Facilitating Standardization through Living Labs – The Example of Drug Counterfeiting

The increasing threat inherent to counterfeited drugs requires coordinated effort among multiple actors with diverging interests. Although multiple initiatives exist, no comprehensive and promising development and diffusion of a commonly applicable and interoperable solution has taken place so far. Agreeing on standards is an essential step on the road to a successful initiative on drug counterfeiting. To facilitate standardization, especially the initiation of a standardization process, we propose the concept of Living Labs as an innovative developing and testing environment serving multiple purposes. Testing solutions in real-life-contexts, aligning multiple interests and resulting in a pre-standard and a proof-of-concept are the advantages of this concept which facilitate the participation and coordinated action among a broad set of different stakeholders

A Cost Benefit Calculator for RFID Implementations in the Apparel Retail Industry

The apparel retail industry is on the one hand facing challenges from increasing competition, consolidations, and thus increasing pressure to reduce costs. On the other hand, customers are getting more demanding, resulting in shorter fashion cycles, and demands for new customer experience. RFID technology is supposed to raise efficiency and to enable innovative customer service offerings. Besides cost savings, benefits are expected to arise from newly designed RFID applications and customer insights from analyses of shop floor data. Recently, apparel retailers started to investigate this technology, resulting in several trials and pilots world-wide. However, the business case of RFID in the apparel retail industry is not clear. Based on the findings of a real-world deployment, our contribution presents a cost-benefit calculator that is specifically designed to meet the requirements of apparel retail industry RFID implementations

Technology Acceptance, Acceptabilty and Appropriation in Professionnal Bureaucracies : The Case of RFID for Improving Mobile Assets Management in Hospitals

