How to foster frontline employee knowledge sharing within service‐oriented enterprises: Empirical evidence from China

Based on the context of Chinese workplace, the present research aims to explore the combined effects of proactive personality, supervisor–subordinate guanxi (s–s guanxi), and leaders’ innovation expectations on the knowledge sharing of frontline employees (FLEs). Questionnaire data from a sample of 301 FLEs within service‐oriented enterprises in China were used in this study. The results show that proactive personality and leaders’ innovation expectations are both positively related to employees’ psychological empowerment and knowledge sharing, and s–s guanxi significantly impacts psychological empowerment, but has a nonsignificant effect on knowledge sharing. This study expands the understanding of FLEs’ knowledge sharing behavior and enriches our understanding of the guanxi construction process during the interaction between supervisors and subordinates.     

A taxonomy of political processes in systems development

Significant resources invested in information system development (ISD) are wasted due to political manoeuvres. Prior research on ISD politics has contributed mainly through theoretical development and case studies. This has enhanced understanding of relevant concepts, political tactics and conditions facilitating politics. However, there is limited understanding of the different processes through which politics unfold. This paper uses 89 ISD projects to develop a taxonomy of political processes in ISD. The taxonomy includes three distinct processes: Tug of War, wherein multiple parties strive to gain project control; Obstacle Race, which involves efforts to resist and pursue the project; and Empire Building, wherein the project is used as an instrument to enhance political or resource bases. The taxonomy is explained using the non‐proponents' view of the project and the balance of power between system's proponents and non‐proponents. We also discuss the emergent taxonomy's implications for how politics can be managed and studied.     

Working with Guanxi: An Assessment of the Implications of Globalisation on Business Networking in China

Cross cultural literature has suggested China has a business culture based on family networks or guanxi connections underpinned by strong Confucian ethics. We argue that Chinese business may have distinctly national cultural attributes (that international businesses ignore at their peril) but we reassess the continuing significance of these historical cultural concepts. We query whether a system of networks consolidated during fifty years of state‐owned enterprises can still have application on the considerably larger scale of multinational corporate business of today’s China. Interview data collected from Australian expatriates in China in 2001 is used to assess the relevance of guanxi for effective international operations in China from the perspective of Australian expatriate managers.     

Information system development activities and inquiring systems: an integrating framework

This article presents a framework that maps information system development (ISD) activities on systems for the creation of knowledge. This work addresses the relevant and persisting problem of improving the chances of ISD success. The article builds upon previous research on knowledge aspects of ISD, abandoning the idea of a monolithic approach to knowledge and presenting a pluralistic approach based on the idea that different inquiring systems can support micro-level ISD activities. The article is divided into two parts. The first part presents the theoretical development of the framework based on ISD literature and on Churchman's (1971) inquiring systems. The second part presents the use of the framework in an ISD project. The case is used to show the applicability of the framework and to highlight the advantages of this approach. The main theoretical implication is that the framework provides a new way to see the development of a system in terms of the knowledge created in the process. The main practical implication of the framework is that it improves the managers' ability to guide ISD activities as knowledge activities embedded in a knowledge process, a crucial element in development projects.     

Requirements engineering—exploring the influence of power and Thai values

This paper explores the impact of Thai social status and hierarchical decision-making processes during Requirements Engineering (RE) in business information systems development projects. The paper illustrates the interaction of RE processes and national culture and shows that culture can change the way processes are implemented, rather than process changing culture. Thai culture is naturally inherent in Thai daily life and Thais bring that into their work information practices. The concepts of power in Thai culture contributes toward hierarchical forms of communication and hierarchical relationships between systems analysts and decision-making process in Thai software houses, especially during RE, where information systems (IS) requirements need to be established for further development. The research shows that power significantly influences the decision making process and the construction of social status between clients and systems analysts in Thailand. The hierarchical structure of Thai organisations also contributes to a bureaucratic, elongated decision-making process during information systems development (ISD). Understanding the influence of power in Thai culture on RE will assist multinational IS consulting organisations to select, adapt, better manage, or change RE process methodologies.     

