The software industry has become an indispensable component of every modern economy, and software systems are fully integrated into everyday life, connecting, and maintaining the continuity of all social and business processes. Another component of all processes is resources, among which energy, people and data stand out -which are always the focus of stakeholders (e.g., for management). Other resources such as infrastructure, space, time, effort, or skills are often neglected and cause unexpected costs, as well as damage to the natural and social environment.
Collaborations between the private and public sectors form a broad spectrum of objectives, where the objectives of the respective participants are based on differing drives to collaborate [1]. The type of collaboration is usually chosen in accordance with the purpose and extent of the complementary information or resources that are needed to accomplish the purpose of cooperation.
The Autonomous Province of Vojvodina (APV), north of Serbia, is a specific region with rapid development of IT (Information Technology) and accompanying sectors. As a result of such fast development and rapid processes, resource awareness might be lowered, which may have significant consequences in the future. Here, it is interesting to observe resource awareness as an open space for strengthening cross-sectorial collaboration towards higher sustainability. However, APV is not an isolated region. Having many international companies present there, especially in the IT domain, it is becoming interesting to investigate resource awareness within the interconnected regions and broader. The future overall observation will be devoted to discovering subject-related similarities and differences between geographical regions, disciplines, domains, and sectors, to identify strengths and weaknesses concerning resource utilization and to enable learning among each other towards balanced resource usage.
The final goal is to extend the research across Europe, and broader, towards better coordination and consolidation of teaching, training, research, and innovations for meeting the UN Sustainable Development Goals [2].
Having described short-and long-term goals in mind, this paper focuses only on APV and local resource awareness as a possible space for collaboration between sectors, primarily academia and industry, as preliminary research.
Observed locally in APV and currently, there is insufficient awareness of all the possible capacities that actors from the academic community and (software) industry can offer each other to improve cooperation in general, and hence in the field of resource utilization, as well. The aim of this preliminary research is to determine the level of awareness about resources and their adequate use in APV. Based on the results as our future goal, a platform will be created for a stronger connection of subjects between and within the two sectors. We tend to identify which principles for resource identification are stated and supported by a sophisticated checklist that will identify opportunities for cooperation and compatible subjects for cooperation based on the identified resources.
We start from an initial list of characteristic resources used in the (software) industry, and then divide them into two general groups:
• basic resources commonly involved in every business process: classical, proven and well explored such as personnel, • additional resources commonly of interest of software and system life cycles such as energy, time, or data. Here, some emerging and not-so-obvious resources may appear such as human effort or employed tools.
Following the goals of CERCIRAS Cost Action CA19135 [3], dedicated to coordinating research efforts around resources and raising awareness of their impact, the goal of this research is to understand: a) how industry and academia use resources, b) how are actors from different sectors and domains aware of various resources, and c) whether there are needs and open space for cooperation towards their more efficient utilization.
To carry out the research we used an online survey. The survey was first sent to a limited group of respondents (pilot survey) for testing. Afterwards, it was improved based on perceived deficiencies.
Answers to these questions will be a key step towards understanding the problem: "What resources (with an emphasis on the non-obvious ones) can be important for improving cooperation between (software) industry/business and academia?" More precisely, through targeted and specialized interviews and surveys, we should arrive at answers with a focus on:
1) identification of characteristic categories of actors (e.g., companies, their products, related parties, and products...) in the local software industry, the academic community, and the wider environment, 2) identification of resources of interest and associated costs, 3) identification of the professional staff that comes into contact with the identified resources, their competence and their awareness of the resources and their roles, and 4) identification of opportunities for connecting characteristic subjects from science and industry, as well as within these two sectors, to improve the use of resources.
The main contributions of this study are lessons learned about the survey structure and the abilities of respondents to be clear when answering specific questions. Another contribution is a better picture of resource awareness in a specific localized developing economy with the IT sector in expansion.
The following section reviews a brief state of the art and the related work. Further, we present the methodology used. Section 4 then presents the main results of the study. Lastly, Section 5 outlines the conclusion of the presented research and potential future directions.
This section outlines available studies and conclusions related to the three main points of this study: (1) reviews and surveys on wide-range resource awareness (2) choice of research method design and the data collection approach, and (3) academia-industry collaboration and impact.
