bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
IT Outsourcing Practices in Australia and Taiwan
Authors: Lin Chad , Lin Koong
Published: May 2011

Globally, information technology (IT) outsourcing has spread quickly in many countries and spending by organizations in IT outsourcing is increasing rapidly each year. According to Gartner (Blackmore, De Souza, Young, Goodness, and Silliman, 2005), total spending on IT outsourcing worldwide is likely to rise from US $184 billion in 2003 to US $256 billion in 2008. However, defining IT outsourcing is not an easy task as it can mean different things to different organizations. Hirschheim and Lacity (2000) define IT outsourcing as the “practice of transferring IT assets, leases, staff, and management responsibility for delivery of services from internal IT functions to third-party vendors.” Willcocks and Lester (1997) define outsourcing as the “commissioning of third-party management of IT assets or activities to deliver required results.” The scope and range of outsourcing services have also increased as well, as evidenced by the promotion of BPO (business process outsourcing), ASP (applications service providers), global outsourcing, R&D (research and development) outsourcing, and web and e-business outsourcing (Gonzales Gascon and Llopis, 2005; Huang, Lin, and Lin, 2005). While there is already much research on the economics of IT outsourcing, critical success factors for IT outsourcing decision-making and for outsourcing vendor management (Barthelemy and Geyer, 2004; Hirschheim and Lacity, 2000), there is very little literature on the actual linkage between IT outsourcing and the use of evaluation methodologies in organizations, especially in how these organizations evaluate their IT outsourcing contracts and ensure that the benefits expected from these contracts are delivered eventually. The aim of this paper is to examine issues surrounding the evaluation and benefits realization processes in Australian and Taiwanese organizations undertaking IT outsourcing. The paper first reviews relevant literature with respect to IT outsourcing, the evaluation of IT outsourcing, and IT benefits realization. Key findings from a survey of the top 2000 Australian organizations, as well as a survey to top 3000 Taiwanese organizations, will then be presented. The paper examines these findings and issues in light of these large organizations’ evaluation practices.
Linking Information Technology, Knowledge Management, and Strategic Experimentation
Authors: Narayanan V. K.
Published: May 2011

Historically, the focus of IT infrastructure had been to capture the knowledge of experts in a centralized repository (Davenport & Prusak, 1998; Grover & Davenport, 2001; Nolan, 2001). The centralized databases contained knowledge that was explicit and historical (e.g., competitor pricing, market share), and the IT infrastructure served to facilitate functional decision making or to automate routine tasks (as in reengineering). The users of technology approached the repository to obtain data in a narrowly defined domain (Broadbent, Weill, & St. Clair, 1999). Consequently, IT originally played a significant, yet ultimately limited role in the strategy creation process. Management information systems (MISs) arguably generated information that was less applicable to strategy creation, as noted in early writings on the linkage between MIS and strategic planning (e.g., Lientz & Chen, 1981; Shank, Boynton, & Zmud, 1985; Holmes, 1985). The active management of knowledge was similarly underdeveloped. Despite the fact that strategic decision makers had always emphasized the role of tacit knowledge, the actual importance of knowledge was not explicitly recognized. Formalized knowledge management (Davenport & Prusak, 1998; Dalkir, 2005), with its associated terminology and tools, is a recent development and as such did not inform the strategic planning process. However, the shifts that have taken place in IT infrastructures over the last decade and the recent developments in knowledge management (KM) have brought them closer to the creators of strategy. Indeed, both IT and knowledge management are increasingly enablers in the contemporary strategic management practice: 1. IT infrastructure is transitioning in its focus from the functional work unit to a process orientation. Whereas computer systems were once the focal point, the new infrastructure is network centric, with an emphasis on business knowledge (Nolan, 2001). For example, traditional search engines utilized rule-based reasoning to identify elements matching specific search criteria; the “state-of-the-art” knowledge management systems employ case-based search techniques to identify all relevant knowledge components meeting the user’s request (Grover & Davenport, 2001). 2. IT now takes into account contexts that include crossfunctional experts, knowledgeable on a wide variety of potentially relevant issues. Additionally, there is greater emphasis on the integration of infrastructure with structure, culture (Gold, Malhotra, & Segars, 2001), and organizational roles (Awad & Ghaziri, 2004). In many ways, the newer IT infrastructures have enabled the garnering of explicit knowledge throughout the organization to speed up strategy creation. The objective of this article is to outline how the developments in IT and KM are facilitating the evolution of strategic management to strategic experimentation to create quantum improvements in strategy creation and unprecedented developmental opportunities for the field if IT.
Mobile Ad Hoc Network Security Vulnerabilities
Authors: Trivedi Animesh K. , Arora Rajan , Kapoor Rishi , Sanyal Sudip
Published: May 2011

