28,106 research outputs found
Audit Quality Indicators: Perceptions of Junior-level Auditors
Purpose
In an effort to develop an audit quality (AQ) framework specific to the US audit market, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) recently issued a concept release proposing 28 audit quality indicators (AQIs) along three dimensions: audit professionals, audit process and audit results. Using AQIs initially proposed by the PCAOB, as well as AQIs suggested by prior literature, the authors solicit perceptions from junior-level (senior and staff) auditors to investigate the current state of practice along many of the AQIs relating to audit professionals and audit process. Design/methodology/approach
In the study, 78 junior-level auditors responded to the survey. Findings
An analysis of the responses suggests auditors engage in activities and audit firms promote conditions that at times improve, and at other times, reduce audit quality. The authors find that individual auditors’ perceptions differ across experience level, gender and audit firm size for certain AQIs. Practical implications
The study is useful to the PCAOB because it provides insights to help assess the value of potential AQIs in differentiating AQ. The study is also useful to other regulators because it describes audit staff and seniors’ perceptions of apparent firm and auditor compliance with accounting and auditing standards. Practitioners should find this information useful in helping to identify possible root causes of audit deficiencies, a challenge put forth to firms by the PCAOB. Originality/value
This study provides academia with evidence on AQ from practicing auditors, which informs existing and future research along. The study complements existing work by showing how individual auditor characteristics (experience and gender) at the junior levels may impact AQ in practic
Open plan and academe: pre- and post-hoc conversations
There now exists a strong body of evidence that creative workplaces can, in certain circumstances, exert beneficial influences on organisational cultures and outputs. Academia tends to resist such spaces and faculty buildings. The reasons are explored but the reactions of staff are not found to be different from those reported in the literature on general creative spaces. The success or failure of team oriented workspaces is in large part a socially constructed perception influenced by the manner of implementation and management. As elsewhere new workplaces are about new conversations. The cases studied lead to a model of the tensions inherent in workplace redesign.</p
Efficient HTTP based I/O on very large datasets for high performance computing with the libdavix library
Remote data access for data analysis in high performance computing is
commonly done with specialized data access protocols and storage systems. These
protocols are highly optimized for high throughput on very large datasets,
multi-streams, high availability, low latency and efficient parallel I/O. The
purpose of this paper is to describe how we have adapted a generic protocol,
the Hyper Text Transport Protocol (HTTP) to make it a competitive alternative
for high performance I/O and data analysis applications in a global computing
grid: the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid. In this work, we first analyze the
design differences between the HTTP protocol and the most common high
performance I/O protocols, pointing out the main performance weaknesses of
HTTP. Then, we describe in detail how we solved these issues. Our solutions
have been implemented in a toolkit called davix, available through several
recent Linux distributions. Finally, we describe the results of our benchmarks
where we compare the performance of davix against a HPC specific protocol for a
data analysis use case.Comment: Presented at: Very large Data Bases (VLDB) 2014, Hangzho
The mystery of the writing that isn’t on the wall: differences in public representations in traditional and agile software development
This paper considers the use of public displays, such as whiteboards and papers pinned to walls, by different software development teams, based on evidence from a number of empirical studies. This paper outlines differences in use observed between traditional and agile teams and begins
to identify the implications that they may have for software
development
TURF for Teams: Considering Both the Team and I in the Work-Centered Design of Systems
Teams are an inherent part of many work domains, especially in the healthcare environment. Yet, most systems are often built with only the individual user in mind. How can we better incorporate the team, as a user, into the design of a system? By better understanding the team, through their user, task, representational, and functional needs, we can create more useful and helpful systems that match their work domain. For this research project, we utilize the TURF framework and expanded it further by also considering teams as a user, thus, creating the TURF for Teams framework. In addition, we chose to examine teams in the emergency department environment. We believe that designing a system with the team also fully incorporated and acknowledged in the work domain will be beneficial for supporting necessary team activities.
Using TURF for Teams, we first conducted an observational field study in the emergency department to get a better understanding of the users, teams, tasks, workload, and interactions. We then identified the need for team communications to be better supported, especially in the management of interruptions, and further categorized the interruptions by their function in order to design a team tool that could help team members better manage their interruptions by focusing on the necessary, or domain, types of interruptions and more easily disregarding the unnecessary, or overhead, types of interruptions.
We then administered some surveys and conducted a card sort and cognitive walkthrough with emergency clinician participants to help us better identify how to design interfaces for the team tool and simulation that would better match the needs of team communication behaviors observed and reported by emergency clinicians.