External social capital and information systems development team flexibility

Context

ISD research based on the socio-technical perspective suggests that two sources of socio-technical change have a bearing on the performance of information systems development (ISD) projects: business requirements and development technology. To enhance project effectiveness, ISD teams need to enhance their flexibility in the face of the constant changes taking place from business and technical environments in which they operate. Flexibility is conceptualized as an outcome of capability development through constantly integrating and reconfiguring available resources within and outside of the organization where the team is embedded.

Objective

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between a team’s external social capital and team flexibility. More specifically, based on social capital theory, this study argues that external social capital leads to IS team flexibility, which in turn contributes to the successful project performance.

Method

A survey design was selected to collect data and test the proposed model. A snowballing strategy was employed to collect data. 118 information systems developers participated in the survey and the model was analyzed using partial least squares regression. Results: The findings show that, in general, the ISD teams’ external social capital do contribute to the team’s response to changes. However, they exhibit unique impacts on ISD team flexibility respectively.

Results

The findings show that, in general, the ISD teams’ external social capital does contribute to the team’s response to changes. However, they exhibit unique impacts on ISD team flexibility respectively.

Conclusion

The various external social capitals have distinctive effects on a team’s flexibility. Specifically, horizontal relationships are positively associated with both business and technology flexibility. Vertical relationships are positively associated with business flexibility and market relationships technology flexibility. ISD managers should establish robust relationships with its high-ups, other lateral units, and third parties outside in the market. They also need to be more adaptive to the increasingly volatile socio-technical environment, and proactively search, exploit, upgrade, and integrate resources that are essential to the development of system development team flexibility.     

How to build an appropriate information ethics code for enterprises in Chinese cultural society

Information ethics codes play a vital role in clarifying the responsibilities of MIS (management information systems) professionals and providing them with a point of reference when dealing with ethical issues. In view of the important 21st Century role played by China, particularly Mainland China, which represents a hugely significant market to all global enterprises, it is hoped that this study will assist the business world in understanding the culture in which Chinese business is conducted, and will facilitate the building of a suitable information ethics code in the future. Academically, this paper aims to explain how Confucian ethics and the guanxi ¹ culture perspective affect MIS professionals’ ethical dilemmas and reactive processes. Specifically, it examines the reactive processes of MIS professionals in CHSyst (pseudonym) in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mainland China. In practice, this study provides a good reference for enterprises such as the above that wish to find the most appropriate way to create an ethics code suitable for a Chinese company context to prevent Chinese MIS professionals from behaving unethically in their workplace. Such a code will serve to reduce the negative consequences of unethical conduct for the organization.     

Expanding the Impression Management Model of Communication Channels: An Information Control Scale

According to O’Sullivan's (2000) impression management model of communication channels, individuals will prefer to use mediated channels rather than face‐to‐face conversation in face‐threatening situations. Within his model, this trend is due to the channel features that allow for control over exchanged social information. The present paper extends O’Sullivan's model by explicating information control as a media affordance, arising from channel features and social skills, that enables an individual to regulate and restrict the flow of social information in an interaction, and present a scale to measure it. One dimension of the information control scale, expressive information control, positively predicted channel preference for recalled face‐threatening situations. This effect remained after controlling for social anxiousness and power relations in relationships.     

A survey of genetic algorithm-based face recognition

Traditionally, special objects can be detected and recognized by the template matching method, but the recognition speed has always been a problem. In addition, for recognition by a neural network, training the data is always time-consuming. In this article, the current method of genetic algorithm-based face recognition is summarized, and experiments for real-time use are described. The chromosomes generated by the genetic algorithm (GA) contain information (parameters) about the face, and genetic operators are used to detect and obtain the position of the face of interest in an image. Here, the parameters of the coordinates (x, y) of the center of the face, the rate of scale, and the angle of rotation θ, are encoded into the GA.     

