Information Technology Platforms: Definition and Research Directions

The concept of an information technology (IT) related platform is broad and covers phenomena ranging from the operating system Linux to the Internet. Such platforms are of increasing importance to innovation and value creation across many facets of industry and daily life. There is, however, a lack of common understanding in both research and industry about what is mean by the term platform when related to IT. This lack of consensus is detrimental to research and knowledge development. Thus, the aims of this study are to: (i) provide a sound definition of the IT-platform concept by identifying its distinguishing dimensions; and (ii) identify important current research directions for the IT-platform concept. To achieve these aims a systematic literature review was undertaken with 133 relevant articles taken from major information systems journals, conferences, and business publications. The study contributes by providing a sound base for future research into IT-platforms.Comment: Research-in-progress ISBN# 978-0-646-95337-3 Presented at the Australasian Conference on Information Systems 2015 (arXiv:1605.01032

Both Sides of the Story: Communication Ethics in Mediatized Worlds

Current transformations in the media landscape are challenging contemporary communication and media ethics in at least 2 ways. First, digitization of the media creates new ethical problems that stimulate calls for a redefinition of the norms and values of public communication. Second, new instruments of web-based media observation introduce new possibilities for media (self-)regulation and accountability, thus complementing the initiatives of traditional institutions like press councils. The article retraces those conflicting developments by reference to 2 comparative studies, representing the diverging traditions of conventional communication ethics and media accountability research. In bridging over the conceptual gap between the 2 forms of research, the article develops new perspectives for ethical reflection in the mediatized worlds of the digital ag

Lessons Learned from Developing a New Distance-Learning Masters Course in the Green Economy

It is widely recognised that for the green economy to develop successfully, new educational curricula will be required to help professionals develop appropriate knowledge and skills. Relatively few university courses have been developed to date that explicitly focus on the green economy, reflecting its recent origins. Here we present the lessons learned from developing and implementing a new Masters course in the green economy, at Bournemouth University in the UK. The most significant challenges were institutional barriers, such as different departmental policies and procedures and decentralised budget strategies, which inhibited the cross-departmental collaboration desired for interdisciplinarity. Uncertainty about the future development of the green economy and its value as a concept, among both teaching staff and prospective students, presented a further challenge. In addition, the development of an appropriate curriculum for green economy courses has received little attention previously. Here, we present an overview of the curriculum developed for this Masters-level course, and, based on our experience, we demonstrate how the challenges in developing such a course can successfully be overcome

Standardization Framework for Sustainability from Circular Economy 4.0

The circular economy (CE) is widely known as a way to implement and achieve sustainability, mainly due to its contribution towards the separation of biological and technical nutrients under cyclic industrial metabolism. The incorporation of the principles of the CE in the links of the value chain of the various sectors of the economy strives to ensure circularity, safety, and efficiency. The framework proposed is aligned with the goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development regarding the orientation towards the mitigation and regeneration of the metabolic rift by considering a double perspective. Firstly, it strives to conceptualize the CE as a paradigm of sustainability. Its principles are established, and its techniques and tools are organized into two frameworks oriented towards causes (cradle to cradle) and effects (life cycle assessment), and these are structured under the three pillars of sustainability, for their projection within the proposed framework. Secondly, a framework is established to facilitate the implementation of the CE with the use of standards, which constitute the requirements, tools, and indicators to control each life cycle phase, and of key enabling technologies (KETs) that add circular value 4.0 to the socio-ecological transition

Software Sustainability: The Modern Tower of Babel

<p>The aim of this paper is to explore the emerging definitions of software sustainability from the field of software engineering in order to contribute to the question, what is software sustainability?</p

Collaborative Development of Open Educational Resources for Open and Distance Learning

Open and distance learning (ODL) is mostly characterised by the up front development of self study educational resources that have to be paid for over time through use with larger student cohorts (typically in the hundreds per annum) than for conventional face to face classes. This different level of up front investment in educational resources, and increasing pressures to utilise more expensive formats such as rich media, means that collaborative development is necessary to firstly make use of diverse professional skills and secondly to defray these costs across institutions. The Open University (OU) has over 40 years of experience of using multi professional course teams to develop courses; of working with a wide range of other institutions to develop educational resources; and of licensing use of its educational resources to other HEIs. Many of these arrangements require formal contracts to work properly and clearly identify IPR and partner responsibilities. With the emergence of open educational resources (OER) through the use of open licences, the OU and other institutions has now been able to experiment with new ways of collaborating on the development of educational resources that are not so dependent on tight legal contracts because each partner is effectively granting rights to the others to use the educational resources they supply through the open licensing (Lane, 2011; Van Dorp and Lane, 2011). This set of case studies examines the many different collaborative models used for developing and using educational resources and explain how open licensing is making it easier to share the effort involved in developing educational resources between institutions as well as how it may enable new institutions to be able to start up open and distance learning programmes more easily and at less initial cost. Thus it looks at three initiatives involving people from the OU (namely TESSA, LECH-e, openED2.0) and contrasts these with the Peer-2-Peer University and the OER University as exemplars of how OER may change some of the fundamental features of open and distance learning in a Web 2.0 world. It concludes that while there may be multiple reasons and models for collaborating on the development of educational resources the very openness provided by the open licensing aligns both with general academic values and practice but also with well established principles of open innovation in businesses

Extending the enterprise: An evaluation of ERP and EAI technologies within a Case Study organisation

It is widely understood that both Information Technology (IT) and Information Systems (IS), provide great benefits in improving the visibility of supply and value chains within and across organisational boundaries. Those enterprises which can realise the benefits of extending their core business processes outwards to clients and trading partners, will be able to create unique supply chain-dependent products and solutions. Thus, such business infrastructures have enabled organisations to expand and improve the effectiveness of their enterprise. One method to achieve this, has been to integrate Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems with web-based and other IS systems, using Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) technologies. This paper seeks to investigate those factors which contributed to a case organisation’s extended enterprise experiences, by using extant ERP and EAI implementation IS evaluation criteria; and by placing the research results within the context of applicable IS research techniques in the area