Mobile ad hoc networks inherently have very different properties from conventional networks. A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a collection of mobile nodes that are self configuring (network can be run solely by the operation of the end-users), capable of communicating with each other, establishing and maintaining connections as needed. Nodes in MANET are both routers and terminals. These networks are dynamic in the sense that each node is free to join and leave the network in a nondeterministic way. These networks do not have a clearly defined physical boundary, and therefore, have no specific entry or exit point. Although MANET is a very promising technology, challenges are slowing its development and deployment. Nodes in ad hoc networks are in general limited in battery power, CPU and capacity. Hence, the transmission ranges of these devices are also limited and nodes have to rely on the neighboring nodes in the network to route the packet to its destination node. Ad hoc networks are sometimes referred to as multi-hop networks, where a hop is a direct link between two nodes. MANET has many important applications, including battlefield operations, emergency rescues, mobile conferencing, home and community networking, sensor dust and so forth.
Mobile Ad Hoc Networks
Authors: Calafate Carlos Tavares , Garrido Pedro Pablo , Oliver José , Pérez Malumbres Manuel
Published: May 2011

This chapter offers a state-of-the-art review in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). It first introduces the history of ad hoc networks, explaining the ad hoc network concept and referring to the main characteristics of these networks and their fields of application. It then focuses on technologies and protocols specific to ad hoc networks. Firstly, it refers to relevant proposals targeting the PHY/MAC layers. Secondly, it discusses the different routing protocol proposals for ad hoc networks according to the category to which they belong. Finally, it includes an overview of the different protocols proposed for ad hoc networks at the transport layer. The chapter concludes with some remarks on future trends in these networks.
Mobile Agent Authentication and Authorization in E-Commerce
Authors: Guan Sheng-Uei
Published: May 2011

With the increasing worldwide usage of the Internet, electronic commerce (e-commerce) has been catching on fast in a lot of businesses. As e-commerce booms, there comes a demand for a better system to manage and carry out transactions. This has led to the development of agent-based e-commerce. In this new approach, agents are employed on behalf of users to carry out various e-commerce activities. Although the tradeoff of employing mobile agents is still a contentious topic (Milojicic, 1999), using mobile agents in e-commerce attracts much research effort, as it may improve the potential of their applications in e-commerce. One advantage of using agents is that communication cost can be reduced. Agents traveling and transferring only the necessary information save the bandwidth and reduce the chances of network clogging. Also, users can let their agents travel asynchronously to their destinations and collect information or execute other applications while they can disconnect from the network (Wong, 1999). Although agent-based technology offers such advantages, the major factor that is holding people back from employing agents is still the security issues involved. On the one hand, hosts cannot trust incoming agents belonging to unknown owners, because malicious agents may launch attacks on the hosts and other agents. On the other hand, agents may also have concerns on the reliability of hosts and will be reluctant to expose their secrets to distrustful hosts. To build bilateral trust in an e-commerce environment, the authorization and authentication schemes for mobile agents should be well designed. Authentication checks the credentials of an agent before processing the agent’s requests. If the agent is found to be suspicious, the host may decide to deny its service requests. Authorization refers to the permissions granted for the agent to access whichever resource it requested. In our previous work, we have proposed a SAFER (Secure Agent Fabrication, Evolution & Roaming) architecture (Zhu, 2000), which aims to construct an open, dynamic and evolutionary agent system for e-commerce. We have already elaborated agent fabrication, evolution, and roaming in Guan (1999, 2001, 2002), Wang (2001), and Zhu (2001). This article gives an overview of the authentication and authorization issues on the basis of the SAFER architecture.
Mobile Agent-Based Information Systems and Security
Authors: Jiao Yu , Hurson Ali R. , Potok Thomas E.
Published: May 2011

The rapid expansion of information and the high demand for timely data delivery have triggered the development of a large number of wireless information systems that enable users to access data from anywhere at anytime. These applications must face three major challenges: the limited bandwidth of wireless medium, intermittent network connectivity, and the fact that portable devices have limited CPU power, memory, and energy sources. Traditional distributed system design methods, such as the client/server-based computational model, cannot meet the aforementioned challenges very well. In contrast, a relatively new distributed system design paradigm, the mobile agent-based computation model, provides natural solutions to these problems. In this article, we will introduce the concept of mobile agent-based computing, review some examples of existing agent-based information systems, and discuss security issues that are related to them.
Mobile Spatial Interaction and Mediated Social Navigation
Authors: Bilandzic Mark , Foth Marcus
Published: May 2011