A standard language for service delivery: Enabling understanding among stakeholders

In Integrated Service Delivery (ISD), multiple service providers have to collaborate in order to serve as a one-stop shop for their clients. Although technical standards have been met, collaboration is difficult. Service providers do not know what kind of information other providers need, are not aware of each other's processes or simply do not understand each other due to the use of ambiguous terms. In this paper, foundations for a language are developed to specify the requirements for ISD and enable the unambiguous understanding of these requirements. A combination of the standards Object-Role Modeling (ORM) and Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) is used to ensure human readability and to have the full expressive power of formal languages. Composed expressions are developed to express logical, temporal, and geographical requirements. This enables service providers to understand how, when, and where services need to be integrated. By utilizing these foundations to generate a standard language for ISD, service providers can collaborate and they can understand complex client requirements which lead to improved ISD.     

A Numerical Study of the Bottom-Up and Top-Down Inference Processes in And-Or Graphs

This paper presents a numerical study of the bottom-up and top-down inference processes in hierarchical models using the And-Or graph as an example. Three inference processes are identified for each node A in a recursively defined And-Or graph in which stochastic context sensitive image grammar is embedded: the α(A) process detects node A directly based on image features, the β(A) process computes node A by binding its child node(s) bottom-up and the γ(A) process predicts node A top-down from its parent node(s). All the three processes contribute to computing node A from images in complementary ways. The objective of our numerical study is to explore how much information each process contributes and how these processes should be integrated to improve performance. We study them in the task of object parsing using And-Or graph formulated under the Bayesian framework. Firstly, we isolate and train the α(A), β(A) and γ(A) processes separately by blocking the other two processes. Then, information contributions of each process are evaluated individually based on their discriminative power, compared with their respective human performance. Secondly, we integrate the three processes explicitly for robust inference to improve performance and propose a greedy pursuit algorithm for object parsing. In experiments, we choose two hierarchical case studies: one is junctions and rectangles in low-to-middle-level vision and the other is human faces in high-level vision. We observe that (i) the effectiveness of the α(A), β(A) and γ(A) processes depends on the scale and occlusion conditions, (ii) the α(face) process is stronger than the α processes of facial components, while β(junctions) and β(rectangle) work much better than their α processes, and (iii) the integration of the three processes improves performance in ROC comparisons.     

On the Expressiveness of Linda-like Concurrent Languages

We compare the expressiveness of a class of concurrent languages that employ asynchronous communication primitives à la Linda. All the languages considered contain sequential, parallel and choice operators, and they differ from one another in the set of communication primitives used. These primitives include tell, get and ask operations for adding, deleting, and checking for the presence of data in a dataspace shared by a number of concurrent processes, as well as a nask (negative ask) operation for checking for the absence of data in the shared dataspace. We use the notion of modular embedding introduced by De Boer and Palamidessi in [3] to compare the relative expressive power of the languages. A first result is the formalisation of the intuitive separation result stating that the language with get and tell is strictly more expressive than the language with ask and tell operations. An interesting result is that the ability to check for the presence of information (ask) does not increase the power of a language containing get and tell operations, whereas the ability to check for the absence of information (nask) does increase the power of such a language. Another interesting result shown is that the language containing all the communication primitives considered is strictly more expressive than each of its sub-languages, except for the redundancy of ask.     

