Outsourcing strategy in two-stage call centers

This paper considers ‘two-stage’ call centers where some incoming calls are completed by first service while others require an additional second service. Although this type of call center is not uncommon, it has not been dealt with, if any, in the call center literature. In this paper, we introduce the concept of the ‘two-stage’ call center and discuss its features. Furthermore, we develop an effective outsourcing strategy in ‘two-stage’ call centers. To this end, we model ‘two-stage’ service system and propose several call routing structures. The structures are compared through numerical test and conventional queueing theories form the theoretical basis of our study.     

‘Best’ for whom?: the tension between ‘best practice’ ERP packages and diverse epistemic cultures in a university context

The idea that so-called ‘best’ business practices can be transferred to organizations when they purchase enterprise resource planning (ERP) software packages is a major selling point of these packages. Yet recent research has illustrated a gap between the espoused theory of a best practice solution and the theory-in-use experienced by those who install software with such a design. As researchers begin to examine the difficult process by which organizations recast the best practices model handed down to them by consultancies and software vendors in an effort to make the software ‘work for them’ in practice, it is equally important that we begin to understand the reasons that such a gap exists. To this end, we analyze the strategic partnership between a multinational software vendor and a university who together designed a ‘best practice’ ERP package for the higher education industry. Through the theoretical lens of ‘epistemic cultures’ we argue that in organizational contexts made up of more than one epistemic culture, the use of a best practice model will be problematic because, by definition, the model mandates one epistemological position through the software design. This is counter to a university's loosely coupled organizational form.     

Information technology (IT) in Saudi Arabia: Culture and the acceptance and use of IT

The unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT), a model of the user acceptance of IT, synthesizes elements from several prevailing user acceptance models. It has been credited with explaining a larger proportion of the variance of ‘intention to use’ and ‘usage behavior’ than do preceding models. However, it has not been validated in non-Western cultures. Using a survey sample collected from 722 knowledge workers using desktop computer applications on a voluntary basis in Saudi Arabia, we examined the relative power of a modified version of UTAUT in determining ‘intention to use’ and ‘usage behavior’. We found that the model explained 39.1% of intention to use variance, and 42.1% of usage variance. In addition, drawing on the theory of cultural dimensions, we hypothesized and tested the similarities and differences between the North American and Saudi validations of UTAUT in terms of cultural differences that affected the organizational acceptance of IT in the two societies.     

The role of IS capabilities in delivering sustainable improvements to competitive positioning

It has long been argued that organizations have struggled to achieve business benefits, and in particular sustainable competitive advantage, from their IT investments. In this paper we draw upon resource-based theory to explore how the effective deployment of IS capabilities might deliver sustainable improvements to an organization’s competitive positioning. In so doing, this research makes a significant departure from the enterprise-level orientation of prior studies, by focusing upon the role of IS capabilities in leveraging sustainable improvements to competitive positioning from individual IS initiatives. Based upon the responses to a quantitative and qualitative survey of practicing managers, it has been shown that an organization’s ability to leverage and sustain improvements in its competitive positioning, from IS initiatives, are directly dependent upon its ability to effectively apply an appropriate portfolio of IS capabilities. Moreover, it has been shown that sustainable improvements in competitive positioning are most likely in circumstances in which the successful outcome of an IS initiative is dependent upon ‘outside-in’ and ‘spanning’ capabilities, which are both lacking in transparency and difficult to replicate.     

Automated High Throughput Screening of Fluorescent Imaging Plate Reader (FLIPR) Assays Using Assay Platform™ Integrated with Activity Base for ‘on the fly’ Compound Reconfirmation

Advances in the field of automation have meant hitherto complex manual cell-based assays can now be automated. These improvements have brought significant enhancements in throughput, data fidelity and consistency, and allowed a reallocation of constrained resources.Building upon these improvements, we have linked our automated cell-based screening system, Assay Platform™, to Activity Base (IDBS), a software package designed to automate the analysis of HTS data. Customisation of this package has resulted in software that can identify ‘active’ compounds and re-pick them ‘on the fly’ from the original compound plates for triplicate re-testing without operator intervention.Based on an operator initially defining ‘normal’ parameters for assay activity in Activity Base, combined with an automated quality control software module that checks data fidelity, wells containing ‘active’ compounds can be re-picked and re-tested at the end of an automated screening run. Automating cell-based assays has significantly improved productivity, and, with the synergism of Activity Base, has given us greater power to complete each screening run and report ‘active’ compounds to Chemistry more rapidly. This article presents our approach to the automation of cell-based Fluorescent Imaging Plate Reader (FLIPR) screening together with automated active re-test confirmation using Activity Base.     

