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Select a model or standard to be used as reference in order to deploy the processes used in software development is a complex task. People with skills and knowledge in order to compare the contents of the model and / or standard taking into account the variety of models structures and descriptions is required. The purpose of this paper is to describe a method for selecting a reference model for software process deployment, based on the organizations needs. The organizations needs are translated into criteria related to the critical success factors of an improvement initiative. The method has been applied to select the reference model to be used in designing a deployment strategy processes with greater assurance of success. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Cloud computing is a new generation of the technology that has been designed to cater for commercial necessities and to run suitable applications or solve IT management issues. While cost and ease of use are two top benefits of cloud, trust and security are the two top concerns of cloud computing users. Federated identity as a useful feature for user management and Single Sign-on (SSO) has also become an important part of federated identity environment. Misuse of the identity, identity theft, and platform trustworthiness are some of the problems in the federated identity environment. OAuth, OpenID, SAML are three main concept in cloud authentication and federated environment. This paper overviews the security issues of federated identity in the cloud authentication and highlights the proposed models to solve identity theft in the federated environment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

To be effective, the systematic reuse in software development process must be supported by an artifact database. Although many organizations do not have such database, generally the Service Repository is the catalog responsible for leveraging Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) reuse within the development lifecycle. This paper presents a SOA implementation experience, emphasizing the contributions of developing Service Repository extensions. The adoption of SOA occurred along with a new ERP deployment. One of the main goals was to enable the reuse of standard processes and services within a better integration between ERP system and legacy systems. The repository received additional capabilities to maximize searches and usability; to support configuration and release management; and also address performance issues within cache manageability. The benefits of this work are presented, as well as the results of the current situation in the organization considering SOA repository usage and the empirical evidence collected. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Organizational learning is an area that helps companies to improve their processes significantly through the reuse of experiences. An area that may help in this way is social learning. Collaborative tools, such as social network and wiki, enable collaborative work and are important facilitators of social learning process. However, collaboration is one of the several necessary components for learning. Therefore, it is important that all acquired knowledge be organized to be reused faster, easily and efficiently. Therefore, we propose using learning objects to organize the content inserted in collaborative tools. There are some learning object metadata to describe relevant learning objects characteristics and to catalog them. As these metadata are proposed to describe educational learning objects, they do not contemplate organizational characteristics, important for knowledge-intensive organizations. Moreover, the metadata are formally modeled through the XML-Schema language, which has a lack of expressiveness. Thus, trying to solve these limitations, the paper presents an ontology for organizational learning object based on IEEE LOM standard. The paper describes the ontology building process, following all the activities proposed in Methontology. Some experiments to evaluate the ontology are also presented [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Software companies are a growing trend in world economy. They are in charge of most IT related developments and, in order to deliver proper products to their customers, they have to improve their organization. Software Process Improvement (SPI) is a key factor that allows software companies to grow and improve. This process has been mainly treated as technical, leaving aside the human and organizational factors. It has to be managed as an organizational change. Also organizations can be seen as living organisms that grow and evolve based on the idea of autopoiesis or self-producing systems. If a software company is understood as an autopoietic system, the SPI can be seen as a self-producing process. The goal of this work is to provide a first approach in the understanding of SPI as a part of the organization self-production process and provide new insights to managers in the SPI implementation and success. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Statistical Process Control (SPC) has been adopted by software development organizations to improve process management and assessment. Without appropriate support tools and a process model to guide the organizations during to SPC, such practice is costly, considering the need to collect and analyze information from several process enactments. To aid in the SPC implementation, this paper proposes a standard process model and an approach for quantitative analysis of projects that was integrated to a Process-centered Software Engineering Environment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents the SQALE (Software Quality Assessment Based on Lifecycle Expectations) method. We describe its Quality Model and Analysis Model which is used to estimate the Quality and the Technical Debt of an application source code. We provide recommendations and guidelines for using the SQALE indicators in order to analyse the structure and the impact of the Technical Debt. