Download 1. General

Department of informatics
Torbjörn Nordström
2011-05-19
First and second year master thesis –
layout template
1. General
Master thesis work at the department of informatics is digitally published in the DIVA
system, administered by the University library. This document provides information
concerning the required layout of the master thesis when published. Note that this document
itself uses the layout template it describes. Every word in this document belongs to a style so
by clicking on different places you will see the style is used to implement all features of the
layout.
2. Headings (Heading 1)
Headings on different levels have different layout. Chapter headings are written with 16
points, bold. The spacing before should be 24 points and after 6 points. The font in all
headings should be Arial.
2.1 Heading 2
Subchapter headings are 14 points bold. Spacing before should be 12 points, and after 3
points.
2.1.1 Heading 3
Sub subchapter headings are 12 points bold. Spacing before 12 points, no spacing after. Try to
avoid more sub levels. If you feel it is absolutely necessary, do it next level like this, but not
in bold.
3 Layout övrigt
3.1 The body of the text
The body of the text should be written in font Times New Roman. The line spacing should be
exactly 16 points. The text should be justified. New paragraphs are indented 0,5 cm the first
line, except the first paragraph after a heading. There should not be empty lines between
paragraphs. Page numbers are centered in the footer. All margins are set to 2,5 cm.
Just to illustrate I add a few lines to show how the body of text should look with indents of
all paragraphs except the first after a heading or a picture/figure/table. I continue babbling a
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Department of informatics
Torbjörn Nordström
2011-05-19
few more words just to force the next heading from the bottom of this page to the top of the
next page.
3.2 The first page
The first page in the thesis should start with an abstract. The purpose of an abstract is to put
The abstract can be max half a page long, it should be Times New Roman 11, italics. Use the
style “abstract_text”. An example can be found in appendix 1.
3.3 The title page
The published thesis should have a cover page. That page has no page number. The design of
the cover is an Umeå University standard. Just edit the template page by filling in your data
instead of the dummy in the template. Also the published thesis will get a unique number in
the department’s publication series. This should be put at the bottom of the title page. That
number will be provided by the course administrator.
3.4 Footnotes and references
Footnotes should be numbered in sequence and be placed at the bottom of the page. The text
should be 11 points and the line spacing should be single1.
References in the text is done by stating the author(s) and year of publication within
brackets, for instance (Churchman, 1968) If the reference list of the thesis contains more than
one item by the same author(s) from the same year, they are separated by adding a, b and so
on, to the year, for instance (Churchman, 1968b) The full reference is given in the reference
list at the end of the thesis. Layout for the reference list is shown in appendix 2.
3.5 Tables, figures, pictures
For this kind of content there are no specific layout, just make sure they are clear, easy to
interpret and informative, All should be numbered and have a text identifying the item. The
number of the figure and the text should be in Times New Roman 12, italics, sspacing before
12 points and after 6 points. The paragraph following the figure text should have no
indention. (See also section 3.1)
3.6 Quotes
A quote is marked in the text with quotation marks and immediately followed by a reference.
For longer quotes (more then 3 lines) you should use the specific quotation style. It is the
same as the body, except that the text is in italic and the lines starts and ends 1 cm inside the
normal margins. Also the line spacing is 15 points. A long quote should look like this:
The fourth implication concerns the risk of going from stable to rigid. The
interlocked behaviour cycle was seen as “solving” the problem of finding the
necessary stability for organisational operations. The problem of finding stability
shifts in informaction systems, such systems have different problems. In
1
I am putting some words in here just to illustrate what a footnote should look like.
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Department of informatics
Torbjörn Nordström
2011-05-19
informaction systems the balance may tilt too far in the direction of stability.
Instead avoiding rigidity becomes a problem. The more an organisation’s
activities are carried out through IT-artefacts the more these activities become a
pattern, based on limited, frozen experience and extrapolations into the future.
Stable behavioural patterns can be seen as manifesting knowledge of how to
handle certain, previewed situations; this is the positive side of organising. Full
computerisation, however, manifests “canned” knowledge, or rather codified
parts of human experience, where formerly successful patterns of action become
mechanically repeated. The problem thus shifts from one of establishing stability,
to one of finding openings for adaptation, learning and further development.
These changes in the properties of the interlocked behaviour cycle underlying
informaction systems amount to an even tighter coupling than before introducing
an IT-artefact. And tighter coupling means an increased sensitivity to
disturbances, fewer conditions will lead to a successful completion of the task.
3.7 Appendix
All appendixes should be numbered and placed at the end of the thesis, after the reference list.