Analysing ISD performance using narrative networks,routines and mindfulness

ContextWhile the ISD process and in particular Requirement Elicitation has been defined as a collaborative social interaction, visualisations fail to accurately capture the multifaceted nature of the social process. Instead, ISD visualisations focus on presenting a more mechanical/technical perspective, ultimately restricting an opportunity to better analyse the process.ObjectiveWith particular focus on Requirements Elicitation this study utilises the narrative network technique to visualise the ISD process as a live routine with the aim to detail the ideal and actual aspects of ISD. The ideal aspect consists of the abstract, generalised understandings of the human actors regarding enacting a routine. Being a live routine, the reality is that adjustments/variations are a common occurrence and need to be taken into account. Enabling the opportunity to identify patterns of action within the routine, the study also incorporates organisational mindfulness to provide further social analysis of these patterns of action.MethodIn light of the lack of theoretical maturity around the viewing of an ISD process as a ‘live routine’, this exploratory research sought to build theory using a single instrumental case study spanning over 3 years (several ISD projects) and a variety of methods (e.g. workshop, experiment).ResultsVisualising the ISD process as a live routine it was possible to identify a number of patterns of action. These patterns were triangulated against the organisational mindfulness analysis of the case data to highlight underlying mindless behaviours. A rule was then implemented (experimentally) during the first iteration of a new ISD project and notable improvements in the ISD process were observed. Furthermore, the knock on organisational impact of the experimental implementation of the rule is also examined.ConclusionFrom a practitioner perspective the study provides an alternative method for analysing the ISD process of an organisation and highlights the benefits of observing the ISD process as a live routine. From an academic perspective, contributions are made to both the ISD and Organisational body of knowledge.     

Depth calculation by using face detection ASIC

Real-time processing in mobile devices is always a hot issue. Although face detection and stereo matching, in particular, are core elements for HRI applications, they are processes that impose the heaviest loads in real-time processing. In this article, we present novel methods of calculating disparities and face detection by using an Altair chip which can detect 32 frontal faces per frame at speed of 30 frames per second (f.p.s.). Altair can take two stereo images and process them in a frame-by-frame manner. If the left-hand image is input in the N-th time frame and then the right-hand image is input in the (N + 1)-th time frame, we can get information about left and right facial images with a one-frame delay. Then we can calculate the disparities between the faces, and can easily estimate the distance from a robot to a human with this information. In cases where several faces are detected, we classified various cases in order to identify corresponding faces. The experimental results show that we can detect faces and calculate distances in the range 0.5 m–3.5 m, with a 0.5%–8.9% error, at a processing speed of 15 f.p.s.     

A framework for Chinese Power Games – Political tactics in information systems development processes

This paper explores the way one particular manager of the MIS department at TaiJen uses expert knowledge to adopt political tactics to achieve his goals of self-interest in information system development (ISD) processes. Based on qualitative data collected from TaiJen (pseudonym), the study interweaves Chinese Power Game: Face and Favor Theory and Confucian Relationalism into the different kinds of political tactics utilized by the MIS department manager. An appropriate categorization of political tactics is constructed based on two dimensions: “relatively strong/weak power” and “winning/losing position.” Nine kinds of political tactics are grouped into four types: aggression, defense, strengthening and withdrawal, and the different tactics used by the manager of the MIS department on his supervisors, equals and subordinates are categorized on the basis of these types. In view of the important role played by Asia in the 21st Century, particularly by Chinese cultural societies, which represent a hugely significant market to all global enterprises, it is hoped that this study will assist the business world in understanding the culture that places emphasis on the conducting of business through interpersonal relationships.     

Information systems fitness and risk in IS development: Insights and implications from chaos and complex systems theories

Information Systems Development often takes place within a complex and uncertain socio-technical environment. The use of methodologies is considered an appropriate way of reducing risks of failures of the ISD projects, allowing for managing of the complexity of the process and product of ISD. Traditional functionalist methodologies, however, are not adequately equipped for dealing with non-linear interactions endemic to such complex social systems as IS. This paper examines IS development from the perspective of the complex systems behavior and chaos theory. It offers insights and implications for augmenting traditional approaches to ISD that could lead to better strategies for managing complexities in the ISD process and the behavior of an IS.