The increasing ubiquity of location and context-aware mobile devices and applications, geographic information systems (GIS) and sophisticated 3D representations of the physical world accessible by lay users is enabling more people to use and manipulate information relevant to their current surroundings (Scharl & Tochtermann, 2007). The relationship between users, their current geographic location and their devices are summarised by the term “mobile spatial interaction” (MSI), and stands for the emerging opportunities and affordances that location sensitive and Internet capable devices provide to its users. The first major academic event which coined the term in its current usage was a workshop on MSI (see http://msi.ftw.at/) at the CHI 2007 (Fröhlich et al., 2007). Mobile spatial interaction is grounded in a number of technologies that recently started to converge. First, the development of mobile networks and mobile Internet technologies enables people to request and exchange specific information from anywhere at anytime. Using their handheld devices people can, for example, check the latest news, request recent stock exchange values or communicate via mobile instant messaging. The second enabler is global positioning technology. Mobile devices with integrated Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers—soon to be joined by the Russian Global Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS) and the European Galileo system—are aware of their current latitude and longitude coordinates and can use this data as value added information for context-aware services, that is, mobile applications that refer to information relevant to the current location of the user. A possible use scenario for such an information request would be, for example, “find all clubs and pubs in a radius of 500 meters from my current position.” The focus of this work is to enrich the opportunities given by such location aware services with selected Web 2.0 design paradigms (Beer & Burrows, 2007; Kolbitsch & Maurer, 2006) toward mobile social networking services that are bound to specific physical places. User participation, folksonomy and geotagging are three design methods that have become popular in Web 2.0 community-platforms and proven to be effective information management tools for various domains (Casey & Savastinuk, 2007; Courtney, 2007; Macgregor & McCulloch, 2006). Applying such a design approach for a mobile information system creates a new experience of collaboration between mobile users, a step toward what Jaokar refers to as the Mobile Web 2.0 (Jaokar & Fish, 2006), that is, a chance for mediated social navigation in physical spaces.
Monitoring Strategies for Internet Technologies
Authors: Urbaczewski Andrew
Published: May 2011

Most large organizations that provide Internet access to employees also employ some means to monitor and/or control that usage (Reuters, 2002). A 2005 AMA report indicates that 76% of companies monitor worker’s Web surfing, while 26% have fired workers for improper Internet usage (AMA, 2005). This chapter provides a classification and description of various control mechanisms that an organization can use to curb or control personal Internet usage. Some of these solutions are technical, while others rely instead on interpersonal skills to curb cyberslacking. After a review of goals for a monitoring program, a list of different activities to monitor and/or control will also be provided. Then a discussion of different techniques for monitoring and associated products will be explored, followed by a discussion of fit between corporate culture and monitoring.
Multimedia Information Filtering
Authors: Parmar Minaz J. , Angelides Marios C.
Published: May 2011

In the film Minority Report (20th Century Fox, 2002), which is set in the near future, there is a scene where a man walks into a department store and is confronted by a holographic shop assistant. The holographic shop assistant recognises the potential customer by iris-recognition technology. The holographic assistant then welcomes the man by his name and starts to inform him of offers and items that he would be interested in based on his past purchases and what other shoppers who have similar tastes have purchased. This example of future personalised shopping assistants that can help a customer find shopping goods is not too far away from becoming reality in some form or another. Malone, Grant, Turbak, Brobst, and Cohen (1987) introduced three paradigms for information selection, cognitive, economic, and social, based on their work with a system they called the Information Lens. Their definition of cognitive filtering, the approach actually implemented by the Information Lens, is equivalent to the “content filter” defined earlier by Denning, and this approach is now commonly referred to as “content-based” filtering. Their most important contribution was to introduce an alternative approach that they called social (now also more commonly called collaborative) filtering. In social filtering, the representation of a document is based on annotations to that document made by prior readers of the document. In the 1990s much work was done on collaborative filtering (CF). There were three systems that were considered to be the quintessential recommender systems. The Grouplens project (Miller, Albert, Lam, Konstan, & Riedl, 2003) initially was used for filtering items from the Usenet news domain. This later became the basis of Movielens. The Bellcore Video recommender system (Hill, Stead, Rosenstein, & Furnas, 1995), which recommended video films to users based on what they had rented before, and Ringo (Shardanand & Maes, 1995), which later was published on the Web and marketed as Firefly, used social filtering to recommend movies and music.
Multimedia Software Interface Design for Special-Needs Users
Authors: Lányi Cecilia Sik
Published: May 2011