Based on the preliminary investigation, many (systematic) literature reviews (SLR) and surveys have been conducted related to resources, their usage and its optimisation. However, all of these are focused on specific categories of systems such as cloud computing [4,5], edge-/fog-computing [6,7], or high-performance computing [8,9]. Alternatively, they are conducted in a scope of a specific domain such as medical systems (with a special focus on privacy and security) [10]. However, we have not identified any wide-range survey on resource awareness across disciplines, domains, sectors, and regions. This situation in the literature gives us a preliminary picture of selective resource-awareness depending on domain and discipline
According to [11] an online survey collects information from people who respond to a form or instrument that is distributed through internet channels. Online surveys have several advantages:
• They are easy to conduct using free platforms such as Google Forms [12], SurveyMonkey [13], Jotform [14], Typeform [15], etc. • They can be quickly created and distributed, • There are free online survey solutions, • The analysis is generally easy to carry out on the same platform on which the survey was conducted.
Finally, we are coming to collaboration across sectors, primarily having in mind industry-academia collaboration, knowledge transfer and innovations.
In [16], authors synthesize up-to-date findings (from 239 articles indexed in Web of Science and Scopus databases), outline the intellectual structure of Open Innovation within the manufacturing research domain, and suggest a future research agenda. Another research on the impact of academia and industry is given by Perkmann and Walsh [17], where they explore the diffusion and characteristics of collaborative relationships between universities and industry.
One of the fundamental roles in the economic development of a country is cooperation in research, development and innovation (RD&I) between universities or research institutes and industry. In [18], authors present a systematic review with the aim to identify the barriers and facilitators of university-industry collaboration and analyze them using bibliometric tools.
Farah et al. [19] propose a model for the desired assimilation of the industry and university, leading to more efficient working of the two.
The research process usually begins with the need to understand the subject ("phenomenon") being researched, which is the case in our research subject. Typically the best research mechanism for learning about a phenomenon is a survey (similar mechanisms intended to assess the current situation in the area under investigation). Modern online tools make basic data analysis easy and fast.
In this section, we present the methodology used in our research. First, we discuss, what are the resources, that we have observed in our study. Next, we present our survey and its dissemination.
We discussed the initial list of characteristic resources used in the software industry and broader with the youth engineers and several managers, and came to the following division:
• Basic resources:
personnel, -education/expertise, -specialized expertise, -narrowly specialized resources, -physical space, -various other types of infrastructure.
energy and efficiency of its use, -energy autonomy, -local and global data bandwidth, -capacities for security and safety of software, -quantity and quality of data, -time and time limits, -more specialized software tools, -tools that allow download of ready-made solutions in source code.
The pilot process was used to identify any confusing or leading questions [20]. Participants in the pilot also helped us populate survey items where we asked survey participants to choose between multiple options. The last version of the survey was conducted through Google Forms [12]. Following this piloting process, the questionnaire was structured into the following sections:
The questionnaire is available as a Google Form in Serbian [21]. The next version, for the global study, will be shared in English.
We did not use any other recruitment channel, like social media or recruiting platforms, but sent emails to former students and other contacts who work in industry. 43 people responded to the survey. In addition, in private communication, 15 persons, representatives of organizations, replied that they do not deal with the issues from the survey at all.
In this section, we are going to summarize the collected results by survey sections as described in Section 3.2.
The distribution among sectors that the organization is engaged in is given in Table 1. Our sample equally covers the educational/academic and industrial organizations, 21 organizations from each sector and only one from public administration. The chart in Figure 1 illustrates distribution across fields within these sectors. Only 7 organizations deal with two or more fields, while 36 are specialized in only one. Education, which most often appears as the field that the respondents deal with, represents 1/3 of all potential fields. We believe that the listed fields represent a good sample of potential fields of interest having in mind the structure of organizations from APV, so we consider their answers representative.
The relation that the organizations have with various kinds of software is given in Table 2. 22 organizations are software users, 14 develop/maintain software for others, 14 for themselves, and only one organization is involved in all these relations. One respondent has not specified it, however.
Activities that the organization is engaged in Activities that the organization is engaged in Number of responses
They develop/maintain the system for others 14
They develop/maintain their system 14 All of the above 1 Unknown 1
Here we show how the respondents evaluated the significance of the resources in both categories, basic and additional ones, as described in Section 3.1.
