Determinants of perceived usefulness of e-learning systems

E-learning systems are increasingly essential in universities, schools, government departments and other organizations that provide an education or training service. The objective for adopting e-learning systems is to provide students with educational services via electronic channels. The focus of this study is on the impact of IT infrastructure services and IT quality on perceptions of usefulness of e-learning systems. A model is proposed which includes five constructs: IT infrastructure services, system quality, information quality, service delivery quality, and perceived usefulness. A quantitative study was conducted at an Australian university with 720 survey responses from students who were enrolled in online courses. The results suggest that IT infrastructure services play a critical role in generating information with high quality, enhancing the aspects of e-learning system quality, and improving service delivery quality. The impact of IT infrastructure services, system quality, and information quality on perceived usefulness is fully mediated by service delivery quality. Universities need to be aware of the critical impact of IT infrastructure services and consider how investment in these services could improve system and information quality, service delivery quality, and the usefulness and success of e-learning systems.     

IT infrastructure services as a requirement for e-learning system success

Evaluation of e-learning systems success is an essential process in managing and developing these types of systems. There are still arguments about the factors can be used to evaluate the success of e-learning systems. Inadequate attention has been paid to investigate the role of IT infrastructure services as a foundation to create the success of e-learning systems. The focus of this study is the role of IT infrastructure services in terms of the success of e-learning systems. A model is proposed which includes five constructs: IT infrastructure services; perceived usefulness; user satisfaction; customer value; and organizational value. A quantitative study was conducted at an Australian University, with survey responses from 110 Academic staff members and 720 students who use the e-learning system. The empirical study confirmed that an IT infrastructure services is a valid and reliable construct to measure e-learning systems success. In addition, this study provides evidence of the critical role of IT infrastructure services in the success of e-learning systems via its significant effect on perceived usefulness, user satisfaction, customer value, and organizational value.     

Event Monitoring and Service in a Flat World Benefits and Challenges

Event monitoring is a critical component in managing IT infrastructure and business operation. Yet, like other IT services, monitoring services face challenges and high expectations in a globally integrated IT environment. Such services offer a telling example that shows both potential and limitation for global IT services, as well as the gaps between expectation and reality and how they might be better identified and thus narrowed.     

Strategies to Keep Your VoIP Network Secure

As VoIP technology matures, more IT departments have made the jump to integrate VoIP into their enterprise communication systems. But, before an organization fully commits to the technology, it should perform a risk assessment, paying close attention to any security measures needed to protect these IP-based voice networks. For telephone systems where controlled access throughout the communications infrastructure isn't necessary, services that leverage machines on the public Internet could be a cost-effective choice. However, for systems where secured network control is critical, VoIP networks based on private enterprise infrastructures should be considered. This article focuses on the security measures associated with private-enterprise-based VoIP networks.     

Information Technology Workforce Skills: Does Size Matter?

Changes in information technology (IT) services and their delivery have shifted the need for non-IT firms' (i.e., firms whose primary business is something other than providing IT goods and services) IT skills and capabilities to emphasize a business focus while integrating more outsourcing options from both domestic and global third-party providers. This paper explores how organizations of different sizes value critical IT skills and investigates firms' needs for entry-level and mid-level capabilities. The results show that smaller organizations consider more in-house hiring than their counterparts. Although desired entry-level skills differed among organizations of varying sizes, they all valued project management skills highly for mid-level IT staff.     

Effective Governance of It: Design Objectives, Roles, and Relationships

This article describes the key roles and relationships in a best-practice IT governance design, including the roles and responsibilities of an IT governance council, the CIO, IT customer services, the IT project office, and several non-IT roles. the author argues that organizational readiness and stakeholder participation are critical success factors for a new IT governance implementation.     

Strategic roles of IT modernization and cloud migration in reducing cybersecurity risks of organizations: The case of U.S. federal government

Many organizations run their core business operations on decades-old legacy IT systems. Some security professionals argue that legacy IT systems significantly increase security risks because they are not designed to address contemporary cybersecurity risks. Others counter that the legacy systems might be “secure by antiquity” and argue that due to lack of adequate documentation on the systems, it is very difficult for potential attackers to discover and exploit security vulnerabilities. There is a shortage of empirical evidence on either argument. Routine activity theory (RAT) argues that an organization’s guardianship is critical for reducing security incidents. However, RAT does not well explain how organizations might guard against security risks of legacy IT systems. We theorize that organizations can enhance their guardianship by either modernizing their legacy IT systems in-house or by outsourcing them to cloud vendors. With datasets from the U.S. federal agencies, we find that agencies that have more legacy IT systems experience more frequent security incidents than others with more modern IT systems. A 1%-point increase in the proportion of IT budgets spent on IT modernization is associated with a 5.6% decrease in the number of security incidents. Furthermore, migration of the legacy systems to the cloud is negatively associated with the number of security incidents. The findings advance the literature on strategic information systems by extending RAT to explain why the “security by antiquity” argument is not valid and how organizations can reduce the security risks of legacy IT systems through modernization and migration to the cloud.     

