Mobile Application Systems for Home Care: Requirements Analysis & Usage Potentials

Home care services increasingly gain importance due to demographic implications: insights on recent developments inGermany hereby relevant to industrialized countries like the USA are given. Portable application systems have only beenestablished sporadically in German care environments unlike the comparable domain of technical field service. This paper willidentify possible mobile usage scenarios by matching healthcare requirements to state-of-the-art concepts, such as productservicesystems. Open potentials concerning the support of actual care processes can be concluded thereby. An integratedmobile application system can minimize knowledge deficits and enhance the quality of home care. The results are of potentialrelevance not only to patients and caregivers but also to different providers of healthcare or IT solutions

Towards an Integrated Framework for Applying the Agile Project Methodology to Manage Task Uncertainty in Disaster Management

Natural and man-made disasters are a constant threat to cultural civilizations and pose various risks to the basic foundations of our known existence. Not only do these situations occur at any time and place; they have various unknown determinants until the tragedy exists. Task uncertainty remains a critical factor in disaster management. This research study examines different facets of task uncertainty and develops an integrated research framework that applies the agile project methodology, in particular Scrum, to properly manage the impact of task uncertainty in disaster response, coordination, mitigation and recovery. Our framework provides insights to researchers and practitioners alike and offers guidelines for effective management of task uncertainty in projects. Implications for future research and practice are discussed

A Model for Understanding Success of Virtual Community Management Teams

Virtual communities enable people with common interests to interact with each other. Until today, research has mostly focused on the aspects of social interaction, usability and success factors for virtual communities. But due to the link between effective coordination of management teams and success of virtual communities, virtual community management becomes of great importance for both research and practice. Therefore, the imperative of this research is to develop an understanding of what drives management teams of successful virtual communities. Drawing on existing literature, we identify relevant theories and use a previous exploratory case study in order to provide a theoretical explanation of the variables and factors that affect the success of virtual community management teams. Furthermore, we provide first suggestions for measurement instruments in order to subsequently test our proposed model using empirical, quantitative methods

RFID Privacy Concerns: A Conceptual Analysis in the Healthcare Sector

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a wireless technology that utilizes radio waves to automatically capture data for identifying and tracking objects and/or people. As the use of RFID has grown, so has the chorus of privacy invasions against this identity-aware technology. With the planned deployment and use of RFID in healthcare, there are concerns regarding the social, technological and regulatory complexity of the RFID technology vis-à-vis the requirements of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). In this paper we use the principles of Fair Information Practice (FIP) as a guideline to examine the design of Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs). The outcome shows that PETs fail to incorporate the FIP principles and the importance of examining the social aspect of this ubiquitous technology from a sociotechnical perspective. The socio-technical perspective, with its emphasis on the examination of complex relations among social and technical interactions of RFID, can provide a useful insight to assess the societal impact and changes to individual behavior that may arise from privacy concerns. We believe that, using the groundwork laid down in this study, future research along these directions could contribute significantly to addressing privacy concerns expressed about RFID in the context of healthcare

Peer-to-Peer Service Quality and Its Consequences in Virtual Communities

Virtual communities are an increasingly popular way to conduct business over the Internet. However, from the service provider’s point of view they pose special challenges. In particular, unless the provider itself engages in content or service provision, the service relies entirely on its members for provision of services. The members should thus be seen as resources for service provision. This type of networked service production system implies challenges in terms of service quality management and, subsequently, value creation for community members. This paper explores these issues by revisiting service marketing and service operations literature on service quality. Our analysis of the literature indicates that firms facilitating virtual communities need to ensure the quality of their service by not only ensuring technical quality but also by nurturing the social aspects of the community that have an impact on the willingness of community members to provide service to each other

The AST View of ES Knowledge Management: Insights from World\u27s Fastest SAP R/3 Implementation

Organizations invest substantial resources in Enterprise Systems (ES) expecting positive outcomes for the organization. Implementing an ES is a lengthy-costly undertaking, with general upheaval for many of the organizations. Many organizations therefore are seriously considering rapid implementations of ES to reduce related resources. A rapid ES implementation requires effective management of knowledge (KM) as the extent of the engagement of external and internal parties (consultants and vendors with the client) is limited. This research paper introduces a theoretical model to assess the impact of KM in a rapid implementation of SAP R/3 that had completed in a record time of three weeks. Using the Adaptive Structuration Theory (AST) this paper proposes a theoretical model 1) to identify the KM enablers and KM strategies of an rapid ES implementation that facilitate knowledge creation, retention and transfer and 2) to determine the importance of knowledge transfer modes in a rapid ES implementation

The adoption of personalized music services – Combining qualitative and quantitative research –

In the last decade the music industry has been developing different Internet based music services. Lately personalization via recommendation is gaining popularity. In this paper we investigate the adoption of personalized music services by a combined quantitative and qualitative research approach. We first deploy an adoption study by the use of an adapted TAM survey. Our quantitative findings confirm perceived enjoyment as influential factor for intention to use, higher than perceived usefulness. Instead of broadening the quantitative study to a wider group of users we investigate deeper with qualitative interviews based on diffusion of innovation and different adoption models. Firstly three hypotheses are formulated on basis of the survey. Secondly our qualitative results give a richer explanation and show our group of respondents value the quality of the music recommendation mechanism over extra other functionalities like social networking, blogging and scrobbling. The latter result is important for music service suppliers in their highly competitive market