The same layout instructions should be applied to the text in the appendix. The only
difference is that you do a header like in the two appendixes to this document
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Department of informatics
Torbjörn Nordström
Appendix 1: First page
Abstract
Organisations depend on IT for successful completion of many organisational activities. A
distinction can be made between organisations with an IT-dependency of type-1, where ITartefacts perform earlier manual routines, and organisations with an IT-dependency of type-2,
where organisations utilise already digital data to enable new or radically improved organisational processes. Recognition of IT-dependency indicates that the way IT-artefacts are related
to organisations is important. Moreover, the ways in which such relations are subject to
change have so far seldom been subject to research. Thus, the research question asked in this
thesis is: How to sustain and further develop the ways IT-artefacts and activities become and
continue as related in order to effectively support changed or new organisational activities?
Within informatics we have been preoccupied with studying design of IT-artefacts. I found a
design perspective inadequate to grasp the complexity of how IT-artefacts become related to
organisational activities. Thus, as a secondary research question I ask: How can IT-artefacts
and organisational activities they are intended to support be perceived and understood as
fundamentally related?
1. Introduction
During periods in the last 15 years Business Process Reengineering, Data Warehousing, Data
Mining, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and e-Commerce have all been widely
discussed topics in research and in business discussions of IT use and utilisation in
enterprises. Besides being topics much talked about for some time, they have some
characteristics in common. Business Process Reengineering (BPR) starts from the idea that
organising business processes as if humans performed them, when in fact computers perform
large parts of them, might not be the most productive way to organise business processes
(Hammer & Champy, 1994). BPR was launched as an initiative to rethink the way business
transactions were done, based on the idea of fully utilising the potential in information
technology, primarily to make business processes more efficient. Data Warehousing is a
sophisticated technique for merging data generated in daily operations into large “historical”
databases enabling advanced statistical analysis of enterprise operations (Sen & Jacob, 1998).
Data Mining is an idea closely linked to Data Warehousing. It means that large databases are
prospected for their treasures, for example patterns of customer behaviours, that for various
reasons might be very difficult to discern ’in real life’ (Apte et al., 2002; Brachman et al.,
1996; Fayyad & Uthurusamy, 1996; Inmon, 1996). ERP is a concept denoting a class of large
business systems promising to integrate the whole spectrum of data processing within an
enterprise (Davenport, 1998). ERP-systems ideally give managers the totally integrated
enterprise accessible through some keystrokes on a keyboard. To achieve this through
information technology has been a dream since the ideas of MIS of the 1960s (Langefors,
1968a, 1968b).
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Department of informatics
Torbjörn Nordström
Appendix 2: List of references
References
Lientz, B. P. & Swanson, E. B. (1980). Software Maintenance Management. Reading, Mass.:
Addison-Wesley.
Lyytinen, K. & Hirschheim, R. (1987). Information systems failures - A survey and
classification of the empirical litteratur. Oxford Surveys in Information Technology
(4).
Lyytinen, K. & Hirschheim, R. (1988). Information systems as rational discourse: an
application of Habermas’s theory of communicative action. Scandinavian Journal of
Management, 4 (1/2), 19-30.
Markus, M. L. & Robey, D. (1988). Information Technology and Organizational Change:
Causal Structure in Theory and Research. Management Science, 34 (No. 5), 583-598.
Mead, G. H. (1967). Mind, self, and society - from the standpoint of a social behaviorist.
(Paperback edition): University of Chicago Press.
Nilsson, K. (1989a). Designing for Creativity - Toward a Theoretical Basis for the Design of
Interactive Information Systems. (UMADP-RRIPCS-8.89): Institute of Information
Processing.
Nilsson, K. (1989b). Doktorandkursen Framväxten och utvecklingen av universitetsämnet
Administrativ databehandling – Presentation och artikelsamling. (UMADP-WPIPCS25.89). Umeå: Institute of information processing, department of administrative data
processing, Umeå University.
Nordström, T., Söderström, M. & Hanseth, O. (2000). Business Development in IT-dependent
organisations. Proceedings of the 23rd Information Systems Research Seminar in
Scandinavia, Uddevalla. Svensson, L., Snis, U., Sørensen, C., Fägerlind, H., Lindroth,
T., Magnusson, M. & Östlund, C. (Eds.). Vol. 1, 77-88.
Olle, T. W., Hagelstein, J., MacDonald, I. G., Rolland, C., Sol, H. G., Van Assche, F. J. M. &
Verrijn-Stuart, A. A. (1991). Information Systems Methodologies: A framework for
understanding. Workingham: Addison-Wesley.
ORBIT-2000. (1999a). Information about ORBIT-2000 and SAP R/3.
ORBIT-2000. (1999b). Newsletter ORBIT-2000, 2 July.
ORBIT-2000. (1999c). Newsletter ORBIT-2000, 3 December.
Parnas, D. L. (1985). Software aspects of strategic defense systems. Communications of the
ACM, 28 (12), 1326-1335.
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