Consumer decision support systems: Internet versus in-store application

This paper reports a study of consumer decision support in the context of Internet and in-store applications. A sample (n = 30) of experienced runners made running shoe selections in either ‘product only’, ‘decision support system only’, or ‘decision support system and product’ conditions. Participants’ decisions tended to be more uniform and of better quality when the DSS was available. Decision making was clearly influenced by DSS recommendations, but these were not always accepted. In this latter circumstance participants reported themselves to be relatively less happy with and less confident in their decision. Consistent with previous literature, abstract attributes were considered more frequently and given higher weightings when using the decision support system. However, predicted differences between conditions with respect to the types of attributes considered and the importance ascribed to different types of attributes were not found.     

The role of student learning styles, gender, attitudes and perceptions on information and communication technology assisted learning

The present study adopts an illuminative approach to evaluate students’ initial attitudes towards the use of information and communication technology (ICT). Ninety-nine undergraduate science students participated in this study and their learning styles were classified according to Honey and Mumford (1986) (Honey, P., Mumford, A., 1986. The Manual of Learning styles. Peter Honey, 10 Linden Avenue, Maidenhead) learning style questionnaire. Student learning styles were classified as activist, reflector, theorist, or pragmatist. No significant difference in learning styles was observed between genders and between student cohorts. Six dimensions to student attitudes toward ICT were identified as follows; ‘comfort’, ‘interactivity’, ‘self-satisfaction’, ‘value new technology’, ‘experience’ and ‘context’. Students exhibited low scores in the attitude dimensions of ‘value new technology’, ‘interactivity’ and ‘context’ indicating that they were uncomfortable with computers, were unhappy about the lack of personal contact and would prefer to learn in a more traditional mode. A significant, though weak, negative correlation between the ‘theorist’ and the ‘interactivity’ and ‘context’ attitude dimensions was also observed. In addition, based on the results of this study it appears that first year students exhibit a more positive perception of ICT supported learning than second and third year students. Though the use of ICT in higher education is becoming more widespread based on the results of this study student use of the technology may be limited by a negative attitude toward a style of teaching which is not consistent with their past learning experiences.     

White noise theory of robust nonlinear filtering with correlated state and observation noises

In the existing ‘direct’ white noise theory of nonlinear filtering, the state process is still modelled as a Markov process satisfying an Itô stochastic differential equation, while a ‘finitely additive’ white noise is used to model the observation noise. We remove this asymmetry by modelling the state process as the solution of a (stochastic) differential equation with a ‘finitely additive’ white noise as the input. This enables us to introduce correlation between the state and observation noises, and to obtain robust nonlinear filtering equations in the correlated noise case.     

A new class of intelligent knowledge-based systems with an optimisation-based inference engine

In this paper we describe a new class of intelligent knowledge-based system (IKBS) which can be used principally for managerial decision making applications. This class of applications often requires a framework for knowledge acquisition which allows the system to use the knowledge of several experts. In addition, since in most business decision making the objective is maximise profits, there is a need for an inference engine which allows optimisation to be carried out. The new class of IKBS which is described in this paper has both these properties, i.e., the ability to use the knowledge of multiple experts in a convenient way and an inference engine which by performing optimisations is able to pick out the profit maximising decisions. As an illustration of these concepts, a system for allocation decision making is described. The system ‘Retail-opt’ allows the user to solve problems like allocation of space in retail outlets, allocation of space in mail order catalogues, pricing policy decisions for discounted airline tickets, etc. In the paper, the basic concepts behind ‘Retail-opt’ are described and an application of ‘Retail-opt’ to the problem of retail space allocation in a Scandinavian Department Store is given. A number of other systems which use these concepts for more complicated competitive decision making situations are also described.     

An ethnographic, action-based approach to human experience in virtual environments

This paper addresses a sensitive issue, of presence experienced by people interacting with a virtual environment (VE). Understanding ‘presence’, both theoretically and empirically, is important for designers interested in building effective computer-mediated environments for learning and work activities. The concept of presence has been treated mostly as a state of mind, to be investigated through ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ measurement devices. The authors propose to add a different approach, which can address presence as an action-based process. This approach considers presence as the ongoing result of the actions performed in an environment and the local and cultural resources deployed by actors. In this sense, ‘presence’ can be captured by monitoring the sequence of participants’ actions and the aspects of the environment that are involved in this process; discourse/interaction analysis represents a fitting method for this goal. Sequences of interaction with a virtual library are used to illustrate some core aspects of an ethnographic, action-based approach to presence, such as the action possibilities envisaged by participants, the configuration of the virtual objects, the norms that regulate the interaction, the resources that are imported in the VE. These aspects are a necessary step to understand users’ presence in the VE and to plan consequent interventions to ameliorate the design of the interface.     