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The outsourcing of IT Service Management (ITSM) processes is now a common and established phenomenon. Traditional outsourcing models were centered on off-shoring. Greater shift towards strategic and transformational forms of outsourcing has led to emergence of global delivery models, shared service models, and multi vendor delivery models. While these models have great potential, the realization of these models on the ground is often suboptimal. Security issues and constraints have forced these systems to work in silos leading to fragmentation of ITSM processes and systems across the client and vendor environments. The need is to create an eco-system where the client systems can be integrated seamlessly with vendor systems to drive service improvements and enable better collaboration, decision making and overall governance of the outsourced services. Addressing security challenges is a key to implementation of these emerging service delivery models. The primary challenges are around data security and privacy, secure network isolation, secure integration of shared services, federated identity management, strong authentication and access control related challenges. In this paper we present the key challenges of integration in these emerging outsourcing models and present security considerations that need to be addressed to realize these models. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Shared services is an organizational culture of sharing and innovation across the organization. It enables the sharing of services by functions of organization such as Finance, Human Resources and Information Technology through a common mechanism of a shared services centre. Delivery of services is through Information and Communication Technology infrastructure. Shared services increases productivity through better customer experience and hence control the cost. Though, Shared services is not a new concept, it has not been exploited yet by the organizations of all industry sectors. This paper discusses possible pitfalls for the unsuccessful use of shared services and suggests the majors to overcome. A maturity model is suggested as a guideline for making shared services successful. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Any service industry and specifically Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry faces multiple challenges in regards to employee motivation, talent retention and job related issues. The engagement of the employees has been identified as one of the important element to manage these challenges. Gamification is an emerging concept that helps in improving user engagement and user experience. This paper proposes a method of applying Gamification in BPO industry to increase the employee engagement and thus manage the employee related challenges encountered in BPO or any service industry. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A participatory social simulation framework is presented to support context analysis in Uruzgan province's Baluchi Valley region, Afghanistan under the banner of context sensitivity. Working in fragile states and areas affected by armed conflict is challenging for locals, development workers and researchers alike. Meaningful interaction with locals for data collection purposes is difficult and techniques applied should balance the desire for broad and in-depth data elicitation with sound risk management. Rarely can standard solutions deliver the results needed for making informed decisions in such circumstance. The reader is shown protocols for data collection and analytics that are tailored to doing context analysis and decision support for development cooperation in areas affected by armed conflict. Select results are presented to demonstrate the usefulness of the framework. The article concludes with a comparison of the proposed framework with development cooperation requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With the development of sensing, wireless communication, and Internet technologies, we are now living in a world that is filled with various smart things — the Internet of Things. This paper introduces and prospects an emerging research area — the Internet of Things Application in China Logistics, which aims at revealing the opportunities, challenges and the explorations of this technology in China logistics. This paper discusses the application history, challenges encountered, advices and approaches for the application of the Internet of Things in China logistics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Nowadays e-Health systems recognize the benefits of new Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the delivery of healthcare services. While these modern technologies have enhanced practices in the healthcare sector, the potential of failures to interrupt a process is still important. This risk of system downtime may induce significant impacts on patient safety. Thus, ensuring business resilience has proven to be increasingly challenging as the healthcare field employs more ICT applications and all signs for the future point to even more reliance on digital data. In this context, we propose an approach based on Business Continuity Management (BCM) to ensure the ability to operate in spite of unforeseen events and to quickly recover from any type of business interruption. The basic purpose of this paper is to define a formal description of a Business Continuity Plan (BCP), following an approach grounded in Model-Driven Engineering (MDE). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Education is one of the most important and challenging issues for implementing and improving information technology (IT) governance. In this study, the role of the education in IT governance is emphasized and discussed with examples from standards and best practices such as IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (COBIT), ISO/IEC 27001, BSI/BS 25999 and ISO/IEC 9001. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Our society's growing dependence on software makes the need for effective software assurance imperative. Motivation to address software assurance requires, at a minimum, an understanding of what to do, how to go about it, and why it is needed. Two key foundation elements are principles for software assurance and a curriculum to educate those who must address this need. This paper highlights efforts underway to address both of these elements. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As software houses align themselves to serve clients operating in rapidly changing business environments, they start putting more emphasis on increasing their agility. However as a precursor to this, there is a need within an organization to measure and monitor its agility. The clients also would be interested to know the level of agility of their vendors. While the need for an effective metric is well established, the subjective nature of the parameters involved, and the need for some degree of generality makes the task of assessing agility a difficult one. This paper is an attempt to arrive at a quantifiable, scalable framework to measure the same. Apart from giving a framework which can be used to assess the agility of a company, this paper indicates how a detailed sensitivity analysis can be done with respect to the parameters that define agility. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing on the concept of organizational integration, we developed a typology that allows us to classify organizational IT applications and better understand, explain, and potentially predict their impacts. As a preliminary test of the typology, the empirical evidence of past research on the impacts of IT on organizational performance was reviewed. We classified the organizational IT applications that were studied in previous work according to our proposed typology and compared their results on IT impacts against the impacts hypothesized in our proposed framework. The proposed framework correctly predicted 87% of past significant findings and 51% of the non-significant findings of extant research (the overall prediction rate was 76%). This is a significant improvement in our predictive abilities as none of the latter studies had hypothesized non-significant effects of IT on performance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Little research has been conducted to investigate a possible transformation of organizational culture through western-developed Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems in developing countries in Asia. A case study carried out in Sri Lanka found that ERP adoptions along with other appropriate mechanisms can be a catalyst for the transformation of organizational culture. A little over 10 years after going live, the organizational culture that has inhibited the achievement of benefits from the western-developed ERP system is slowly changing at the case organization. Cultural transformation (user-behavior pattern change) in the case company occurred by accepting three out of four user-behavior patterns assumed by the western-developed ERP systems to a noticeable extent. Furthermore, case organization used several mechanisms such as company-wide education programs, phased-out implementation approach, recruiting an increasing number of young professionals to facilitate the transformation process taking place through the ERP adoption. Additionally, from this evidence, it can be deduced that organizational culture may not be static, over time they may be changed through various mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Executives around the globe are investigating the benefits that cloud computing can deliver above and beyond cost savings. What is its contribution to competiveness - through improved agility, expanded business networks, and enhanced decision-making? At the same time, organizations, and specifically IT departments, have gotten a firmer grasp on IT governance and have embraced initiatives to adjust governance strategies and structures, as well as governance processes and software. What is cloud computing's impact on IT governance and the role of the IT department - and will it change how firms' request, prioritize, fund, monitor, enforce, and realign IT investments? This article presents and discusses a conceptual and operational research model combining research in IT governance, cloud computing, and business/IT alignment. The model is applied to a quantitative study of 21 European and North American cloud adopters and non-adopters across various industries. Our results indeed indicate that IT organizations need to change to keep in control and that IT governance is an important means to stay relevant. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Top management support has been identified as one of the most critical factors to the success of enterprise systems. However, few studies have addressed the issue of what type of top management support is most effective in which phase of the enterprise systems lifecycle. In this study, we argue that the effectiveness of management support is dependent on the top manager's leadership style and the specific phase of enterprise systems. Given the different challenges resulted from enterprise systems in different phases, and the variety of top management leadership styles, a one-size fits all approach is clearly inadequate. Drawing upon extant literatures, we propose a theoretical framework to clarify the relationships between the two most recognized leadership styles and the four phases of enterprise systems lifecycle. Specifically, we argue that transformational leadership is more effective in the adoption phase, while transactional leadership is more effective in the implementation phase, and a mixed leadership is more effective for the assimilation and extension phases. Our study deviates from the traditional focus on transformational leadership in management literature and breaks new ground in IS literature by highlighting the effectiveness of leadership in the success of enterprise systems throughout the lifecycle. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Fits and misfits between information systems and their organizational contexts are important to many theoretical streams in the information systems research tradition. A premise underlying this fit-related research is that a fit is generally a good thing and should therefore be pursued, whereas misfits are bad and should be eliminated. In this conceptual essay we draw upon work on enterprise information systems to question whether this premise is necessarily always the case. In doing so we make two broad contributions: first, we conceptualize the different points where we might find fits or misfits between an enterprise system and its organizational context, second, we theorize about situations where misfits may not negatively influence organizational performance. We conclude with a provocation about the simultaneous desirability and danger of fit. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Prior research has characterized the adoption of technical and process standards as a multi-stage effort ranging from the initial implementation through institutionalization. However, the relationships between these adoption stages have not been examined significantly. In this study I analyze performance data from a large service provider that has implemented a process standardization framework for services off shoring. I evaluate the extent to which process standardization influences service delivery performance, and how the effect of standardization differs based on the implementation duration of each new process and the complexity of the task for which the process is implemented. The results indicate that longer implementation durations are associated with greater performance improvement. Performance on complex tasks also increases to a greater extent after standardization than performance on simple tasks. Contrary to expectations, performance on complex tasks improves to a greater extent following shorter implementation durations than after longer durations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a method to analyse the consistency of a process model according to business transactions. Business transactions focus on specifying the pattern-based behaviour resulting from the collaboration between actors and systems while services and products are being requested and provided. The method makes possible assessing the consistency of a business process in terms of the business transactions that can be inferred from it. To do so, it takes as input a process model that is converted to a transactional model. The transactional model is then analysed and revised so that all transactions become consistent according to the pat-terns of DEMO. Finally, the original process model is revised to comply with the transactional model. As a result, the revised business process becomes consistent with the corresponding transactional model. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although principles are a key concept in the definition of Enterprise Architecture (EA), they have not received the same degree of attention as other EA concepts. The notion of EA principles (EAP) is suffering from the lack of a theoretical foundation that provides a logical framework for defining them. Stafford Beer's Viable System Model (VSM) and its application to IT governance, the Viable Governance Model (VGM), have shown to be comprehensive blueprints for designing viable organizations and IT governance arrangements, respectively. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether the principles of cybernetics can provide a theoretical basis for interpreting EA principles derived through practice. This paper maps the principles defined in the Open Group's TOGAF to theoretical concepts drawn from the VSM/VGM and cybernetics. The paper concludes by identifying possible shortfalls in the existing set of principles and the need to develop a theoretical framework to overcome them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Enterprise "architecting" is the process of developing, updating and maintaining the EA. The goal of EA is to align business process and IT for the effective execution of business strategy. But the architecting process involves many stakeholders with very diverse and often conflicting goals. This makes architecting a daunting process. However, coordination in EA has received very little attention in the literature. A prior study reported that there are three fundamental types of coordination, each affecting architecting differently: (1) communication -- the most prevalent, but least effective coordination mechanism in EA, (2) task programming -- less prevalent but a very necessary type of coordination for EA success, and (3) team cognition -- less understood but the most critical predictor of EA coordination success. In this paper we report on two case studies that investigated one highly successful and one less successful EA practice. Both organizations had competent business, IT and EA staff and active architecting coordination via communication and task programming. Only the successful organization, however, had strong team cognition, underscoring the importance of cognitive coordination in architecting. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The present article investigates critical contextual success factors that influence business intelligence (BI) system success and design in organizations with regard to their relevance, variability, and controllability. The initial set of factors is based on an analysis of extant literature and serves as the basis for further research on this topic. In contrast to previous studies, a Delphi Study provides several advantages such as the validation of possible critical factors by domain experts and the multi-dimensional view on these factors. A carefully selected expert panel investigated the factors not only by means of relevance but also assessed each factor in terms of variability and controllability. This multi-dimensional approach allowed us to identify six distinct clusters of factors with similar attributes and, hence, similar implications for practice. This paper contributes to IS research on critical success factors and system design variables in general and gives specific insights into the BI domain. The results are expected to support BI managers addressing their challenges in BI initiatives and they also provide directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Defining when a knowledge management (KM) project or initiative is successful is difficult. Jennex, Smolnik, and Croasdel [14] [15]l proposed that KM success is measured in four dimensions: impact on business processes, impact on knowledge management strategy, leadership/management support, and knowledge content. This study proposes a set of measures that operationalizes these four dimensions and then survey respondents to see if these measures were observed in a specific knowledge management project or initiative. The results of the survey is that the more successful a knowledge management project/initiative is perceived to be the more of the tested measures will be observed and more likely the organization is to see success in all four dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Information systems development projects often involve continued commitment even in the face of negative feedback - a phenomena many describe as "escalation." Existing perspectives that explain escalation decisions implicitly make an assumption of a universal "disembedded" rationality, and characterize such commitment as a sort of paradox. In this paper, we develop an alternative, institutional perspective that embraces a conception of rationality that is embedded within social contexts. Through this lens we analyze and recast three published case studies on escalation decisions and find that contextual factors such as legitimacy and momentum reinforce IT project persistence, in effect institutionalizing projects over time. Further, we find evidence of three distinct rationalities -- efficiency, technical, and innovative -- that each gain and lose salience for commitment decisions over time. We argue that commitment, when viewed through this institutional perspective, is not the paradoxical exception associated with failed IT projects, but rather, the norm once an IT project is institutionalized. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The effectiveness of electronic knowledge repositories relies on employees' willingness to contribute their knowledge and rewards have often been used to promote knowledge contribution. To better understand the effectiveness of rewards, this study examines the relative effect of extrinsic and intrinsic rewards. Further, noting that extrinsic rewards have been observed to have inconsistent effects, this study investigates whether the effect of extrinsic rewards is contingent upon job design. Results of a survey of 163 employees show that extrinsic rewards have a weaker effect than intrinsic rewards but its effect can be enhanced by increasing job autonomy, skill variety, and task identity. This study contributes to research by identifying the circumstances in which extrinsic rewards have stronger effect and offers practical suggestions for providing rewards and designing jobs to promote knowledge contribution by employees in organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Shared services have been heralded as a means of enhancing services and improving the efficiency of their delivery. As such they have been embraced by the private, and increasingly, the public sectors. Yet implementation has proved to be difficult and the number of success stories has been limited. Which factors are critical to success in the development of shared services arrangements is not yet well understood. The current paper examines existing research in the area of critical success factors (CSFs) and suggests that there are actually three distinct types of CSF: outcome, implementation process and operating environment characteristic. Two case studies of public sector shared services in Australia and the Netherlands are examined through a lens that both incorporates all three types of CSF and distinguishes between them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Insider Threat Security Reference Architecture, ITSRA, provides an enterprise wide solution to insider threat. The architecture consists of four security layers -- Business, Information, Data, and Application. Organizations should deploy and enforce controls at each layer in order to address insider attacks. Each layer does not function in isolation or independently of other layers. Rather, the correlation of indicators and application of controls across all four layers forms the crux of this approach. Based on empirical data consisting of over 600 cases of insider crimes, insider attacks proved successful in inflicting damage when an organization failed to implement adequate controls in any of three security principles -- authorized access, acceptable use, and continuous monitoring. The ITSRA draws from existing best practices and standards as well as from analysis of these cases to provide actionable guidance for organizations to improve their posture against the insider threat. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents the result of a network analysis on cumulative studies addressing issues of data integration, information sharing, knowledge network, and technical interoperability, which we consider as key themes of cross-boundary information integration and sharing for e-government. The network analysis explores the academic community of e-government research pertinent to those four topics. We profiled conference papers and journal articles included in the e-government research database that the Digital Government Society of North America released in March, 2011. This study found the lack of connections among scholars in the research community in terms of publication outlets and research themes. The paper also discusses potential reasons of the disconnected pattern in collaborative research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Responding to the issues of complexity, relevance, cost and risk of Electronic Governance (EGOV), we witness a specialization of the roles responsible for EGOV development and operation, professionalizationof the personnel playing such roles, and utilization of the EGOV services and information to fulfill citizen needs. In order to build competencies required by such(managerial, professional, technician and user) roles, education becomes a key success factor, and a growing variety of EGOV learning opportunities emerges. However, lacking conceptual underpinnings for EGO education, the discovery, analysis and integration of such opportunities is difficult. To address this need, the paper develops a theoretical construct for EGO education, applies six measures to this construct: who-- learners, why -- roles, what -- competencies, how --programs, where -- schools, and when -- prerequisites, and validates it through a landscaping exercise focusing on EGOV university programs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The deployment of social media inside and across enterprises, i.e. 'enterprise 2.0', has garnered significant attention, not least due to considerable levels of market push and hype from technology vendors, benchmarking institutions and consultancy firms. However, for some organizations, encouraging open and uninhibited knowledge exchanges may actually clash with past habits of relying on designed and structured strategies to manage communication. This paper has two objectives: first, to propose a set of management challenges inherent to the deployment of enterprise 2.0, and second, to incorporate these challenges into a collaborative management workshop process and group decision support system (GDSS) that encourages organizations' leadership teams to consider those challenges mindfully and collaboratively - before jumping on the enterprise 2.0 'bandwagon'. The paper follows Hevner's cycles of design science. For the system's design, we draw on theories of episodic change of general systems theorist, Luhmann and work by Churchman on inquiry systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The goal of Risk Management activities is to define prevention and control mechanisms to address the risks attached to specify activities and valuable assets. Many Risk Management efforts operate in silos with narrowly focused, functionally driven, and disjointed activities. That fact leads to a fragmented view of risks, where each activity uses its own language, customs and metrics. The lack of interconnection and holistic view of risks limits an organization-wide perception of risks, where interdependent risks are not anticipated, controlled or managed. In order to address the Risk Management interoperability and standardization issues, this paper proposes an alignment between Risk Management, Governance and Enterprise Architecture activities, providing a systematic support to map and trace identified risks to enterprise artifacts modeled within the Enterprise Architecture, supporting the overall strategy of any organization. We discuss the main relationships between Risk Management and Enterprise Architecture and propose an architecture to integrate risks concerns into the overall organization environment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Security-related policies can help organizations safeguard against breaches and other threats and plan for how to respond to events. However, adoption of security, privacy and acceptable use policies, audit processes and disaster recovery, and business continuance planning may lag behind an organization's efforts to leverage the benefits of web-based technologies. This paper presents findings from a study of security-related policy assimilation. Assimilation is designed to measure the level of adoption. We examine the antecedents of assimilation--e.g., an organization's web strategy, business activities conducted on the web, and the existence of security related knowledge as predictors of assimilation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines a system driven government process and articulates how this system can be transformed into a consumer driven process through the use of Health Information Technology (Health IT). In order to achieve this, expert interviews were conducted with stakeholders familiar with the process, followed by a convening meeting to review status and directions. The findings identified a range of Health IT uses that would facilitate enhanced consumer access and active benefit and health management. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Developing countries have lagged behind developed countries in the adoption of B2B e-Commerce (EC). There have been limited in-depth studies to explore the adoption experience of developing countries. This study compares the experience of the grocery industry in adopting B2B e-Commerce (EC) in Indonesia and Bahrain as examples of developing countries. It shows that the differences in the social, economic, political and technological conditions of developing countries do not necessarily create barriers to the adoption. Each industry in a specific country may have a unique position that requires a thorough assessment of the relevance of B2B EC and the appropriate strategies for adoption. This study offers contribution to both theory and practice through detailed investigation of the adoption experience of the grocery industry in both countries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study employs a multiple respondent research technique to assess the efficacy of a framework intended to improve the quality of health care provided to patients. We