The optimal level of CRM IT investments

In light of the growing relevance of customer-oriented business strategies IT investments in the field of Customer Relationship Management have increased considerably. However, firms often could not realize sufficient returns on these IT investments. One major reason for this failure seems to be the lack of appropriate approaches to determine the economic impact of such investments ex ante. Therefore, we develop an economic model to determine the optimal level of Customer Relationship Management IT investments. Using this approach, firms can evaluate, to what extent investments in Customer Relationship Management IT are reasonable. One major result is that in most cases the “all or nothing strategy” pursued by many firms does not lead to the optimal level of investments. To illustrate the practical utility and applicability of the approach, we provide a real world example of a German financial services provider.     

Business Intelligence Acceptance: The Prominence of Organizational Factors

The specifics of business intelligence systems compared to operational IS motivate the necessity to research the business intelligence systems acceptance determinants separately. The authors followed an exploratory approach in order to conceptualize a business intelligence acceptance model. Their findings show that in the Business Intelligence Systems context, there is a significant emphasis on organizational factors, such as result demonstrability, social influence, and facilitating conditions with sufficient resources that help build an adequate information culture all substantially influencing the effective acceptance of business intelligence systems.     

Social commerce research: An integrated view

Social commerce has quickly emerged as a new area of inquiry for both practitioners and researchers, suggesting the potential impacts of social media and social networking technologies and services in shaping commercial channels on and off the Internet. This essay starts by providing a brief overview of social commerce research and practice in light of the wide attention it has drawn in the industry. Then, we propose a research framework with an integrated view of social commerce that consists of four key components: business, technology, people, and information. The framework helps us understand the development of social commerce research and practice to date. Subsequently, we report some preliminary findings from a bibliometric study of academic and industry publications in social commerce to reveal recent trends and research topics, as well as some verification of the research framework. Finally, we discuss five articles in this special issue and categorize them in terms of the proposed social commerce research framework.     

Universal Remote Console-based next-generation accessible television

This paper presents a new approach to make current and future television universally accessible. The proposed approach provides a means of universal accessibility both for remotely operating the TV set and for interacting with online services delivered through the TV. This proposal is based on the ISO/IEC 24752 “Universal Remote Console” (URC) standard. This standard defines an abstract user interface layer called the “user interface socket” and allows the development of pluggable (plug-in) user interfaces for any type of user and any control device. The proposed approach lays the foundation for the development of advanced user interfaces that can be interacted within various modalities. Different prototypes have been developed based on this approach and tested with end users. The user tests have shown this approach to be a viable option for the proposed scenarios. Based on the experience gathered with the prototypes, recommendations and implementation options are suggested for commercial adoption.     

The Formation of Calcified Nanospherites during Micropetrosis Represents a Unique Mineralization Mechanism in Aged Human Bone

Osteocytes—the central regulators of bone remodeling—are enclosed in a network of microcavities (lacunae) and nanocanals (canaliculi) pervading the mineralized bone. In a hitherto obscure process related to aging and disease, local plugs in the lacuno‐canalicular network disrupt cellular communication and impede bone homeostasis. By utilizing a suite of high‐resolution imaging and physics‐based techniques, it is shown here that the local plugs develop by accumulation and fusion of calcified nanospherites in lacunae and canaliculi (micropetrosis). Two distinctive nanospherites phenotypes are found to originate from different osteocytic elements. A substantial deviation in the spherites' composition in comparison to mineralized bone further suggests a mineralization process unlike regular bone mineralization. Clearly, mineralization of osteocyte lacunae qualifies as a strong marker for degrading bone material quality in skeletal aging. The understanding of micropetrosis may guide future therapeutics toward preserving osteocyte viability to maintain mechanical competence and fracture resistance of bone in elderly individuals.     

