a range of relevant scholarly and scientific perspectives.

Pattern status: 
Released