Most software engineering companies do not develop for special users, because they do not see the potential in this limited market. But 10% of the population worldwide are handicapped. In the United States, 14% of the population are estimated to suffer from a disability. In the population aged over 65, this figure becomes 50%. Disabilities are strongly linked with age, and our societies are facing a growing number of people aged 75 and more, who are more likely to have impairments or disabilities. This group will comprise 14.4% of the population in 2040, compared with 7.5% in 2003?almost a twofold increase (EU Commission, 2003). It is not a simple task to assess the effectiveness of multimedia for all users with disabilities. The question is more complicated if the users have special needs. This article provides a minimal requirements list that every software engineer, computer scientist, and Web designer should take into account if they develop a new multimodal software or a new Web site with multimedia elements.
Networked Virtual Environments
Authors: Bouras Christos , Giannaka Eri , Tsiatsos Thrasyvoulos
Published: May 2011

The inherent need of humans to communicate acted as the moving force for the formation, expansion and wide adoption of the Internet. The need for communication and collaboration from distance resulted in the evolution of the primitive services originally offered (i.e., e-mail) to advanced applications, which offer a high sense of realism to the user, forming a reality, the so-called virtual reality. Even though virtual environments were first introduced as stand alone applications, which could run on a single computer, the promising functionalities of this new form of representation and interaction as well as the familiarity of the users with it drew increased research interest. This fact resulted in virtual reality to be viewed as the solution for achieving communication and collaboration between scattered users, in various areas of interest, such as entertainment, learning, training, etc. This led to the creation of Networked Virtual Environments (NVEs). In particular, NVEs were first introduced in the 1980’s and the first areas that exploited the newborn technology were military and entertainment applications. In particular, the U.S Department of Defense played an important role to the direction of applications, protocols and architectures for this promising technology. In the 1990’s, where academic networks became a reality, NVEs drew increased academic research interest and a variety of applications and platforms were developed. In particular, the academic community has reinvented, extended, and documented what the Department of Defense has done. The evolution and the results extracted by research on this field were widely adopted from multiple areas of interest, with main representative the entertainment area. Since 2000, where virtual reality technology, processing power of computers and the network were significantly improved, a wide variety of systems, protocols and applications were developed. In particular, the familiarization the end users with the Internet and the promising advantages and opportunities of Virtual Reality contributed to currently view NVEs as an effective tool for supporting communication and collaboration of scattered users. Currently, the application areas of NVEs have been widely expanded and their use can be found at military and industrial team training, collaborative design and engineering, multiplayer games (Zyda, 2005), mobile entertainment, virtual shopping malls, online tradeshows and conferences, remote customer support, distance learning and training, science, arts, industry, etc. Summarizing, NVEs nowadays tend to consist a powerful tool for communication and collaboration, with applications ranging from entertainment and teleshopping to engineering and medicine. To this direction, in the recent years important active research on this topic in both academic and industrial research is taking place.
Object-Oriented Software Reuse in Business Systems
Authors: Brandon Jr. Daniel
Published: May 2011

“Reuse [software] engineering is a process where a technology asset is designed and developed following architectural principles, and with the intent of being reused in the future” (Bean, 1999). “If programming has a Holy Grail, widespread code reuse is it with a silver bullet. While IT has made and continues to make laudable progress in our reuse, we never seem to make great strides in this area” (Grinzo, 1998). “The quest for that Holy Grail has taken many developers over many years down unproductive paths” (Bowen, 1997). This article is an overview of software reuse methods, particularly object oriented, that have been found effective in business systems over the years.
Observations on Implementing Specializations within an IT Program
Authors: Slazinski Erick D.
Published: May 2011

With a projected 2.26 million additional jobs to fill in various computer fields by the year 2010, there are and will continue to be ample job opportunities in the computer industry. However, the computer field is far too broad for one individual to be an expert in the entire field. Therefore it may be more useful for students to have the opportunity to concentrate their studies in a specific interest area within a broader Information Technology (IT) degree. IT educators throughout the United States (US) have paid attention to the needs and demands of the IT industry. To address the need for IT graduates with specialized skills, many of the leading universities have created programs which allow undergraduate students to specialize or focus their studies. This chapter will discuss findings on the state of IT programs with regards to their course offerings. One area of specialization, or track, is presented as an example. It will be noted that even within a specialty area, there can be further specializations. In addition to supporting the students pursuing the specialty area, general knowledge courses must also be offered to those pursuing other specialty areas.
Online Communities and Community Building
Authors: Kindsmüller Martin C. , Leuchter Sandro , Urbas Leon
Published: May 2011