Most organizations (their representative respondents) consider that, for their business and activities, the most important (ratings from 3 to 5), basic resources are: Education/expertise, Personnel, and then Infrastructure (40, 36, 36 answers). If we observe only the highest rating 5, then the most important for 25 organizations is Education/expertise, followed by Personnel in 20 organizations. On the opposite side, physical space is the most important basic resource only for 8 organizations, observing only the rating 5, and observing ratings 3,4, and 5 it is still in last place (26 answers). All results are shown in Table ?? and illustrated by the chart in Figure 2.
Figure 3 shows that most of the organizations/respondents believe that, out of additional resources, Security and Integrity, Network Bandwidth and Specialized Tools are of the greatest importance to them (importance grades 3 to 5 in 38, 37, 37 answers respectively) and least of them consider Energy autonomy as important (20). Observing only the grade 5, Capacities for security and safety of software and Time and time limits are the most important to the highest number of respondents (20).
We can notice that there is a high awareness of the importance of additional resources among the respondents, only slightly less compared to the awareness of basic resources (if we also included those mentioned 15 who refused the survey because they did not deal with additional resources, the situation is worse).
Data Flow, Safety and Security, Time and Time Limits, and Data Quantity and Quality (Figure 4) are used significantly more than the others, followed by Specialized platforms/tools in almost all phases of software development.
Prior knowledge, where present, (Figure 5) was acquired through appropriate studies (18 cases), work experience (12 cases) and specialized courses (10 cases). The additional resources mentioned in the previous question also have the most appearances here, with the exception being here now appears and using tools to download ready-made solutions in source code -but judging by the response to the previous question it is insufficient even though there is prior knowledge.
The use and efficiency of additional resources, when measured (Figure 6), is measured by specialized tools (13 cases), analysis (12 cases), testing (3) and specialized teams (3).
For most of the resources, asking about the existence of the special department dedicated to additional resources, we got a positive answer in around one-fourth and fewer cases (Figure 7). Here, the situation is different for the Bandwidth of local and global networks, Security and safety and Quantity and quality of data, where the ratio is half-and-half.
Organizations generally do not offer their own courses (Figure 8), except (increasingly) for Bandwidth of local and global networks, Security and safety, and Quantity and quality of data. However, we haven't identify high awareness of missing training or courses on these topics (Figure 9). About half of the respondents think that other sectors in the organization can help (Figure 10), and if they cannot, then it is because there is no available corresponding speciality or expertise, or all the activities are performed within the same unit where software is developed or used.
In two cases, there are more concrete ideas than no ideas for cooperation (Figure 11 and Table 3):
• with the industry (13 organizations from the industry and 15 from academic/educational institutions have concrete ideas) and, • with academia (11 organizations from business and 16 from educational institutions have concrete ideas).
In the other two cases (cooperation with the public administration and with other organizations), the majority do not have a concrete idea.
To make resource-usage trade-offs at specification, design, implementation, and run-time requires profound awareness of the local and global impacts. We conducted a survey to learn about resource awareness in organizations in APV. The study aimed to examine how the academy and the (software) industry use additional resources.
Based on the results of the survey, the following can be concluded: a) Awareness of the importance of additional resources is only slightly lower than awareness of the importance of basic resources, which is positive, b) There is significant interest in cooperation on specific ideas in this area and the organizations have concrete ideas and intentions to cooperate with industry and academia. Besides, we haven't identified any significant correlation between other parameters (e.g. the field the organization deals with, its expertise concerning other additional resources, the existence of a specialized sector ... concerning the desire for cooperation.) c) Network bandwidth, Safety and security, Time and time limits, and Quantity and quality of data clearly stand out as the most used additional resources.
We identified a correlation between the expressed importance of the team resources, the existence of dedicated units for those resources, offering own courses, large prior knowledge, and a small need for additional courses. Namely, the greater the importance expressed by an organization/respondent for some of these 4 resources, the greater the prob- ability that in the organization there exists a specialized department, that it offers its courses, and that there is one within the organization with appropriate prior knowledge. From this point, there are several research directions among which we highlight: (1) potential extension of the study and conducting it globally, and (2) deeper investigation of discovered ideas for collaboration, towards their implementation.
This research was partially funded by Short-term APV project 142-451-2036/2022 "Exploring the use of widespectrum resources as a potential for collaboration between academia and (software) industry in the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina" and Cost Action CA19135 -CER-CIRAS: Connecting Education and Research Communities for an Innovative Resource Aware Society funded by COST Association.