Control and design problems in material processing—how can process systems engineers contribute to material processing?

‘Process control and systems engineering’ is not just a subject of study for controlling and designing ‘a plant’ and/or ‘a unit operation’. It also deals with any control and design problems related to physical and chemical phenomena occurring in short time-scale and at nano, meso as well as micro-scale levels. In materials processing, controlling the material structure is of primary importance for realizing high material performance and functions. The phenomena determining the material structure often involve phase separation and/or occur on the surface of the materials, at small level and in short time-scale. To control these phenomena, the current feedback design schemes, where controlled variables are measured by ‘externally equipped sensors’ and fed back to a ‘externally designed controller’, are no longer effective due to the shortness of time and smallness of spatial scales of the objects. Making reference to two novel polymer-processing processes, a micro-cellular polymeric foaming process and surface coating injection-molding process, we discuss how process control and process systems engineers can contribute to controlling the structure of materials.     

Interpreting SWRL Rules in RDF Graphs

An unresolved issue in SWRL (the Semantic Web Rule Language) is whether the intended semantics of its RDF representation can be described as an extension of the W3C RDF semantics. In this paper we propose to make the model-theoretic semantics of SWRL compatible with RDF by interpreting SWRL rules in RDF graphs. For dealing with SWRL/RDF rules, we regard ‘Implies’ as an OWL class, and extract all ‘Implies’ rules from an RDF database that represents a SWRL knowledge base. Each ‘Implies’ rule is grounded through mappings built into the semantic conditions of the model theory. Based on the fixpoint semantics, a bottom-up strategy is employed to compute the least Herbrand models.     

Online safety calculations for glide-slope recapture

As unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) increase in popularity and usage, an appropriate increase in confidence in their behavior is expected. This research addresses a particular portion of the flight of an aircraft (whether autonomous, unmanned, or manned): specifically, the recapture of the glide slope after a wave-off maneuver during landing. While this situation is rare in commercial aircraft, its applicability toward unmanned aircraft has been limited due to the complexity of the calculations of safety of the maneuvers. In this paper, we present several control laws for this glide-slope recapture, and inferences into their convergence to the glide slope, as well as reachability calculations which show their guaranteed safety. We also present a methodology which theoretically allows us to apply these offline-computed safety data to all kinds of unmanned fixed-wing aerial vehicles while online, permitting the use of the controllers to reduce wait times during landing. Finally, we detail the live aircraft application demonstration which was done to show feasibility of the controller, and give the results of offline simulations which show the correctness of online decisions at that demonstration.This work was sponsored by the Large National Science Foundation Grant for Information Technology Research (NSF ITR) ‘‘Foundations of Hybrid and Embedded Software Systems’’, Award #0225610, and by Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration (DARPA) ‘‘Software Enabled Control’’ (SEC) Program, under contract #F33615-98-C-3614.     

Towards critical region reliability support for Grid workflows

Many Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-based workflow applications often have timing constraints such that each processing of a workflow needs to be finished within its deadline. There have been some studies to improve the performance of time-constrained workflow processing. Few of them, however, have taken into account the fact that successful execution of a workflow within its deadline is also affected by the ‘normal state’ and ‘abnormal state’ of Grid resources occurring in successive turns and by the relative difference in execution time between tasks on the critical path and tasks on the non-critical path. To solve the problem, we first put forward new some conceptions, such as the critical region and the reliability of the critical region, and then present a scheduling algorithm. In terms of the finite-state continuous-time Markov process, the algorithm selects a resource combination scheme which has the lowest expenditure under a certain credit level of the resource reliability on the critical path in the DAG-based workflow. The simulation shows the validity of theory analysis.     

An assessment of the use of Transaction Cost Theory in information technology outsourcing

Transaction Cost Theory (TCT) has been widely used in information technology outsourcing (ITO) research to explain and predict outsourcing decisions and outsourcing-related outcomes. This research, however, has led to mixed and unexpected results in terms of the effects of transaction attributes on outsourcing decisions and outcomes. This study assesses the empirical literature employing TCT-based ITO models in terms of its faithfulness to the precepts of TCT, and argues that one possible explanation for the mixed results is that the extant models do not capture all the essential elements of TCT. First, there are core TCT constructs that the extant models do not take into account; second, the linkages among constructs that the IT outsourcing models have hypothesized are not always in line with TCT precepts; and third, the normative nature of the theory is not always captured by the extant models. This paper, therefore, aims to provide one possible answer to the question: “Why have the appropriations made of TCT to study IT outsourcing produced mixed results?”     

