‘Mind the Gap’: diagnosing the relationship between the IT organisation and the rest of the business

The senior management of many organisations are continually disappointed with the benefits and value which they perceive they are getting from their investments in IT. This frustration with IT, and in particular with the IT function, has seen many organisations choose to rid themselves of the ‘problem’ altogether by outsourcing IT activities to a third party. The fact that there is a separate organisational unit responsible for IT activities has led to the emergence of gap between this so called IT organisation and the rest of the business. Culture is often used to explain the gap as if this somehow justifies an organisations inability to effectively leverage IT. However, the premise underlying this article is that culture is an excuse for rather than a cause of ineffective application of IT for business benefits and value. The clear message from this article is that achieving high performance from IT is not just about the IT function's ability to build, maintain and deliver systems, but is an organisational wide activity requiring a strong business/IT partnership. A framework grounded in the research literature, which identifies the elements to manage in creating high performance from IT, is developed and operationalised. The findings of an exploratory survey are presented and research and practitioner implications developed.     

Do activity lifecycles affect the validity of a business rule in a business process?

Traditional process mining techniques offer limited possibilities to analyze business processes working in low-predictable and dynamic environments. Recently, to close this gap, declarative process models have been introduced to represent process mining results since they allow for describing complex behaviors as a compact set of business rules. However, in this context, activities of a business process are still considered as atomic/instantaneous events. This is a strong limitation for these approaches because often, in realistic environments, process activities are not instantaneous but executed across a time interval and pass through a sequence of states of a lifecycle. This paper investigates how the existing techniques for the discovery of declarative process models can be adapted when the business process under analysis contains non-atomic activities. In particular, we base our proposed approach on the use of discriminative rule mining to determine how the characteristics of the activity lifecycles in a business process influence the validity of a business rule in that process. The approach has been implemented as a plug-in of the process mining tool ProM and validated on synthetic logs and on a real-life log recorded by an incident and problem management system called VINST in use at Volvo IT Belgium.     

EFTPoS– the engine of the card business

The slow but increasing spread of chip-based payment cards, the introduction of the euro and the recent flurry of panic over the security of the smart card payment system in France offers new opportunities to point-of-sale terminal manufacturers.     

How consistent is the satellite derived SST–LHF relationship in comparison with observed values?

Time series data for sea surface temperature (moored buoy), wind speed, air temperature, sea level pressure, relative humidity, short wave radiation and rainfall were collected close to the Lakshadweep islands for five months from July 2000 to cover two seasons, namely summer monsoon and autumn. Day and night passes of TMI data for the same period were analysed to compare with the observed values. Daily mean values were then generated from both satellite‐derived as well as observed parameters and daily latent heat flux (LHF) values computed using the advanced COARE‐3.0 version of the model. In concurrence with earlier studies, the observed LHF–SST relationship was inverse as the SST during this season seldom fell below 27°C. On the contrary, the satellite derived LHF–SST relationship exhibited a direct correlation. It is also observed that the satellite underestimation of SST increases linearly on either side of a threshold value of 28.5°C. Although the SST over the eastern Arabian Sea was generally above 27°C, the satellite underestimation often produced SSTs less than 27°C, thereby supporting a linear relationship with LHF, as suggested by Zhang and McPhaden. Similarly for SSTs higher than 28°C, the satellite underestimation prevented a further decrease of LHF (to sustain the linear relationship) by virtue of the inverse relationship for SSTs higher than 28°C. The overestimation of SST and wind speed in the satellite scenario generates a virtual enhancement of LHF values without cooling the sea surface. The linear relationship between SST and LHF is thus nothing but a virtual display of the observed inverse SST–LHF relationship.     

SOA adoption in business networks: do service-oriented architectures really advance inter-organizational integration?

The emergence of the Internet as a global communication infrastructure has dramatically reduced interaction costs within and across organizations, with significant impact on inter-organizational relationships, vertical industry structures, and markets. More recently, service-oriented architectures (SOA) and Web services have introduced the next paradigm shift and foster the idea of dynamic business networks with quick connect and disconnect relationships. However, little research has systematically analyzed how companies leverage SOA to improve their inter-organizational relationships and reshape their business networks. In addition, the mature research stream on inter-organizational information systems (IOS) has not yet sufficiently considered SOA. In order to close this gap, our research seeks to improve the fundamental understanding of how SOA is applied in business networks and how it differs from prior forms of IOS. Using an exploratory research approach, we investigate 33 SOA cases to identify focus areas and patterns of SOA adoption in business networks. Our case analysis builds on a multi-dimensional classification scheme which we derived from prior literature. While our empirical findings do not confirm all promising propositions related to SOA, they underline the specific contribution of SOA compared to prior forms of IOS. We conclude by suggesting five clusters of SOA adoption in the inter-organizational domain, each of those introducing new aspects in the coordination of distributed business networks.     

Investigating the importance of Delaunay-based definition of atomic interactions in scoring of protein–protein docking results

The approaches taken to represent and describe structural features of the macromolecules are of major importance when developing computational methods for studying and predicting their structures and interactions. This study attempts to explore the significance of Delaunay tessellation for the definition of atomic interactions by evaluating its impact on the performance of scoring protein–protein docking prediction. Two sets of knowledge-based scoring potentials are extracted from a training dataset of native protein–protein complexes. The potential of the first set is derived using atomic interactions extracted from Delaunay tessellated structures. The potential of the second set is calculated conventionally, that is, using atom pairs whose interactions were determined by their separation distances. The scoring potentials were tested against two different docking decoy sets and their performances were compared. The results show that, if properly optimized, the Delaunay-based scoring potentials can achieve higher success rate than the usual scoring potentials. These results and the results of a previous study on the use of Delaunay-based potentials in protein fold recognition, all point to the fact that Delaunay tessellation of protein structure can provide a more realistic definition of atomic interaction, and therefore, if appropriately utilized, may be able to improve the accuracy of pair potentials.     

