Narrow Results

The purpose of this paper is to start a conceptual investigation of approximation rule based on VPRS as a result of the certainty degree of rules in complete information system that cannot exactly express the uncertainty of those in incomplete information system, and then an efficient approximation rule induction algorithm under the rough set framework is presented. Instead of focusing on the minimal rule set, this algorithm hierarchically extracts rules in multistages from data sets to suit changing environments in learning and classification. In addition, a heuristic strategy is employed in the algorithm to improve its performance and reduce the time consumed in inducing. Experiments are carried out, and the results show that the proposed algorithm is effective in inducing rules which can enhance their adaptive capacities.

Methods for supporting evolution of software-intensive systems are a competitive edge in software engineering as software is often operated over decades. Empirical research is useful to validate the effectiveness of these methods. However, empirical studies on software evolution are rarely comprehensive and hardly replicable. Collaboration may prevent these shortcomings. We designed CoCoMEP — a platform for supporting collaboration in empirical research on software evolution by shared knowledge. We report lessons learned from the application of the platform in a large research programme.

Clustering techniques are used to split data into clusters where each cluster contains elements that look more similar to elements in the same cluster than elements in other clusters. Some of these techniques are capable of handling clustering process uncertainty, while other techniques may have stability issues. In this paper, a novel method, called Minimum Information Gain Roughness (MIGR), is proposed to select the clustering attribute based on information entropy with rough set theory. To evaluate its performance, three benchmark UCI datasets are chosen to be clustered by using MIGR. Then, the resulting clusters are compared to those which are resulted from applying Min-Min-Rough (MMR) and information-theoretic dependency roughness (ITDR) algorithms. Both last-mentioned techniques were already compared with a variety of clustering algorithms like k-modes, fuzzy centroids, and fuzzy k-modes. The Global purity, the overall purity, and F-measure are considered here as performance measures to compare the quality of the resulting clusters. The experimental results show that the MIGR algorithm outperforms both MMR and ITDR algorithms for clustering categorical data.

The system designers and developers (SD&Ds) of a leading global Fortune 500 telecommunication corporation developed a Lean Management Information System (LMIS) for a Metropolitan Utility Company (MUC) located in the United States. The MUC needed a state-of-the-art information system to provide services for its expanding customer base, which was projected to grow at a rate of approximately 2.4% annually over the next ten years. This paper compares the legacy system with the LMIS and discusses lean management principles employed to design and develop the new system.

This paper seeks to develop and test a model to examine the relationships between, technical aspects of IS resources (IS alignment, IS resources technical quality, IS advancement), supply chain process integration, and firm performance. A questionnaire-based survey was conducted to collect data from 227 supply chain, logistics, or procurement/purchasing managers of leading manufacturing and retail organizations. Drawing on resources-based view of the firm, and through extending the concept of process integration in supply network, as well as broadening the scope of role of IS resources in relation to process integration and performance gain from the focal firm to the entire supply chain, we found that supply chain process integration is an important multidimensional intermediate organizational capability through which the value of IS resources for supply chain management can be materialized. This capability serves as a catalyst in transforming the value of technical aspects of IS resources into higher performance gain for a firm. Thus, the importance of formation of all dimensions of this capability across supply network should be realized. Moreover, the result suggests that the technical aspects of IS resources need to be jointly developed by supply partners to effectively form supply chain capabilities.

In their attempts to communicate innovation, technical writers produce what Everett Rogers calls "technology-embodied information," per the Diffusion of Innovations theory. This study focuses on technical writers working for multinational software firms in the Philippines and seeks to explain their function as gatekeepers in the information traffic between development centres and software users. The practices of technical writers — representative of eight software companies — are collected, described, and analysed according to qualitative design. The study uses the focus group discussion as its primary research tool, triangulated by portfolio and process documentation analyses. Key themes are presented in step-flow. The study illustrates technical communication tasks such as user profiling, knowledge capture, and information delivery within the framework of technology transfer.

The struggle for commercial supremacy through information is being fought on two points: Information management and enabling technologies. Over the last years, there has been an increasing focus on information architecture (IA) to help organisations distinguish and manage information as corporate resource. As the information complexity increases, more IA studies show that IA could provide the structural and process design to facilitate enterprise interoperation under the information sharing environment. However, limited IA has been addressed for the usage of managing the information sharing. Motivated by this observation, this paper presents a literature review that IA can be used to understand and manage information sharing, utilising the enterprise information resource statically and dynamically through IA implementation. First, enterprise IA description and definition are presented. Second, we analyse IA from a static and dynamic view to reveal the research streams on an architectural approach for information sharing management. Third, contributions and limitations are discussed. It is finally concluded by providing future IA research directions and implications for empirical applications. Our research illustrates that IA deployment imposes a positive influence on information sharing management.