An Exploration of Impact of Cognitive Elaboration on Learning in ISD Projects

Stakeholder learning has been considered crucial for effective participation and the success of information system development (ISD). However, little guidance has been offered as an operational method to facilitate learning in ISD settings. We argue that “cognitive elaboration” (CE) is a helpful strategy for developing effective learning in client–developer interactions in ISD efforts. Two types of learning are investigated: model-building (MB) and model-maintenance (MM). The current study investigated whether CE performed by stakeholders themselves in client–developer interaction led to their MB rather than MM learning. In addition, an alternative hypothesis has been explored: whether mere communication activities may induce learning. Fifty individuals in seven ongoing software development projects in four organizations were examined. For each project, two meetings in which clients and developers participated were observed. The empirical results demonstrated that stakeholders in an ISD process who have engaged in CE themselves are more likely to experience MB learning; and that mere communication does not account for MB learning. An insignificant link between CE and MM learning was found. This study deepens our understanding about IS–user interactions. Limitations of the current research and implications for future research are discussed.     

A framework for incremental construction of real global smart space applications

This article describes a standardised way to build context-aware global smart space applications using information that is distributed across independent (legacy, sensor-enabled, and embedded) systems by exploiting the overlapping spatial and temporal attributes of the information maintained by these systems. The framework supports a spatial programming model based on a topographical approach to modelling space that enables systems to independently define and use potentially overlapping spatial context in a consistent manner and in contrast to topological approaches, in which geographical relationships between objects are described explicitly. This approach is supported by an extensible data model that implicitly captures the relationships between information provided by separate underlying systems and facilitates the incremental construction of global smart spaces since the underlying systems to be incorporated are largely decoupled. The framework has been evaluated using a prototype that integrates legacy systems and context-aware services for multi-modal urban journey planning and for visualising traffic congestion.     

Randomized naming using wait-free shared variables

A naming protocol assigns unique names (keys) to every process out of a set of communicating processes. We construct a randomized wait-free naming protocol using wait-free atomic read/write registers (shared variables) as process intercommunication primitives. Each process has its own private register and can read all others. The addresses/names each one uses for the others are possibly different: Processes p and q address the register of process r in a way not known to each other. For processes and , the protocol uses a name space of size and running time (read/writes to shared bits) with probability at least , and overall expected running time. The protocol is based on the wait-free implementation of a novel -Test&SetOnce object that randomly and fast selects a winner from a set of q contenders with probability at least in the face of the strongest possible adaptive adversary. Received: September 1994 / Accepted: January 1998     

人脸老化/去龄化的高质量图像生成模型

目的 近年来关于人脸老化/去龄化的研究在深度学习的推动下取得了飞速发展,2017年提出的条件对抗自编码器（CAAE）人脸老化/去龄化模型生成的人脸不仅可信度高,而且更贴近目标年龄。然而在人脸老化/去龄化过程中仍存在生成图像分辨率低、人工鬼影噪声严重（生成人脸器官扭曲）等问题。为此,在CAAE的基础上,提出一个人脸老化/去龄化的高质量图像生成模型（HQGM）。方法 用边界平衡对抗生成网络（BEGAN）替换CAAE中的对抗生成网络（GAN）。BEGAN在人脸图像生成上不仅分辨率更高而且具有更好的视觉效果。在此基础上,添加两个提高生成图像质量的损失函数：图像梯度差损失函数和人脸特征损失函数。图像梯度差损失函数通过缩小生成图像和真实图像的图像梯度,使生成图像具有更多轮廓等高频信息;人脸特征损失函数将生成图像和真实图像分别输入到配置预训练参数的VGG-FACE网络模型中,输出各自的特征图。通过缩小两幅特征图的对应点差值,使生成图像具有更多真实图像的人脸特征信息。结果 实验使用UTKface、FGnet和Morph数据集,经过训练,每幅测试图像分别生成10幅不同年龄的图像。与CAAE相比,HQGM可以有效去除人工鬼影噪声,峰值信噪比高3.2 dB,结构相似性高0.06,提升显著。结论 HQGM可以生成具有丰富纹理信息和人脸特征信息的人脸老化/去龄化图像。