After designing and developing the team tool and simulation, we conducted an evaluation of this system by having emergency medicine, medicine, and informatics graduate student teams go through the system and utilize the team tool and simulation as a team. Though we had a small sample size, we found that emergency medicine teams found the team tool and simulation to be very usable and they reacted favorably to its potential in helping them better understand and manage their team communications.
In summary, we were able to utilize the TURF framework for incorporating teams into the design of systems, in this case a team communication tool and microworld simulation for the emergency department. Our findings suggest that TURF for Teams is a viable framework for designing useful and helpful team based systems for all work domains
Team Learning: A Theoretical Integration and Review
With the increasing emphasis on work teams as the primary architecture of organizational structure, scholars have begun to focus attention on team learning, the processes that support it, and the important outcomes that depend on it. Although the literature addressing learning in teams is broad, it is also messy and fraught with conceptual confusion. This chapter presents a theoretical integration and review. The goal is to organize theory and research on team learning, identify actionable frameworks and findings, and emphasize promising targets for future research. We emphasize three theoretical foci in our examination of team learning, treating it as multilevel (individual and team, not individual or team), dynamic (iterative and progressive; a process not an outcome), and emergent (outcomes of team learning can manifest in different ways over time). The integrative theoretical heuristic distinguishes team learning process theories, supporting emergent states, team knowledge representations, and respective influences on team performance and effectiveness. Promising directions for theory development and research are discussed
A Call for Engaging Context in HCI/MIS Research with Examples from the Area of Technology Interruptions
This paper contributes to the discussion on future directions of Human-Computer Interaction in Information Systems (HCI/MIS) research by explicating the role of task- and social context. We show that context has not been sufficiently engaged, and argue why it is important to pay more attention to it in theory and design of future HCI/MIS research. Drawing on examples from the core HCI area of technology interruptions, we formulate a set of general research questions and guidelines, which allow us to represent the context of multiple users in continuous collaboration with multiple tools while working on tasks that are intertwined within business processes. These guidelines will generate new insights for HCI/MIS research and allow us to develop research that captures the changing nature of the computing environment
Mobile support in CSCW applications and groupware development frameworks
Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) is an established subset of the field of Human Computer Interaction that deals with the how people use computing technology to enhance group interaction and collaboration. Mobile CSCW has emerged as a result of the progression from personal desktop computing to the mobile device platforms that are ubiquitous today.
CSCW aims to not only connect people and facilitate communication through using computers; it aims to provide conceptual models coupled with technology to manage, mediate, and assist collaborative processes. Mobile CSCW research looks to fulfil these aims through the adoption of mobile technology and consideration for the mobile user. Facilitating collaboration using mobile devices brings new challenges. Some of these challenges are inherent to the nature of the device hardware, while others focus on the understanding of how to engineer software to maximize effectiveness for the end-users. This paper reviews seminal and state-of-the-art cooperative software applications and development frameworks, and their support for mobile devices
Productivity Challenges in Digital Transformation and its Implications for Workstream Collaboration Tools.
Digital transformation has brought an
unprecedented pace of change and a huge amount
of information available for businesses. At the same
time, it has also created a number of difficulties for
knowledge workers that have to deal with increasingly
Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous (VUCA)
environments. In this scenario, the use of workstream
collaboration tools (WSC), such as Microsoft Teams
or Slack, to manage this new way of working and
to improve the productivity of knowledge workers is
proliferating. However, the goals that these WSC tools
need to achieve and the way to use them are not well
established because of two reasons: (i) these new work
environments pose a new set of challenges for working
productively that have not been clearly characterised,
and (ii) there is neither previous experience nor a
strong research body that study them in conjunction to
offer guidelines to design good solutions based on WSC
tools. In this paper, we follow an inductive approach
based on the analysis of qualitative and quantitative
data from 365 employees of 3 companies (immersed
in VUCA environments and digitisation initiatives with
WSC tools) to characterise the productivity challenges
in these scenarios. The result is a set of 14 challenges
that appear with different intensity in each company. A
thorough study of the related literature shows that the
implication of these challenges in WSC tools have been
studied independently, but there is no single theory that
covers all of them together. This paper, hence, helps to
put them togetherMinisterio de Ciencia, InnovaciĂłn y Universidades RTI2018-101204-B-C22 (OPHELIA)Ministerio de Ciencia, InnovaciĂłn y Universidades RTI2018-101204-B-C21 (HORATIO)Junta de AndalucĂa EKIPMENTPLUS (P18–FR–2895
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