IT Consulting: Communication Skills Are Key

IT consultants are professionals who have joined an existing consultancy or have established a consulting business as a single individual or with colleagues. Regardless of their origin, IT consultants perform a variety of tasks, from idea generation to design to project management support. Chief among the success factors in IT consulting is effective communication - an idea that seems to have eluded most of the research purporting to help IT consultants. IT consultants must be proactive in opening communication lines with customers. Ensuring that expectations are clear is a major benefit of effective communication because it helps minimize the damage from an outcome in which the customer is unhappy     

Preparation of New Fibers on the Basis of Codeine Imprinted Polymer

A monolithic copolymer of methacrylic acid-ethylene glycol dimathacrylate as a fiber with 2 cm length and 0.3 mm diameter, containing codeine (CO) template was prepared through thermal radical co-polymerization procedure. This fiber is a robust recognition material capable of mimicking natural systems, combined with solid-phase micro-extraction (SPME) and gas chromatography/mass spectrometry for the extraction of trace CO from various street-drug samples. Effective experimental parameters such as Methacrylic Acid (MAA), Ethylene glycol dimethacrylate (EDMA), and CO proportions, nature, and dimension of mold, copolymerization time and temperature were optimized. Experimental studies such as scanning electron microscopy (SEM) reveal that highly homogenate fiber was achieved that can preciously be used for the above mentioned goals.     

Anodized aluminum wire as a solid-phase microextraction fiber

The efficiency of anodized aluminum wire was investigated as a new fiber for solid-phase microextraction (SPME). Aluminum wires were anodized by direct current in a solution of sulfuric acid at room temperature and were conditioned at 300 degrees C for 30 min. These fibers were used for the extraction of some aliphatic alcohols, BTEX, and petroleum products from gaseous samples. The extracted analytes were transferred to a GC injector using an (inhouse-designed) SPME syringe that also allowed for an easy change of SPME fibers. The results obtained prove the ability of anodized aluminum wire as a new fiber for sampling of organic compounds from gaseous samples. This behavior is due most probably to the porous layer of aluminum oxide, which is formed on the metal surfaces. In this work, the optimum conditions for the preparation and conditioning of fibers and the extraction of analytes from gaseous samples were obtained. In the optimum conditions, one fiber was used in several equal analyses and the relative standard deviations were below 5% (n = 5). However, fiber-to-fiber reproducibility was 8% (n = 5). This fiber is firm, inexpensive, and durable and can be prepared simply.     

Critical Characteristics of Metasystems: Toward Defining Metasystems' Governance Mechanism

To effectively design, integrate, and understand the functional operations of metasystems, researchers and practitioners need a standard definition and common understanding of metasystems as an extended system-of-systems.     

Guest Editors' Introduction: Strategic Planning in Today's IT Environment

This introduction to the special issue dedicated to strategic planning presents the complexity and dynamics of global enterprise IT management in today's tight and unstable economic environment. IT managers and enterprise executives can achieve their overall business success by opening channels of communications among their normally independent organizational silos and by creating an enterprise-shared culture that recognizes the critical role IT has in this endeavor.     

ERP: a literature survey

Most of organizations have a “functional structure,” which is composed of various functional units. In some cases, each functional unit works towards their own goals and objectives, rather than the organizational goals. This is further aggravated because information flow is restricted by functions, and even when other functional units want to take a systemic view, they do not have the needed information to do so. These are the issues addressed by “Enterprise Resource Planning” (ERP) software solutions providing a common and consistent system to capture information organization-wide, with minimum redundancy. Today, many organizations acquire and implement ERP to improve their operational performance and create strategic value; however, they fail to achieve these objective due to lack of knowledge and better understanding of ERP and its lifecycle. Although, so far, hundreds of research article are published separately focusing on ERP and various issues related to its lifecycle and management, there is no survey and overview of the article published in different top-tier journals. We believe that a survey of the articles related to ERP provides better understanding of ERP and attempts to create an information bank of the published articles these in turn, contribute to improving the performance of an enterprise in terms of achieving its strategic value creation goals. In this study, we attempt to summarize our survey and review of the articles related to ERP.     

Surveying the risks and benefits of IT outsourcing

In this article a survey of senior IT managers points to political and legal issues as the top risk concerns. These managers also say offshoring can create more jobs. Most companies consider offshore outsourcing as a way to reduce cost and increase efficiencies. Outsourcing can be a viable option for companies and can also help businesses and economies in the countries involved, as long as the outsourcing company objectively identifies and analyzes the benefits and risks.     

The Application of Analytic Hierarchy Process to Determine Proportionality Constant of the Taguchi Quality Loss Function

Taguchi's philosophy of quality improvement is quite unique and challenging. Traditionally, quality management focused on conformance to specifications within a given range. In Taguchi's philosophy, the aim of quality management should be achieving a specific target value. Any deviation from the predetermined target value results in a loss (e.g., due to customer dissatisfaction). Taguchi measures this loss with a quadratic function called quality loss function (QLF). An important component of QLF is the proportionality constant ( ). An inaccurate or erroneous value for can result in misallocation of the organizational resources and can easily lead to chaos in quality management efforts. Thus, an accurate estimate for is of utmost importance. This paper proposes a new methodology for calculating the proportionality constant . To this end, the analytical hierarchy process is used to estimate the value of the proportionality constant in QLF. It is argued that the proposed methodology takes into account the relative importance of various quality characteristics and captures different levels of sensitivity along the loss function. Both symmetric and asymmetric loss functions are considered.