“Online community” is one of today’s buzzwords. Even though superficially it is not hard to understand, the term has become somewhat vague while being extensively used within the e-commerce business. Within this article, we refer to online community as being a voluntary group of users who partake actively in a certain computer-mediated service. The term “online community” is preferred over the term “virtual community,” as it denotes the character of the community more accurately: community members are interacting online as opposed to face to face. Furthermore, the term “virtual community” seems too unspecific, because it includes other communities that only exist virtually, whereas an online community in our definition is always a real community in the sense that community members know that they are part of the community. Nevertheless, there are other reasonable definitions of online community. An early and most influencing characterization (which unfortunately utilizes the term “virtual community”) was coined by Howard Rheingold (1994), who wrote: “…virtual communities are cultural aggregations that emerge when enough people bump into each other often enough in cyberspace. A virtual community is a group of people […] who exchanges words and ideas through the mediation of computer bulletin boards and networks” (p. 57). A more elaborated and technical definition of online community was given by Jenny Preece (2000), which since then, has been a benchmark for developers. She stated that an online community consists of four basic constituents (Preece, 2000, p. 3): 1. Socially interacting people striving to satisfy their own needs. 2. A shared purpose, such as interest or need that provides a reason to cooperate. 3. Policies in the form of tacit assumptions, rituals, or rules that guide the community members’ behavior. 4. A technical system that works as a carrier that mediates social interaction. Not explicitly mentioned in this characterization but nevertheless crucial for our aforementioned definition (and not in opposition to Preece’s position) is voluntary engagement.
An Overview of Executive Information Systems (EIS) Research in South Africa
Authors: Averweg Udo Richard
Published: May 2011

Executive information systems (EIS) are designed to serve the needs of executive users in strategic planning and decision- making. Sometimes the terms “executive information systems” and “executive support systems” are used interchangeably (Turban, McLean, & Wetherber, 1999). Definitions of EIS are varied but all identify the need for information that support decisions about the organization. EIS can be defined as “a computerized system that provides executives with easy access to internal and external information that is relevant to their critical success factors” (Watson, Houdeshel, & Rainer, 1997). This article is organized as follows: The background to EIS implementation is given. EIS research studies undertaken in South Africa are then described. Some future EIS trends are then suggested.
An Overview of Knowledge Translation
Authors: Groeneboer Chris , Whitney Monika
Published: May 2011

Knowledge translation (KT) was traditionally framed as a problem of moving research results into policy and practice. The impetus for the flow of knowledge originated with researchers constructing new knowledge and seeing its utility, or with policymakers and administrators seeing problems in practice and looking to researchers for solutions. In the 1970s, a shift in focus away from knowledge use was exemplified by Caplan’s (1979) two-communities theory, which posits that researchers and policymakers comprise two different communities with two different languages (Jacobson, Butterill, & Goering, 2003). A shift back to knowledge use with a new focus on user-centered design is evident in more recent KT models that provide frameworks for researcher and user interaction in order to build better understanding between diverse groups. The flow of knowledge from its construction in one context to its use in another context has been variously termed knowledge translation, knowledge exchange, knowledge transfer, research transfer, technology transfer, knowledge transformation, knowledge dissemination, knowledge mobilization, knowledge utilization, and research utilization. The terms are often used synonymously, but a specific term is sometimes used because it highlights a particular component of the knowledge flow process. For example, knowledge exchange implies a sharing of information between partners of equal value and focuses on the movement of knowledge between them, whereas research utilization implies the transformation of research results into usable knowledge and focuses on embedding the usable knowledge in practice. Information technologies have the potential to support knowledge translation in powerful ways. Key processes in the translation of knowledge include: (1) knowledge creation, management, and dissemination; (2) recognition of links between existing knowledge and its potential application to problems or practice; (3) translation into usable knowledge in practice; and (4) change in practice. Information technologies are a natural solution for these knowledge translation processes. For example, group and social software such as blogs and wikis support collaborative construction and sharing of knowledge; knowledge management systems support capture, storage, accessibility, and maintenance of constructed knowledge; and most Internet-based technologies support dissemination of information. Well-designed virtual communities provide online environments for the kinds of human interaction that enable collaborative exploration of ideas, that foster recognition of potential links between existing knowledge and its application to solve problems or change practice, and that inspire people to transform their practice. Data mining and artificial intelligence techniques can be used to enhance identification of potential links between knowledge in one context and problems in another context.
An Overview of Semantic-Based Visual Information Retrieval
Authors: Zhang Yu-Jin
Published: May 2011

Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) could be described as a process framework for efficiently retrieving images from a collection by similarity. The retrieval relies on extracting the appropriate characteristic quantities describing the desired contents of images. Content-based video retrieval (CBVR) made its appearance in treating video in the similar means as CBIR treating images. Content-based visual information retrieval (CBVIR) combines CBIR and CBVR together (Zhang, 2003). With the progress of electronic equipments and computer techniques for visual information capturing and processing, a huge number of image and video records have been collected. Visual information becomes a well-known information format and a popular element in all aspects of our society. The large visual data make the dynamic research to be focused on the problem of how to efficiently capture, store, access, process, represent, describe, query, search, and retrieve their contents. In the last years, CBVIR has experienced significant growth and progress, resulting in a virtual explosion of published information. It has attracted many interests from image engineering, computer vision and the database community. The current focus of CBVIR is around capturing highlevel semantics, that is, the so-called Semantic-based Visual Information Retrieval (SBVIR). This article will first show some statistics about the research publications on SBVIR in recent years to give an idea about its developments statue. It then gives an overview on several current centers of attention, by summarizing results on subjects such as image and video annotation, human-computer interaction, models and tools for semantic retrieval, and miscellaneous techniques in applications. Finally, some future research directions, the domain knowledge and learning, relevance feedback and association feedback, as well as research at even high levels, such as cognitive level and affective level, are pointed out.
An Overview of Trust Evaluation Models within E-Commerce Domain
Authors: Mahmood Omer
Published: May 2011

This chapter outlines various models which can be used to predict users’ trust on online shopping, to enhance user’s trust on online vendor, and to estimate the risk in an online transaction. The discussed models are selected to provide an overview of different aspects which can be used by the service providers and developers to identify the factors which impact user’s online trust. The factors that have been identified can be further used as a guide to enhance user’s trust levels. The rest of the article is organized as follows. In the next section, four models are discusses starting from Cheung and Lee (2000) conceptual model of trust in electronic environment to the model presented by Mahmood (2006a) that relies on mathematical equations to assist user to compare and evaluate online retailers. After discussing the presented models, the impact and effect of Web 2.0 technologies are discussed in future directions. The potential use of FOAF and RDF to create completely decentralized repository of users’ trust evaluations which can be tapped into any application that uses Web 2.0 is also discussed in future directions. Concluding remarks and model comparison are presented the conclusion.
Pedagogical Perspectives on M-Learning
Authors: Torrisi-Steel Geraldine
Published: May 2011

The advent of multimedia on desktop computers in the late 1980s and early 1990s heralded an era of educational technology that held the promise of revolutionising the business of teaching and learning by facilitating a shift from traditional teacher-centred methods to more effective student-centred approaches. During the mid-late 1990s the popularisation of the Internet, added to educational technology a new dimension of “connectedness” between people and between people and information resources. Online learning and e-learning became icons of the era. In late 1990s and early 2000s major players in the mobile phone industry worked on developing a wireless infrastructure to allow for wireless communication between devices, WAP (wireless application protocol) being one of the principle outcomes. This set the stage for the wireless Internet and for another new dimension to educational technology, mobility. Thus, the maturation of multimedia, the Internet and communication technologies together with development and availability of ubiquitous computing devices and wireless networking birthed the notion of mobile learning (m-learning) or “learning on the move.” Like many other media technologies before, m-learning is considered to have the potential to reshape teaching and learning, in this instance, holding promise of unprecedented connectivity and learning interactions between learners, learners and educators, information and computing resources, anywhere, anytime. This article seeks to facilitate the realisation of the pedagogical potential of m-learning by proposing a model for the construction of m-learning spaces. The proposed model is founded upon a pedagogical framework directing attention to guiding philosophies, technology integration, and the capabilities of mobile devices.
Performance Implications of Pure, Applied, and Fully Formalized Communities of Practice
Authors: Terjesen Siri
Published: May 2011

Interest in knowledge-based perspectives on the firm has grown in both practitioner and academic realms, spurred by management bestsellers such as Senge’s Fifth Discipline (1990) and the acknowledgement that intangible assets are key to the firm’s sustainable competitive advantage. Knowledge management tools and processes are used by organizations to identify, create, represent, and distribute knowledge for reuse, awareness, and learning. One component of knowledge management is the “communities of practice” (CoPs) concept. CoPs are informal networks of individuals who possess various levels of a common capability and apply their knowledge in pursuit of a similar endeavor (Brown & Duguid, 1991). For example, Xerox technicians solve problems by relying on informal communication with colleagues in addition to formal user user manuals. Created as a response to bureaucratization, CoPs emerge from individuals’ passions for a particular activity and the term is used to describe a formal of organization that is distinct from traditional formal boundaries around geographic and functional business units or other institutional affiliations and divisions. For the most part, managers use the CoP concept to encourage informal, situated learning (e.g., Hildreth & Kimble, 2004). However, some managers developed highly formalized structures with regulated membership, prescribed roles, scheduled meetings, and technical tools. This formalization distorts the original concept—that CoPs are created as a response to bureaucracy and are, by definition, emergent. The formalization of CoPs defeats both the original intent and the ability to reap full benefits for the firm. The chapter reviews three models of communities of practice — pure, applied, and formalized — and explores how coordination, opportunity, and knowledge flow costs in formalized CoPs can impede organizational performance.
A Primer on Text-Data Analysis
Authors: Rahal Imad , Wang Baoying , Schnepf James
Published: May 2011