use survey data from 78 matched respondents to answer the question to what extent does IT capability intentions affect a hospital's ability to detect and reduce clinical errors. We investigate empirically the impact of IT capability intentions and IT infrastructure integration on elements of IT-enabled quality of care. Our findings position IT capability intentions as an antecedent to IT infrastructure integration and suggest IT infrastructure integration is the key component in overcoming a highly fragmented delivery system. The degree of IT infrastructure integration has significant effects on quality of care, in terms of both patient-centric responsiveness and error detection and reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Information systems (IS) offer healthcare practitioners a variety of benefits. As such, the acceptance of such technologies by healthcare professionals is an important topic of interest to both practitioners and researchers. IS acceptance has been widely researched in the extant literature, however, studies focusing on perspectives of healthcare professionals are sparsely represented. To add the growing work in this area, we used the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) with a minor modification to examine the factors influencing IS acceptance among five healthcare professionals in Canada. A research model was developed and tested with data collected in a survey. Analyses of 227 healthcare professionals' data confirmed that their intentions to use IS and usage behaviors were significantly influenced by effort expectancy, social influence, compatibility, and organizational facilitating conditions. Performance expectancy did not yield meaningful interpretations. The study's implications for practice and research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In order to deal with continuous drastic increases in healthcare spending and major demographic changes, governments in industrialised countries are initiating major reforms aimed at improving the efficiency and the quality of care services provided to their citizens. These reforms along with increasing requirements for accountability tend to "corporatize" these institutions by exposing them to market-like pressures. To face their changing environment, healthcare institutions have invested in ERP systems as their basic technological infrastructure, highlighting a phenomenon that recalls the earlier popularity of the ERP movement with private companies. Based on the analysis of 180 public "success stories, " the main objective of this study is to identify and characterize the sets of motivations that lead to the adoption of ERP systems in healthcare organizations. Our findings indicate that these motivations can be classified into six categories, namely technological, managerial operational, managerial strategic, clinical operational, clinical strategic, and financial. Three clusters of healthcare organizations were identified with regard to these motivations, and labelled as a Business View, a Clinical View, and an Institutional View of ERP systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Knowledge creation has emerged as a critical area in information systems research in the past decade [1]. One of the mechanisms through which knowledge creation enhances firm performance has been theorized as organizational agility. This paper empirically examines the role of organization agility as a mediator between knowledge creation processes and financial firm performance. Our survey study of 134 firms combined with objective measures of firm performance indicates that two forms of organizational agility -- customer agility and operational agility, significantly mediate the effect of knowledge creation processes on firm performance. Our findings confirm prior research results that were based exclusively on survey data, and provide additional discussions on the role of organizational agility in facilitating the effect of knowledge creation processes on firm performance. Implications for researchers and managers are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

IS researchers have so far developed conceptual propositions rather than empirical insights into what it takes to green an industry in practice. This paper analyzes an ongoing ten-year action design research effort, which seeks to leverage transport coopetition for environmental sustainability by guiding vertical standard design. Drawing on extensive field data, the paper theorizes about design challenges that surround attempts to tie together people, technologies, and processes into integrated IT solutions. In doing so, it illustrates the usefulness of a coopetitive lens for understanding these challenges and their effects on the evolution of such solutions. The paper also suggests that the action design research approach helps IS researchers to guide technology development in real-world situations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sustainability reports bear the potential to improve a company's image and to create competitive advantages, for they influence consumers' buying decisions and the investment decisions of potential shareholders. There are multiple standards and guidelines on sustainability reporting, which, however, mainly relate to the contents of the reports. We argue that due to the stakeholder-focused nature of sustainability reports, additional quality criteria exceeding the mere content need to be considered to improve the stakeholders' acceptance. Since these criteria are stakeholder-specific, they need to be defined and evaluated with direct involvement of the stakeholders. Thus, we propose a multi-method framework for the quality evaluation of web based sustainability reports. In order to evaluate our framework and to gain first insights into stakeholder-focused quality and acceptance criteria, we applied our framework within a preliminary study. First experiences and results are presented and implications for theory and practice are derived. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper seeks to conceptualize the evolution of ad-hoc and improvised self-coordination to institutionalized self-governance of non-binding virtual groups. It uses data collected from Face book group postings in the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake to discuss how netizens engage in loosely coordinated actions to contain hatred messages, and eventually evolve into a process of institutionalization of online communities to better coordinate their anti-cyber hate effort. The literature on coordination and governance has focused on virtual teams, and members of these teams typically belong to an organization, or are bound by a well defined contractual arrangement. In our study, netizens are random subscribers of social networking groups who join forces to promulgate or fight against cyber hate. As adversarial external forces intensify, self-coordination needs to become more effective and the necessity of self-governance gradually leads to institutionalization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Lean principles have attracted the attention of software development companies due to their potential to improve competitiveness. However, the application of such principles in the software domain is still in its infancy. This paper presents a proposal for adapting the Lean Enterprise Self-Assessment Tool (LESAT) to guide the transformation of software development companies toward Lean. LESAT, developed by the Lean Advancement Initiative (LAI) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has been widely used in other domains. In this study, concepts and expressions of LESAT were analyzed and mapped to software development following the ISO/IEC 12207 standard. Seven assessment items concerning life-cycle processes were modified from the original LESAT. The modified LESAT for software was compared with a lean assessment approach called "Lean amplifier, " which has been developed and successfully used in practice by Ericsson R&D in Finland. The results indicated that LESAT may complement lean assessment in the software domain at enterprise level, involving the entire value stream. Moreover, they clearly emphasized the role of leadership in the transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper discusses the data description and organization of HGML, the data exchange standards of G/S model. Proposed the description of spatial data to show and the description of spatial data organization to solve scheduling, exchange and display problems in G/S model G-side and organization, storage and management problems in G/S model S-side. Also, described the geometric model and feature model of spatial data in detail. Finally, the organization of HGML is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Due to the rapid emergence of Information Technology, cloud computing provides assorted advantages to service providers, developers, organizations, and customers with respect to scalability, flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and availability. However, it also introduces new challenges and concerns, especially in terms of security and privacy. One of the major security obstacles to widespread adoption of cloud computing is the lack of near-real-time audit ability. In particular, near-real-time cloud auditing, which provides timely evaluation results and rapid response, is the key to assuring the cloud. In this paper, we discuss security and privacy concerns in cloud computing and the current status of cloud auditing efforts. Next, we address the strategies for reliable cloud auditing and analyze the deficiencies of current approaches. We then discuss the summary of our case study with Amazon Cloud Watch, which is one of the most developed cloud-monitoring APIs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Virtual Organizations (VO)—a network of independent organizations collaborating to address specific business opportunities—have become popular in today's technology driven business environment business climate. Although many solutions have been proposed over past two decades to support inter-organizational interactions, VOs still face several challenges due to their dynamic and temporal nature that cannot be addressed by the traditional solutions such as ebXML and EDI. In this paper, we propose a distributed architecture for a flexible infrastructure that supports collaborative business process execution, monitoring and management. The infrastructure supports the common topologies of inter-organizational collaboration (e.g. peer-to-peer, star, linear), and responds well to changes due to its loosely coupled components. The proposed infrastructure is based on federating multiple SOA infrastructures with the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) as its core. It is implemented using IBM WebSphere products. We demonstrate that the proposed SOA-based virtual organization facilitates flexibility, rapid process integration and dynamic evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Continual service improvement within IT service management is an important research topic. Nowadays, IT services should be actively developed and improved in order to increase quality and cost effectiveness. Continual Service Improvement enables identification of bottlenecks and weak areas in the services. The research problem of this study is: what types of challenges exist in the IT service management from IT service provider's perspective? The main contribution of this study is to present ITSM challenges in two IT service provider companies in Finland. In order to categorize results, we used the three core perspectives of ITSM people, process, and technology. These three areas provide inputs to the continual service improvement lifecycle phase which controls and manages the identified improvements. Data for this study were mainly collected through interviews with 21 IT service management specialists. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]