RÉSUMÉ : Les hôpitaux, même ceux de petite taille, peuvent gérer sur une base quotidienne plusieurs milliers d’actifs fixes et mobiles. Les actifs mobiles sont très diversifiés et incluent des pompes à infusion, du matériel chirurgical, des électrocardiogrammes, des machines portables à rayons X, des défibrillateurs, etc. Ces actifs circulent en permanence entre les différents services et les divers départements. Pratiquement tous les patients dépendent d'un ou plusieurs actifs mobiles lors de leur hospitalisation. Ces actifs sont également indispensables à la prestation des soins de santé et le personnel clinique consacre une partie importante de leur temps pour chercher ces actifs lorsque requis. L'incapacité de retrouver ces actifs en cas d’urgence peut mettre la vie des patients en danger. La technologie RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) a le potentiel de retracer et d’effectuer le suivi, et ce, de façon unique et transparente, les actifs mobiles et, par conséquent, d’en améliorer leur gestion dans les hôpitaux. Comparé à d’autres secteurs d’activité, le secteur de la santé adopte RFID à un rythme beaucoup plus lent, ce qui se traduit par un nombre limité d'études empiriques portant sur l’implantation de RFID dans ce secteur. Cette thèse se propose donc de contribuer à ce vide empirique par une analyse en profondeur d’une implantation réelle de RFID. Cette implantation vise à améliorer la gestion d'un type d’actifs mobiles, nommément les pompes à infusion dans un hôpital. Les données empiriques ont été recueillies pendant une période de 25 mois, de la phase de préfaisabilité jusqu’à la phase de post-implantation. Huit organisations (incluant l'hôpital qui est le principal site d'observation) et 35 participants ont été impliqués. Les résultats de la recherche peuvent être résumés comme suit. À la question, pourquoi RFID est implanté? La réduction des inefficacités existantes liées à la gestion des actifs mobiles en est la principale raison. De plus, la familiarité avec les technologies de l’information au sein de l'hôpital, la compatibilité de l’infrastructure existante (l'hôpital est presque 100% Wi-Fi) et l'expérience des partenaires technologiques sont des facteurs positifs reliés à l’implantation RFID. Comment l’implantation RFID est-elle effectuée? Les résultats montrent que le processus d’implantation est fortement itératif : les participants reviennent en effet sur les phases précédentes et modifient les décisions approuvées antérieurement. L'amélioration continue des services de soins est sans aucun doute la préoccupation principale exprimée par tous les participants de l'hôpital. Toutefois, les attentes et les exigences diffèrent entre les différents groupes de participants. Les résultats démontrent un clivage entre les points de vue de l’administration et ceux du côté clinique. Des divergences sont notées entre les infirmières et les médecins, et, entre les techniciens de l'hôpital (responsables des TIC, ingénieurs biomédicaux, et spécialistes de la maintenance) et les administrateurs. Les enjeux les plus importants ne sont pas technologiques, mais sont principalement organisationnels, ce qui semble découler de la présence de points de vue divergents. Est-ce que la RFID améliore la gestion des actifs mobiles? Les résultats suggèrent que les avantages identifiés et évalués lors l’implantation de RFID appartiennent aux catégories suivantes: amélioration de la visibilité des actifs, augmentation de l'efficacité opérationnelle, réduction de certains coûts et émergence de processus intelligents. Ce dernier point apparait comme particulièrement important. Les processus intelligents misent principalement sur les capacités d'auto-identification et de sensibilité au contexte (context-awareness) de RFID, sur le changement automatique de statuts, et sur la mise à jour automatique des applications d’hôpital (par exemple, WMS). Les résultats démontrent également que les processus intelligents améliorent la planification et la prise de décision. Est-ce que les caractéristiques intrinsèques des organisations dans lesquelles la technologie RFID est envisagée posent des contraintes à son implantation? Les hôpitaux, qualifiés de bureaucraties professionnelles, constituent un ensemble unique de contraintes dont on doit tenir compte lors d’une implantation RFID. En particulier, l'inertie, la complexité et la rigidité organisationnelles ne sont pas favorables à des changements à grande échelle dans l’hôpital et affectent la façon dont RFID est implanté. En outre, l'existence d'une structure à double pouvoir et les pièges liés à une culture forte (culture entrapment)ont un impact profond sur l'importance des avantages découlant de RFID. Est-ce que l’acceptation de la technologie, son acceptabilité et son appropriation représentent des concepts clés pour comprendre l’implantation de la RFID? Ces trois concepts ont été explorés lors de cette recherche et ont conduit à deux observations principales. Tout d'abord, on peut affirmer que si la technologie est acceptée, acceptable et appropriée, elle est utilisée, de façon partielle ou plus large. Par extension, l'acceptation, l'acceptabilité et l'appropriation pourraient être importantes non seulement pour expliquer l'ampleur de l'utilisation d'une technologie (utilisation partielle par rapport à la pleine utilisation), mais aussi pour expliquer les raisons pour lesquelles une technologie a été initialement adoptée, puis ensuite rejetée. Deuxièmement, les résultats empiriques ne confirment pas un ordre chronologique entre ces trois concepts. Par exemple, l'appropriation ne suit pas l'acceptation, même au début de l’implantation. Au contraire, l'acceptation, l'acceptabilité et l'appropriation coexistent à tout moment pendant le processus d’implantation. Cependant, l’ordre chronologique joue quand même un rôle puisque les niveaux d'acceptation, l'acceptabilité et l'appropriation varient au fil du temps. En outre, ces trois concepts sont sensibles à la fois à la technologie (dans ce cas, RFID) et au contexte dans lequel cette technologie est utilisée (l'hôpital), qui continuent de leur côté à changer au fil du temps. La thèse se termine en examinant les limites de la recherche, en proposant quelques pistes de recherche. Les contributions de cette thèse peuvent être pertinentes pour les chercheurs, les décideurs du secteur de la santé, les administrateurs d'hôpitaux, et les spécialistes et consultants en TI.----------ABSTRACT : Hospitals, even small ones, handle on a daily basis several thousands of mobile and fixed assets. Mobile assets are very diverse, ranging from infusion pumps, surgical equipment, electrocardiograms, portable x-ray machines, defibrillators to wheelchairs and rotate constantly between different medical wards. Since virtually every patient depends on one or more mobile assets during his or her hospital stay, they are also indispensable in healthcare delivery. Clinical staff spends a significant share of their working time searching for these essential, but commonly misplaced assets. Locating mobile assets is not only a time consuming activity, but the inability to find them when needed is remarkably costly, and possibly life threatening. RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) holds the potential to uniquely and seamlessly track and trace mobile assets and, thus, to improve mobile asset management in hospitals. Compared to other sectors, healthcare organizations adopt RFID at a much slower pace and only a limited number of empirical studies address RFID adoption and implementation in the context of healthcare. This thesis intends to contribute the research arena by analysing a real-life RFID implementation in order improve the management activities of one type of mobile assets, namely infusion pumps in hospital settings. The research focuses on a real-life RFID implementation in one European hospital. Empirical data was collected for a 25 month period from the pre-feasibility stage to post-implementation stage from eight organizations (including the hospital as the main observation site) and from thirty-five participants. Research results can be summarized as follows. To the question why RFID is implemented? The most straightforward answer is to reduce the existing inefficiencies related to mobile assets management. Technological preparedness and readiness drive RFID implementation: This includes familiarity with IT innovations within the hospital, compatibility with existing IT infrastructure (the hospital is almost 100% Wi-Fi enabled), and experience of technological partners with RFID implementation in various sectors. How RFID implementation is carried out? The answer seems to be through a highly iterative five stage process where participants revisited and modified previously agreed steps. The continuous improvement of care services was without a doubt the superseding concern expressed by all participants from the hospital. However, expectations and requirements differ among different groups of participants. The empirical evidence demonstrates not only a cleavage between the administrative and clinical perspectives, but also within the clinical perspective. Divergences run deep within each perspective (for instance, nurses vs. doctors) and between the technologists in the hospital (ICT managers, biomedical engineers, and maintenance specialists) and the administrators. The most significant issues related to such implementation are not technological but are mainly organizational, as they seem to arise from the presence of diverging perspectives. Does RFID really improve mobile assets management? Results suggest that the benefits identified and evaluated during the real life RFID implementation belong to the following broad categories: improving assets visibility, promoting operational efficiency, reducing costs and facilitating the emergence of intelligent processes. Intelligent processes are mainly derived from the RFID capabilities for auto-identification and context-awareness, process automatic status change, and automatic update in hospital’s enterprise applications (i.e. WMS). Results further demonstrate that intelligent processes improve planning and decision-making. Do the intrinsic characteristics of organizations play a role in RFID implementation? The very characteristics of hospitals, qualified as complex professional bureaucracies, constitute a unique set of constraints to be taken into account for RFID implementation. In particular, organizational inertia, complexity and inflexibility are not conductive to hospital-wide changes and affect how RFID is implemented. Moreover, the existence of a dual power structure and a tendency to culture entrapment may have a profound impact on the importance of the benefits derived from RFID. Do technology acceptance, acceptability and appropriation represent key concepts that should be considered to understand the implementation of RFID? These three concepts were explored in the research. This leads to two main observations. First, it could be stated that if technology is accepted, acceptable and appropriated, then it is fully used. By extension, acceptance, acceptability and appropriation could be significant not only in explaining the extent of use of a technology (partial use vs. full use), but also the reasons why a technology was initially adopted and then discarded. Second, empirical results reject the presence of a chronological order between the three concepts. For instance, appropriation does not follow acceptance, even initially. Rather, acceptance, acceptability and appropriation coexist at any time during the implementation process. However, chronology still matters since the levels of acceptance, acceptability and appropriation vary over time. Furthermore, these three concepts are sensitive to both the technology (in this case RFID) and to the context where it is use (the hospital), which are also changing over time. The thesis examines research limitations, proposes some research avenues and outlines contributions that may be relevant for researchers, healthcare policy makers, hospital administrators, IT specialists and IT consultants