The case study describes how the team members of a Tunisian Environmental Scanning Agriculture Observatory dealt with new ways of communicating introduced by technology. An inter-organizational computer supported collaborative work (CSCW) platform was implemented within the agriculture observatory to ameliorate the communication of information and knowledge between the stakeholders. Our study aims to determine what contextual conditions could impede the adoption of the new ways of communicating and sharing knowledge. A diagnostic tool was designed and used to assess the impact of culture, structure and top management attitude, as contextual conditions, on the achievement of the collaborative environmental scanning and knowledge exchange activity. To understand the dynamic between these variables and their interplay during the implementation phases of the CSCW, we conducted a longitudinal study. The results could assist managers at the organizational level; indeed they will be able to avoid failures and to better support the process of organizational change.

Customer’s satisfaction is crucial for companies worldwide. An integrated strategy composes omnichannel communication systems, in which chabot is widely used. This system is supervised, and the key point is that the required training data are originally unlabelled. Labelling data manually is unfeasible mainly nowadays due to the considerable volume. Moreover, customer behaviour is often hidden in the data even for experts. This work proposes a methodology to find unknown entities and intents automatically using unsupervised learning. This is based on natural language processing (NLP) for text data preparation and on machine learning (ML) for clustering model identification. Several combinations for preprocessing, vectorisation, dimensionality reduction and clustering techniques, were investigated. The case study refers to a Brazilian electric energy company, with a data set of failed customer queries, that is, not met by the company for any reason. They correspond to about 30% (4,044 queries) of the original data set. The best identified intent model employed stemming for preprocessing, word frequency analysis for vectorisation, latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) for dimensionality reduction, and mini-batch $k$-means for clustering. This system was able to allocate 62% of the failed queries in one of the seven found intents. For instance, this new labelled data can be used for the training of NLP-based chatbots contributing to a greater generalisation capacity, and ultimately, to increase customer satisfaction.

The success of information system process depends on accuracy of software estimation. Estimation is done at initial phase of software development. It requires a collection of all relevant required information for estimating the software effort. In this paper, a methodology is proposed to maintain a knowledgeable use case repository to store the use cases of various projects in several software project-related domains. This acts as a reference model to compare similar use cases of similar types of projects. The use case points are calculated and using this, schedule estimation and effort estimation of a project are calculated using the formulas of software engineering. These values are compared with the estimated effort and scheduled effort of a new project under development. Apart from these, the effective machine learning technique called neural network is used to measure how accurately the information is processed by use of case repository framework. The proposed machine learning-based use case repository system helps to estimate and analyze the effort using the machine learning algorithms.

Drugs are essential for the prevention and treatment of diseases. However, co-administration of multiple drugs may cause serious adverse drug reactions, which are usually known but sometimes unknown. Package inserts of prescription drugs are supposed to contain risks and side effects, but such information is not necessarily complete. At the core of efforts to improve prescription quality, there is reliance on the extent and quality of information used for decision of a medical doctor. To address this on-going need, GraphSAW provides users a comprehensive view on drug-related pharmacological and molecular information. The features of GraphSAW allow users to analyze drug cocktails for adverse drug reactions and drug-induced diseases. Network visualization by drug mapping enables exploring associative networks of drugs, pathways, and diseases to fully understand effects of drugs in an intuitive way. GraphSAW is meant to be a platform and starting point for health professionals and researchers for educational and scientific research in order to achieve substantial improvements in patient safety.

This article investigates the form and nature of resistance to technical change in implementing information systems. The data come from three different case studies in different environment. The first case comes from a factory where work is done to support technological development but the development is not seen in direct throughout this process. The second case comes from an environment where the nature of work is highly human and social; technology is serving only as a tool. The third case is directly connected with technological development and change and the workers are the developers. Each environment has its special technology and relation. A human being is a part of an organization and tends toward inertia and stability. Resistance to change is always related to the angle of view that is used. The information system with its required technology is a part of the organization where it is used. The implementation of an information system influences on the functions in the organization and any changes in the organization result in some resistance. The resistance can be known or unknown and the influences of the resistance can be dramatic on the success of the implementation. In every case in this article the new information system is more technical and more complex than its predecessor. One purpose of this article is to consider the nature of resistance to technical change in different environments and to consider its influence on the implementation in that culture. It seems that there will be resistance to change and it is independent of the branch and culture of the environment. Another purpose of this article is to find out, how to affect on the possible resistance to technical change. This article consists of a literature review, a review of three different information system implementations, and the phenomena of resistance to change in the implementations. The user role is emphasized in the paper. At the end of this article there is a discussion about how the resistance to technical change was managed in the implementations in their very different working cultures and how it was seen in the success of the implementations.