Since the invention of the printing press, text has been the predominate mode for collecting, storing and disseminating a vast, rich range of information. With the unprecedented increase of electronic storage and dissemination, document collections have grown rapidly, increasing the need to manage and analyze this form of data in spite of its unstructured or semistructured form. Text-data analysis (Hearst, 1999) has emerged as an interdisciplinary research area forming a junction of a number of older fields like machine learning, natural language processing, and information retrieval (Grobelnik, Mladenic, & Milic-Frayling, 2000). It is sometimes viewed as an adapted form of a very similar research field that has also emerged recently, namely, data mining, which focuses primarily on structured data mostly represented in relational tables or multidimensional cubes. This article provides an overview of the various research directions in text-data analysis. After the “Introduction,” the “Background” section provides a description of a ubiquitous text-data representation model along with preprocessing steps employed for achieving better text-data representations and applications. The focal section, “Text-Data Analysis,” presents a detailed treatment of various text-data analysis subprocesses such as information extraction, information retrieval and information filtering, document clustering and document categorization. The article closes with a “Future Trends” section followed by a “Conclusion” section.
Reconciling the Perceptions and Aspirations of Stakeholders in a Technology Based Profession
Authors: Lowry Glenn , Turner Rodney
Published: May 2011

Information systems professionals help to achieve business and organizational goals through the use of information technology.a The information systems (IS) profession is teamoriented and project-based. It involves a blend of business knowledge and understanding, technical skills, and working relationships with business and technical professionals. The skills and knowledge involved range from traditional computing, wide ranging business related studies, to “soft” skills useful in working with individuals and teams to achieve organizational objectives. IS students are first and foremost concerned with future employability. Employers, on the other hand, often indicate that they want new graduates who can be immediately productive in their environment. Are the aspirations of students and employers fundamentally incompatible? How can IS educators help to find a workable and satisfying balance? How can information systems educators achieve a better fit between the workplace and the university “studyplace”?
Relating Cognitive Problem-Solving Style to User Resistance
Authors: Mullany Michael J.
Published: May 2011

This chapter explores cognitive problem-solving style and its impact on user resistance, based on the premise that the greater the cognitive difference (cognitive gap) between users and developers, the greater the user resistance is likely to be. Mullany (1989, 2003) conducted an empirical study demonstrating this. This study contradicts the findings of Huber (1983) and supports Carey (1991) in her conclusion that cognitive style theory, as applied to IS, should not be abandoned. Mullany’s findings, in fact, are the opposite. Kirton (1999, 2004) supported Mullany’s results. In particular, Mullany made use of Kirton’s (2004) adaption–innovation theory. The emergent instrument, called the Kirton adaption–innovation inventory (KAI; Kirton, 1999, 2004), was used by Mullany as his measure of cognitive style. Mullany’s study also investigated the relationship between user resistance and user ages and lengths of service in the organisation. It failed to show any relationship between these factors and user resistance. This countermands the findings of Bruwer (1984) and dismisses any intimation that older or longer-serving employees are necessarily more resistant to change as myths.
Security Issues in Distributed Transaction Processing Systems
Authors: Haraty R. A.
Published: May 2011

Transaction-processing systems (TPS) are becoming increasingly more available as commercial products. However, the approaches to the issues associated with using TPS in multilevel secure environments are still in the research stage. In this article, we address the issues of multilevel security in distributed transaction-processing systems. A distributed transaction-processing system (DTPS) is a collection of a finite number of centralized transaction-processing systems connected by a computer network. Each of these transaction- processing systems is controlled by a software layer and can be accessed both remotely and locally. Properties of a DTPS, such as data replication, may have a substantial effect on the security of the system. The security policies and integrity constraints adopted at each site may result in global security having inconsistent states. We address the issues of achieving a multilevel secure DTPS, and discuss the security constraints and data replication. In this work, we address the issues of achieving a multilevel secure DTPSs system and discuss the security constraints and the replication of data items. The next section provides some background. Then, next, an overview of a distributed transaction-processing system is presented. In the fourth section, security-related issues are discussed. In the fifth section, a multilevel secure distributed transactionprocessing system is presented. Then, in the next section, future trends are presented. The final section concludes the article.
Self-Organization in Social Software for Learning
Authors: Dron Jon
Published: May 2011