Dynamic admission control for two customer classes with stochastic demands and strict due dates

We study a dynamic capacity allocation problem with admission control decisions of a company that caters for two demand classes with random arrivals, capacity requirements and strict due dates. We formulate the problem as a Markov decision process (MDP) in order to find the optimal admission control policy that maximises the expected profit of the company. Such a formulation suffers a state-space explosion. Moreover, it involves an additional dimension arising from the multiple possible order sizes that customers can request which further increases the complexity of the problem. To reduce the cardinality of possible policies, and, thus, the computational requirements, we propose a threshold-based policy. We formulate an MDP to generate such a policy. To deal with the curse of dimensionality, we develop threshold-based approximate algorithms based on the state-reduction heuristics with aggregation proposed previously. Our results reveal that for the majority of instances considered the optimal policy has a threshold structure. We then demonstrate the superiority of the proposed threshold-based approximate algorithms over two benchmark policies in terms of the generated profits and the robustness of the solutions to changes in operational conditions. Finally, we show that our proposed policies are also robust to changes in actual demand from its estimation.     

Optimization and experimental investigations of stiffened, axially compressed CFRP-panels

Thin-walled, unstiffened and stiffened shell structures made of fibre composite materials are frequently applied due to their high stiffness/strength to weight ratios in all fields of lightweight constructions. One major design criterion of these structures is their sensitivity with respect to buckling failure when subjected to inplane compression and shear loads. This paper describes how the structural analysis program BEOS (Buckling of Eccentrically Orthotropic Sandwich shells) is combined with the optimization procedure SAPOP (Structural Analysis Program and Optimization Procedure) to produce a tool for designing optimum CFRP-panels against buckling. Experimental investigations are used to justify the described procedures.Nomenclature C, C _b material stiffness matrices (shell, beam stiffener) - f objective function - F _cr buckling load - g vector of inequality constraints - K,K _g , stiffness matrix, geometrical stiffness matrix, condensed stiffness matrix - n _s ,n _b vector of stress resultants (shell, beam stiffener) - N _x ,N _y ,N _xy membrane forces of the shell - P _x ,P _y ,P _xy membrane forces of the stiffener - r _x ,r _y ,r _xy radii of curvature - ⁿ n-dimensional Euclidean space - W strain energy - u, v, w deformations inx, y, z direction - x, y, z global coordinate system - x vector of design variables - y, z right-hand side, left-hand side eigenvector - variational symbol - _i ^k Kronecker's delta - e _s ,e _b strain vectors (shell, beam stiffener) - , _cr load factor, buckling load factor - , e total energy, external potential energy A (^) sign above a variable points out that this variable belongs to the prebuckling state.     

Knowledge and information awareness for initiating transactive memory system processes of computer-supported collaborating ad hoc groups

This paper presents an innovative approach for initiating processes of a transactive memory system in newly formed groups of experts collaborating computer-supported in a complex problem-solving task. Our empirical study compared 15 experimental and 15 control groups, each consisting of triads. In the experimental condition, the triads were provided with a tool for fostering knowledge and information awareness, that is, being informed about the knowledge and the underlying information of the collaboration partners in form of digital concept maps. In the control condition, the groups had no access to this tool. Results confirmed the potential of the tool to initiate processes of a transactive memory system: shared agreement of the knowledge of the other group members’ knowledge proved to influence group performance positively. In addition, previous findings of the tool’s potential to establish knowledge and information awareness and to augment group performance could be replicated. However, the postulated mediating effect of processes of a transactive memory system concerning the impact of knowledge and information awareness on group performance did not reach statistical significance. Aspects for future studies and implications of these findings regarding their practical implementation, for example, in teams of organizations, are discussed.     

The subspace global skyline query processing over dynamic databases

The global skyline, as an important variant of the skyline, has been widely applied in multi-criteria decision making, business planning and data mining. In this paper, we extend our early work and propose the maintenance methods to process the subspace global skyline (SGS) queries in dynamic databases. In the previous work, we proposed the index structure RB-tree, which can effectively manage the data to accelerate the subspace global skyline calculation. Also, the basic single SGS algorithm based on RB-tree (SSRB) and the optimized single SGS algorithm (OSSRB) were proposed to process a single SGS query. In addition, the multiple SGS algorithm (MSRB) was proposed to calculate multiple SGS queries by sharing the scan spaces of different queries. In this paper, we design some data structures and propose the maintenance approaches of SSRB, OSSRB and MSRB to cope with updates that happen to data sets. Thus our extended algorithms can be adopted for dynamic data sets. Finally, the experimental results show that the proposed algorithms OSSRB and MSRB have good performance to process SGS queries and they can be easily maintained with dynamic datasets.