A spreadsheet program to optimize kinetic parameters of organic matter from laboratory pyrolysis data

Transformation of sedimentary organic matter (OM) to hydrocarbons is best modeled by assuming the total reaction suite consists of parallel degradations of ‘i’ hypothetical components following the Arrhenius equation and first order kinetics. A kerogen can be defined by characterizing each constituent component by its activation energy (Ei) their initial potentials (Xios) and a single frequency factor (A). We present a user friendly Lotus 1-2-3 program to determine A, Ei and Xio distribution of OMs using a multiple linear regression utility and programmed macros. Rock Eval (RE) S₂ curves of three heating rates are required. Equally spaced time/temperature and peak height data for S₂ curves of ‘n’ temperature steps in increasing order of heating rates are the inputs for the program. The fraction of hydrocarbon generated (f) from 19 hypothetical components of Ei 30, 32,34…78 Kcal/mole for ‘n’ temperature/time steps, by using frequency factor (A) value and assuming Xios=1, are calculated and set up in a ‘n×19’ matrix (matrix M). The fraction of total hydrocarbon generated (f) at ‘n’ temperature steps, obtained from the observed peak heights, are set up in a ‘n×1’ matrix (matrix L). Matrix M is suitably reduced by the program to ‘n×k’ matrix (matrix N) where ‘k’ is a variable, facilitating matrix inversion. Regressing matrix N against matrix L by the program, gives the Xios for ‘k’ Ei components along with a standard error (ERR) of Y estimates and R². Xios and A are then optimized iteratively by varying A values and selecting the solution associated with the lowest ERR value. Results of applying the program on data sets of two widely different types of samples from Indian basins are shown. They match the results obtained from the more sophisticated proprietary software.     

Estimation of model quality

This paper provides an introduction to recent work on the problem of quantifying errors in the estimation of models for dynamic systems. This is a very large field. We therefore concentrate on approaches that have been motivated by the need for reliable models for control system design. This will involve a discussion of efforts that go under the titles of ‘estimation in ’, ‘worst-case estimation’, ‘estimation in ℓ₁’ and ‘stochastic embedding of undermodelling’. A central theme of this survey is to examine these new methods with reference to the classic bias/variance tradeoff in model structure selection.     

How Corporations E-Source: From Business Technology Projects to Value Networks

A 78 organization study in USA, Europe and Australasia throughout 1999–2001 finds a variety of practices in sourcing the development and running of technology and e-businesses in value networks. The paper points to trade-offs in e-sourcing decisions, not least between speed to the net, cost, and organizational learning. Leading and lagging practices are identified and the evolutionary paths organizations take are described and assessed. Outsourcing emerges as highly useful for specific purposes, but other ways of using the external market for e-business development can be more suitable for certain identifable activities. The paper further discusses how external sourcing and partnering practices are increasingly being extended into the customer resource life-cycle, into supply chains and throughout value networks. Case examples are discussed and the strengths and weaknesses of their practices identified. The need to clarify core capabilities is demonstrated, and two matrices that facilitate effective e-sourcing decisions are developed to summarize the findings from the research.     

‘Light’ and ‘heavy’ work in the housekeeping service of a hospital

Work is organized based in part on the perceptions, by managers and workers, of workers, their abilities and the characteristics of the work to be done. Physical tasks in factories and services have often been divided into ‘light’ and ‘heavy’, a division that often corresponds formally or informally to gender. We have observed the work of cleaners on wards and in offices in an acute-care hospital, using several indicators of workload to identify and characterize typical work situations. ‘Heavy’ work was characterized by neutral postures, walking, repetitive movements involving the articulations of the upper limb pushing a 1-6 kg (wet or dry) mop, with occasional more intense effort. ‘Light’ work was characterized by flexed postures, walking, rapid repetitive movements involving the articulations of the upper limb and light weights (dusting) or 1-3 kg weights (emptying wastebaskets), with more occasional intense effort. We did not discover any compelling reason to divide cleaning into ‘light’ and ‘heavy’ work. Task assignment by sex may appear to be a solution to excessive job demands which would be better addressed by job re-design.     

Intelligent handling of data by integration of commonsense reasoning

Any intelligent problem solving system should be able, given the known data on a case, to decide whether some item of information is true, false or unknown. In this paper the way in which various forms of commonsense reasoning can be integrated to provide such decisions is described. To this end three structural types of knowledge defined over data, and four strategies for exploiting these structures, are identified. ‘Decide-Status’ integrates the reasoning strategies into a task frame. This frame structure not only integrates the reasoning but also affords the appropriate facilities for providing strategic justifications for its conclusions, if required.