The Impact of Service Refusal to the Supply–Demand Equilibrium in the Taxicab Market

Service refusal is a significant problem in the taxicab market, especially in developing countries where policies and regulations have not been well developed against this unpleasant phenomenon. Understanding the disturbance of service refusal to the demand–supply equilibrium is essential for the governing authorities to develop effective pricing policies and regulations to tackle the issue. This paper proposes a sigmoid function that depicts the service refusal behavior due to the lower-than-expected profit. Integrated with this service refusal function, the interrelation between the fleet size, fare, and passenger demand is well evaluated at an aggregate level. The social optimum and maximum profit solutions are examined with consideration of the presence of service refusal. It is found that in a market with a non-negligible refusal problem, raising fares at a certain level would drive passenger demand as the benefit from relieved service refusal outweighs the negative impact of the markup itself. This is contrary to the common understanding that raising fares will always reduce the demand. The maximum profit and maximum social welfare achievable will drop if the service refusal becomes severer due to higher expected profits. However, at the social optimum the profit could be positive in the presence of service refusal. These properties of the model are demonstrated by a numerical study.     

Predicting the influence of users’ posted information for eWOM advertising in social networks

Many social network websites have been aggressively exploring innovative electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) advertising strategies using information shared by users, such as posts and product reviews. For example, Facebook offers a service allowing marketers to utilize users’ posts to automatically generate advertisements. The effectiveness of this practice depends on the ability to accurately predict a post’s influence on its readers. For an advertising strategy of this nature, the influence of a post is determined jointly by the features of the post, such as contents and time of creation, and the features of the author of the post. We propose two models for predicting the influence of a post using both sources of influence, post- and author-related features, as predictors. An empirical evaluation shows that the proposed predictive features improve prediction accuracy, and the models are effective in predicting the influence score.     

Design science research contribution to business intelligence in the cloud — A systematic literature review

Business intelligence (BI) helps managers make informed decisions. In the age of big data, BI technology provides essential support for decision making. Cloud computing also attracts many organizations because of its potential: ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g. networks, servers, storage, applications, and services). This paper focuses on the deployment of BI in the cloud, from the vantage point of design science research (DSR). We produce a state of the art of research pertaining to BI in the cloud, following the methodology of systematic literature review. This literature review especially exhibits the different artifacts proposed by design science researchers regarding BI in the cloud. To structure the literature review, we propose a framework composed of two dimensions: artifact type and BI step. In particular, we propose a typology of artifact types, refining the coarse-grained typology commonly used in DSR. We use the two-dimensional framework both to map the current state of DSR regarding BI in the cloud, and to elicit future research avenues in terms of design science artifacts for BI in the cloud. The contribution is threefold: the literature review may help DSR researchers get an overview of this active research domain; the two-dimensional framework facilitates the understanding of different research streams; finally, the proposed future topics may guide researchers in identifying promising research avenues.     

Industrial Ethemet in the Production of Tomorrow——Requirements-Challenges-Hazards

1 Foreword Do we really need Ethernet in the production of tomorrow? I think, the answer is YES. The production technology of today has to meet the challenge to develop new strategies for a highly flexible, highly available and cost-effective automation technology. Through the gradual increase of Ethernet technology in the automation field industrial communication could be standardized considerably to deal with all the requirements of future automation and production strategies. Industria…     

Exploring the relationship between information satisfaction and flow in the context of consumers’ online search

The study investigate the subjective aspect of consumers’ online information satisfaction within the frame of flow experience in two processes: ongoing and goal-directed information search. A total of 391 samples for ongoing processes and 415 samples for goal-directed processes obtained in this study were analyzed with structural equation modelling. Flow is conceptualized in the study with Enjoyment, Time Distortion, Curiosity, Perceived Control and Concentration dimensions. The results indicate that flow experience has significant effects on consumers’ online information satisfaction in both processes. Enjoyment, Time distortion, Curiosity and Perceived Control dimensions affect online information satisfaction positively in the ongoing process, which is largely carried out with hedonic urges. In addition to Enjoyment, Perceived Control and Concentration dimensions have positive and Curiosity dimension has negative effects in goal-directed online information satisfaction, which is largely carried out with utilitarian urges. In addition, the results indicate that Enjoyment, Time distortion and Curiosity dimensions have significantly stronger positive effects on online information satisfaction in ongoing search processes compared with goal-directed processes, and Concentration dimension has significantly stronger positive effects on online information satisfaction in goal-directed search processes compared with ongoing processes.     

Simple procedures of choice in multicriteria problems without precise information about the alternatives’ values

The additive model of multiattribute value theory is widely used in multicriteria choice problems. But often it is not easy to obtain precise values for the scaling weights or the alternatives’ value in each function. Several decision rules which require weaker information, such as ordinal information, have been proposed to select an alternative under these circumstances. We propose new decision rules and test them using Monte-Carlo simulation, considering that there is ordinal information both on the scaling weights and on the alternatives’ values. Results show the new rules constitute a good approximation. We provide guidelines about how to use these rules in a context of selecting a subset of the most promising alternatives, considering the contradictory objectives of keeping a low number of alternatives yet not excluding the best one.