This paper focuses on how organisations utilise external capabilities to procure high-technology products and services. It is argued that the conceptual frameworks developed in the context of organisations which manufacture such products need to be modified to explain the behaviour of organisations that buy them. The use of third-party consultants in the procurement process is explored and a new class of temporary capabilities, termed Contingent Capabilities, is proposed. This class of capabilities occupies the boundary between accepted notions of core and non-core, and play an essential role in the innovation process. The roles of two distinct categories of Contingent Capabilities, strategic and tactical, within the innovation process are explored. The paper concludes with an agenda for further work in this area.

Let us consider the following scenario: A human is working with a corpus of text documents. In this corpus, the human needs to know documents with similar content and highlight relevant locations in the retrieved documents. An information system displaying the contents of the corpus and providing an information retrieval agent will help the human. To perform information retrieval on the corpus, the agent used internally in the information system may need additional data associated with the documents. In order to support this, the so-called Subjective Content Descriptions (SCDs) provide additional location-specific data for text documents. SCDs are subjective in the sense that the agent associates data with sentences to reflect the beliefs of users. In our scenario, the agent needs SCDs referencing sentences of similar content across various documents in the corpus and most text documents are not associated with SCDs. Therefore, this paper presents UESM, the Unsupervised Estimator for SCD Matrices, an approach to associate any corpus with SCDs. In an evaluation, we show that the performance of UESM in estimating topics of similar content in the corpus is on par with Latent Dirichlet Allocation, while UESM provides the SCDs referencing sentences of similar content.

The objective of this chapter is to describe the purpose of using cost information for internal use of the organization by interviewing several hospitals, and to compare the differences in performance measures from the perspective of information system and influence system. The results of the survey suggested that all hospitals intended to use cost information as an influence system. The performance measures differed among the hospitals, with measures of profit scale by department, and a rate of change in revenue and some costs by department. The use of performance measures as an influence system differed among the three facilities. In other words, it became clear that each hospital used the indicators and non-financial indicators obtained from departmental costing with the intention of influencing the improvement of profit, the reduction of cost, and the improvement of motivation. When implementing departmental costing, it is necessary to consider not only what measures are used to evaluate performance, but also what impact the measures are intended to have.

The routing management styles of Information System Project (ISP) were surveyed, and the two basic solutions of process control were discussed. The concept of Process Pattern is suggested based on the analysis of strategies of process management. Some typical process patterns are analyzed and the XP Pattern is summarized.

Software development should be a disciplined activity, which means that it is to be driven by well-defined processes. An organization that is to be effective in defining such processes must acquire certain capabilities, and, as it acquires the capabilities, the organization becomes more mature. Capability models define the capabilities and assign them to capability levels. This chapter centers on the Software Capability Maturity Model (SW–CMM) and Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), developed by the Software Engineering Institute. Inspired by the SW–CMM, specialized capability models have been developed for individual parts of the software process and specific application domains. Two such models, for requirements engineering and information systems development, are examined in some detail.

The information-based economy has promoted a greater competition among firms. Information and communication technologies have become one of the major factors influencing the decision-making process in firms operating in a global context. A series of information and communication technologies can assist with different types and levels of the decision-making process in organizations. The types of decisions facing businesses vary considerably. The main objective of the chapter is to describe how different types of information and communication technologies can be applied to improve the decision-making process in the area of management information systems in organizations. We are going to offer examples by applying a case study methodology in firms using the above-mentioned information and communication technologies.

Financial management business includes modules of budget management, cost management, fund management, asset management, general ledger management and decision support. With the increase of Western Pipeline Company's business expansion, increasingly complex financial accounting and financial set of books appeared, doubling the workload and other issues. To solve these problems, it is proposed through the information technology to implement financial information management system of covering the entire business processes to further regulate the financial management and reduce human intervention. The system completes integration of automated processes in the greatest degree, improves decision support, data sharing and improving financial management.

Good governance is a prerequisite for a transition toward a more sustainable development. Within western democracy, governance is understood either as a management function or as a leadership role played by the government, politicians, business, academics, not-for-profit and community organizations or just particular individuals within civil society. More recently, this top–down approach has been challenged by the newly emerging methods of deliberative democracy which entrust the power of decision-making to randomly selected representatives of the public following intensive processes of deliberation. The role of experts in the process is to inform the deliberations, and the role of the traditional structures of power within society is to implement the outcomes from the deliberations.

Information availability is a serious condition for the potential of deliberative democracy to be fulfilled. Within the climate change imperatives, the focus of information delivery should be on allowing for a global picture to be created as the basis for individual localized decision-making. Based on the unprecedented power of computer and communication technology, this chapter puts forward the concept of a Global Green Information System (GGIS) which can provide the virtual space for and support on-line deliberative democracy processes. The functions that such a GGIS can provide are monitoring, information storage and transmission, facilitation of decision-making and analysis of virtual sustainability models.

Despite its enormous importance and input, the GGIS however will only be a tool in the broader deliberative processes guided by the value systems represented by society members.