Information Technology Strategic Planning

Understanding an enterprise's IT requirements and providing innovative IT solutions are essential to keeping a business flourishing. An IT strategic plan based on a shared vision with stakeholders is critical to any successful enterprise and requires continual updating. The three building blocks for constructing an IT strategic plan are performing an IT assessment to understand the issues, problems, and needs for delivering outstanding service to customers; aligning the IT strategy with business drivers, management expectations, and customer requirements to ensure that the enterprise receives the right solutions; and formulating initiatives to improve business performance and IT services over time. Key elements common to most enterprises, such as IT assessment approach, business drivers, and management and customer expectations, can serve as a baseline for constructing the IT strategic plan.     

Information Technology Workforce Skills: Does Size Matter?

ABSTRACT

Changes in information technology (IT) services and their delivery have shifted the need for non-IT firms' (i.e., firms whose primary business is something other than providing IT goods and services) IT skills and capabilities to emphasize a business focus while integrating more outsourcing options from both domestic and global third-party providers. This paper explores how organizations of different sizes value critical IT skills and investigates firms' needs for entry-level and mid-level capabilities. The results show that smaller organizations consider more in-house hiring than their counterparts. Although desired entry-level skills differed among organizations of varying sizes, they all valued project management skills highly for mid-level IT staff.     

On the predictive performance of queueing network models for large-scale distributed transaction processing systems

Automated business processes running on distributed transaction processing (DTP) systems characterize the IT backbone of services industries. New web services standards such as BPEL have increased the importance of DTP systems in business practice. IT departments are forced to meet pre-defined quality-of-service metrics, therefore performance prediction is essential. Unfortunately, the complexity of multiple interacting services running on multiple hardware resources as well as the volatility in the demand for these services can make performance analysis extremely difficult. While business process automation has been a dominant topic in the recent years, surprisingly little has been published on performance modelling of large-scale DTP systems. In this paper, we will describe these systems with respect to the workloads and technical features, and compare the predictive accuracy of different types of queueing models and discrete event simulations experimentally. The experiments are based on two real-world DTP systems and respective data sets of a telecom company. Overall, we found that while the results for average utilization scenarios are quite similar, the effort to implement and run analytic solutions is much lower. As long as standard distributional assumptions of analytical models hold, they provide a reliable and fast methodology to explore different demand mix scenarios even for large-scale systems. The difficulty to estimate service and arrival time parameters and demand mix for the respective queueing network models can largely be reduced with appropriate tooling. Often, this information is missing in IT departments. Also, complex event conditions and error handling in DTP systems can make the analysis difficult. For many DTP applications, however, performance modelling could provide valuable decision support for service level management.     

Web services and flexible business processes: towards the adaptive enterprise

The full potential of the expected role of Information Technology (IT) in facilitating organizational adaptation has not yet been realized because most of the existing systems do not lend themselves to the levels of flexibility required to support changes in business processes. This problem is accentuated with increase of inter-organizational linkages involving disparate IT systems. Web services have emerged as a disruptive technology, with a real potential of enabling flexible business processes. This paper examines the influence of Web services on business process flexibility and analyses its impact on organizational adaptation.     

Effective Governance of It: Design Objectives,Roles, and Relationships

Abstract

This article describes the key roles and relationships in a best-practice IT governance design, including the roles and responsibilities of an IT governance council, the CIO, IT customer services, the IT project office, and several non-IT roles. the author argues that organizational readiness and stakeholder participation are critical success factors for a new IT governance implementation.     

Process: Learning,Working and Innovation

Worldwide the environment in which IT initiatives are deployed is changing. Increasingly, IT investments are being made to produce market outcomes as well as internal operating efficiencies. Learning about the linkage between the IT investments and business value is a critical challenge in the service sector for industries such as financial services, transportation and retailing where IT is endemic to the products and services delivered to customers [1]. Using a case study in a large North American insurance company and recent theory [2] as our guide, we identify ways in which Information Systems (IS) organizations can become more innovative by using learning as the bridge between working and innovation.     

铁路客运服务系统存在的问题与解决方案研究

通过对如何更好地实现铁路客运专线旅客运输服务价值以及国内外旅客服务、票务和营销与决策支持等IT业务支撑系统的比较研究,分析中国铁路客运服务系统存在的问题,从系统结构、服务产品、运营流程、IT支撑平台系统研发等方面探讨我国铁路客运专线客运服务系统集成解决方案。     

Outcomes and success factors of enterprise IT architecture management: empirical insight from the international financial services industry

Within the last decades, corporate information technology (IT) environments have approached considerable degrees of complexity. As a consequence, IT has become increasingly difficult to manage resulting in high costs and poor flexibility. Today, it is generally acknowledged that the sustainability of corporate IT environments can only be ensured through a continuous and long-term management on the level of the Enterprise (IT) Architecture (EA). To address this, many firms have implemented a dedicated Enterprise (IT) Architecture Management (EAM) function. However, little is known yet on the effectiveness of such functions and the factors influencing EAM success. Within this research, we thus seek to answer two main questions: (1) do firms adopting EAM perform better with regard to high-level information management objectives like IT flexibility and IT efficiency, and if so, (2) what are the critical success factors in attaining these goals? To answer these questions, a field survey was conducted within the international financial services industry. The results provide evidence that the implementation of an EAM function is in fact supportive in the creation and sustainment of IT efficiency and IT flexibility. Several factors are shown to be of critical importance for achieving these goals with architectural governance being the most important one.     

