Quick links:

• I have a research webpage that presents my research in more detail.
• I might have other projects in the pipeline, so feel free to contact me.
• Find here a paper listing research challenges for responsible software.

Short bio

I am assistant professor in the Department of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University (Netherlands). I received a PhD degree in Computer Science (2011) from Universitat Politècnica de València (Spain). I have taught BSc. and MSc. courses in several universities around the world (Spain, Netherlands, Chile, Paraguay, Colombia), as well as industry-oriented workshops. I lead the Responsible Software research line (see below). I have participated in international applied-research projects (e.g. ITEA2 UsiXML, FP7 CaaS) and authored over 70 scientific publications in requirements engineering and conceptual modelling conferences and journals. Programme committee chair and member many international conferences and workshops. I am a proud member of the Spanish Network of Networks of Social and Solidarity Economy (REAS) and I also belong to the Dutch working group of the Economy for the Common Good.

The behaviour of enterprises and citizens has an impact on the sustainability of the economic, social and environmental systems. A responsible enterprise is an enterprise that performs accordingly to ethical values, taking care of the impact of their activities on society and on the environment. Together with empowered, well-informed citizens they are agents of change towards a better world. Responsible enterprises can be for-profit (e.g. a financial institution in the ethical banking domain, a chain of locally-sourced organic food supermarkets) or non-profit (e.g. an NGO on social inclusion of long-term unemployed, a foundation that promotes gender equity in science and technology).

Many of the challenges faced by responsible enterprises can be addressed with the support of the appropriate information and communication technology. We call it responsible software!

Main competences applied in this research line

My main interest is in business models, methods and tools for socio-environmental auditing, the process of assessing and reporting the social and environmental effects of a company’s economic actions to particular interest groups within society and to society at large [Kolb, 2008; Tilt, 2010].

But, more broadly, this research line focuses on the application of the following practices to responsible enterprises:

• Responsible enterprise modelling is the graphical representation of the goals, stakeholders, processes, rules, information and technologies that are relevant to an organisation striving to achieve its mission in a sustainable and solidary way. Making this knowledge explicit facilitates undertaking organisational reengineering and continuous improvement practices, standardising ways of working, resolving conflicting viewpoints, etc.
• Business process management enables being under control of business processes by means of analysing organisational structures and work practices, modelling and enacting business processes, managing resources, communicating and interoperating with clients and providers, preventing failures in information technology service provision or facilitating a fast (possibly automated) recovery, monitoring execution, etc. We apply these practices to improve the sustainability of current business processes or model new processes related to responsible actions.
• Socio-environmental business intelligence entails the collection of operational data, its analytical processing to calculate business indicators, and the meaningful display of complex, high-quality, timely information. This supports planners and decision makers on making responsible decisions, measuring social balances, or steering organisations in a sustainable way.
• Model-driven software engineering solves business consultancy and information system challenges at an abstract level, and then automates as much as possible the implementation of the solution technologies. It contributes to facilitating the problem-solving processes and increasing the efficiency during software development projects. Our intention is to use model-driven technologies to facilitate the development of software supporting responsible actions.
• Requirements engineering is the process of discovering the purpose for which a software system is intended, by identifying stakeholders and their needs, documenting these in a form that is amenable to analysis, communication, validation, and subsequent implementation. We improve existing methods and adapt them to the context of responsible enterprises.
• Free software can support responsible actions and socio-environmental auditing. We explore existing open-source software ecosystems and their role in such areas. All our tools are delivered with open-source or free software licences..

See my research webpage for more ideas!

The improvement cycle in responsible enterprises

Responsible enterprises not only try to conduct their business in a sustainable and ethical way, but they also want to do that better every year. They typically engage in a continuous improvement cycle (see image below). This cycle entails (1) materiality assessment in order to identify the important topics they should pay attention to, (2) socio-environmental auditing in order to assess how well they are performing in terms of social and environmental sustainability and business ethics, (3) sustainability reporting in order to disclose the findings in a transparent and honest way, (4) strategic management in order to determine where they should improve, as well as commiting to and planning improvement actions, and (5) organisational reengineering in order to effectively change the enterprise with the intention to improve its social and environmental performance or adopt more ethical governance practices.

The responsible tool landscape

We are developing a number of tools that are part of the responsible software landscape (see image below).

openSEA is an open-source, model-driven tool for socio-environmental auditing (SEA). The aim is that it can be tailored to suit support any SEA mehod and suit the needs of any responsible enterprise. We already have a minimum viable product is being transferred to the Fair Trade Software Foundation, where it will be used to certify their members.

openMasses is an open-source tool that supports part of materiality assessment i.e. (the identification and prioritisation of the sustainability and business ethics topics that are relevant for a given enterprise). Specifically, it runs text analytics over sustainability reports or peer enterprises from the same sector, to identify topics that they commonly report on.

If you are interested in contributing to this research line, contact me.