The Internet has long been touted as an answer to the needs of adult learners, providing a wealth of resources and the means to communicate in many ways with many people. This promise has been rarely fulfilled and, when it is, often by mimicking traditional instructor-led processes of education. As a large network, the Internet has characteristics that differentiate it from other learning environments, most notably due to its size: the sum of the value of a network increases as the square of the number of members (Kelly, 1998), even before aggregate effects are considered. Churchill (1943) said, “We shape our dwellings and afterwards our dwellings shape us.” If this is true of buildings then it is even more so of the fluid and ever-changing virtual environments made possible by the Internet. Our dwellings are no longer fixed but may be molded by the people that inhabit them. This article discusses a range of approaches that make use of this affordance to provide environments that support groups of adult learners in their learning needs.
Shortest Path Routing Algorithms in Multihop Networks
Authors: Misra Sudip
Published: May 2011

The topic of shortest path algorithms is very fundamental and important in information science and technology. Shortest path algorithms have evolved over many years and have found applications in different domains such as telecommunication networks, military, and transportation. There has been a lot of work undertaken on this topic in this area in the past. A lot of research is still being conducted. The topic is still poorly understood. This article should be helpful to readers, because it reviews some of the important works conducted in the area, out of the plenty of works available on this topic. The problem is so fundamental that whatever the interest areas of the readers may be, they will find the article useful. The popular traditional shortest path algorithms date back to 1958/1959 and were proposed by Dijkstra (1959), and Bellman (1958). Their algorithms found wide applications in the abovementioned domains for many years. However, they were static. Thereafter, many other algorithms were proposed in the last few decades, all of which can be classified to be either dynamic or semi-dynamic.
SMEs Amidst Global Technological Changes
Authors: Al-Qirim Nabeel A.Y.
Published: May 2011

In small countries such as New Zealand, small to mediumsized enterprises (SMEs) are defined as enterprises employing 19 or fewer employees. Small enterprises are defined as those employing zero to five full-time employees (FTEs) (often called microbusinesses), and medium-sized enterprises as those employing six to nineteen FTEs. Other countries, such as the United States and European countries, define their SMEs as having a much larger number of employees (200–500 or fewer). SMEs contribute significantly to the economies and to the employment levels of different countries in the world. For example, SMEs constitute around 95 percent of enterprises and account for 60–70 percent of employment within the countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD, 1997) and other countries across the globe, including the United States. Not to forget that SMEs are usually the source of most of the profound inventions and innovations (Iacovou, Benbasat, & Dexter, 1995). Historically, SMEs have been accused of being uncritical about the strategic importance of IT and its use in their businesses. This laggardness in adopting or using IT in business was attributed to various organisational, technological, and environmental deficiencies in SMEs. The recent emergence of the Internet, in general, and the Web, in particular, revolutionises business activities (Abell & Lim, 1996) and promises to provide unprecedented opportunities to SMEs to expand in scope and in market reach. However, despite the apparent media hype (Premkumar & Roberts, 1999) and the enthusiasm among academicians (Adam & Deans, 2000; Abell & Lim, 1996; Infotech Weekly, 1997; Poon & Swatman, 1999a) and professionals (Deloitte, 2000; IDC, 1998; PWHC, 1999) about electronic commerce (EC), the published EC research portrayed a gloomy picture about EC uptake and use by SMEs. Thus, investigating reasons behind such laggardness in adopting and in using EC effectively is essential. This research attempts to highlight some of the important issues that could assist in bridging the existing divide between SMEs and EC. These issues could be of interest to SMEs and to other stakeholders interested in SMEs and EC.
Technology and Transformation in Government
Authors: Homburg Vincent
Published: May 2011

The relation between technology and transformation is not as straightforward as might appear at first sight (Williams & Edge, 1996), for at least two reasons. First, the clamor for transformation and reform was first heard in the beginning of the 1990s (Osborne & Gaebler, 1992) without technology playing a role. Rather, the focus was on organizational and managerial changes, in particular focusing on establishing customer orientation and use of market-type mechanisms (Guy Peters, 1996; Hood, 1991; Pollitt, van Thiel, & Homburg, 2007), that later blended with the emergence of new technologies. Second, e-government practices throughout the world display a huge variety of forms, shapes and effects that are not easily attributed to technology alone. In the national policies of the United Kingdom and the United States, for instance, the focus is on achieving one-stop service shops that enable transactions with citizens on the basis of clearly defined “service themes” (Chadwick & May, 2003). At municipal levels in Sweden, on the other hand, e-government takes the form of electronic interactions between municipal commissioners and citizens, in such a way that citizens can watch video broadcasts of city council meetings, and can submit questions to commissioners during the half-way break (Grönlund, 2003).