基于扩展WF-Net的配电网故障诊断与抢修流程优化

基于扩展WF-Net对配电网故障诊断与抢修流程进行了建模与优化。首先将流程涉及的信息系统封装成具有松散耦合特性的 IT 服务;然后扩展了 WF-net 的时间集和颜色集,提出了基于 IT 服务的赋时有色工作流网（TCWFN-ITS）,以显式地表达业务流程与IT服务的调用关系。最后,针对某电力公司配电网故障诊断与抢修流程,采用TCWFN-ITS进行建模,使用Petri网建模工具CPN Tools进行仿真分析,通过并行执行任务、合并任务、优化服务占用端口数量等手段,实现了配电网故障诊断与抢修流程性能提升和 IT 服务的平衡配置,验证了所提方法的可行性和有效性。     

浅析网络应用系统性能优化测试简

随着网络迅速的发展,数据逐渐向数据集中化、业务处理复杂化、数据增长较快向趋势变化,并集中于后台服务处理,通过网络向成千上万的网络用户提供服务。而随着网络应用系统用户访问量的增加,网络应用系统提供服务时所出现系统响应速度太慢,加载时间过长等现象,严重影响网络应用系统提供服务的质量,由此可见,对于IT服务系统的性能测试与优化值得对其进行深入的学习和研究。     

Social Comparison,Goal Contagion,and Adoption of Innovative Information Technology

When adopting a new, innovative information technology (IT), most institutions tend to lack knowledge about it initially. However, they often adopt new ITs despite their illiteracy. This behavior is difficult to explain using rational IT adoption theories. Focusing on the organizational decision-making process behind adoption of innovative IT, we examine the strategy by which some companies compensate for their lack of knowledge: collection of information from other companies that have successfully adopted IT previously. We develop a new IT adoption model for which goal contagion theory and social comparison theory are combined to interpret the circumstances under which organizations tend to adopt new, innovative IT despite limited knowledge about it. Big data, cloud services, and smart mobile systems are considered as examples of innovative IT in the empirical study.     

Strategic context and patterns of IT infrastructure capability

The importance of a firm's information technology (IT) infrastructure capability is increasingly recognised as critical to firm competitiveness. Infrastructure is particularly important for firms in industries going through dynamic change, for firms reengineering their business processes and for those with multiple business units or extensive international or geographically dispersed operations. However, the notion of IT infrastructure is still evolving and there has been little empirically based research on the patterns of IT infrastructure capability across firms.We develop the concept of IT infrastructure capability through identification of IT infrastructure services and measurement of reach and range in large, multi-business unit firms. Using empirical case research, we examine the patterns of IT infrastructure capability in 26 firms with diverse strategic contexts, including different industry bases, level of marketplace volatility, extent of business unit synergies and the nature of firm strategy formation processes. Data collection was based on a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods with multiple participants.More extensive IT infrastructure capability is defined as a combination of more IT infrastructure services and more reach and range. More extensive IT infrastructure capability was found in firms where: (i) products changed quickly; (ii) attempts were made to identify and capture synergies across business units; (iii) there was greater integration of information and IT needs as part of planning processes; and (iv) there was greater emphasis on tracking the implementation of long term strategy. These findings have implications for both business and technology managers particularly in regard to how firms link strategy and IT infrastructure formation processes.     

An information system architecture for build- and engineer-to-order production of application services

In manufacturing, substantial efficiency gains have been achieved through industrialization. Key concepts of industrialization include standardization, automation, and modularization. Transferring these to IT service production promises increased efficiency. ERP systems apply such concepts and have been an integrating tool for making production for manufacturers more efficient. However, previous research has considered ERP systems for IT service providers either very broadly or only from a business or technical perspective. This article investigates how to apply the ERP system concept comprehensively to a specific type of IT service provider. To this end, application services are prescribed as being composed of three types of configuration models. This helps to achieve a composition of (IT) application services that is comparable to physical parts, and it further supports their management and automated production within an ERP system. An information system architecture with the ERP system at its core is presented. It supports application service production. All relevant service lifecycle phases are considered and a consistent domain model is provided that connects business and technical layer entities. Targeted companies can improve their application service production in terms of quality and efficiency by leveraging this novel automation- and model-based approach.