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

Cross-border Mobility for Electric Vehicles: Selected results from one of the first cross-border field tests in Europe

This book provides selected results from the accompanying research of the project CROME. The vision of the project was to create and test a safe, seamless, user-friendly and reliable mobility with electric vehicles between France and Germany as a prefiguration of a pan-European electric mobility system. Major aims were contributions to the European standardisation process of charging infrastructure for electric mobility and corresponding services, and to provide an early customer feedback

Ubiquitous computing and natural interfaces for environmental information

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia do Ambiente, perfil Gestão e Sistemas AmbientaisThe next computing revolution‘s objective is to embed every street, building, room and object with computational power. Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) will allow every object to receive and transmit information, sense its surroundings and act accordingly, be located from anywhere in the world, connect every person. Everyone will have the possibility to access information, despite their age, computer knowledge, literacy or physical impairment. It will impact the world in a profound way, empowering mankind, improving the environment, but will also create new challenges that our society, economy, health and global environment will have to overcome. Negative impacts have to be identified and dealt with in advance. Despite these concerns, environmental studies have been mostly absent from discussions on the new paradigm. This thesis seeks to examine ubiquitous computing, its technological emergence, raise awareness towards future impacts and explore the design of new interfaces and rich interaction modes. Environmental information is approached as an area which may greatly benefit from ubicomp as a way to gather, treat and disseminate it, simultaneously complying with the Aarhus convention. In an educational context, new media are poised to revolutionize the way we perceive, learn and interact with environmental information. cUbiq is presented as a natural interface to access that information

The role of ERP in business model innovation: Impetus or impediment

Purpose This research explores the moderating role of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) in (Business Model (BM) innovation by comparing two groups of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) that are still in the process of considering adoption of ERP or already have implemented ERP. In particular, the aim is to see whether ERP enables or hampers the relationship between BM experimentation, i.e. the process of BM innovation, and BM performance. An important mediator, with a focus on downstream value delivery and creation, is the novelty of the BM in question. Design/methodology/approach This research is based on a large quantitative study among Spanish firms that are engaged in BM innovation activities and in different phases of implementing ERP. A representative sample of 208 Spanish firms engaged in Business Model Innovation from different sectors was used to collect data, which was analysed using heterotrait-monotrait (HTMT) for scaling and Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) for model testing. Findings Quantitative findings show that there is a direct positive impact of BM experimentation on BM performance for firms that did not implement an ERP, while downstream novelty leads to improved value capture due to increased efficiency and the associated cost reduction. By contrast, firms with ERP show a better performance, depending on the degree of the downstream novelty of the BM. Originality/value There is no previous research exploring the moderating role of ERP in BM Innovation for SMEs. This is the first study to examine whether BM experimentation affects BM performance and value capturing, as mediated by BM novelty and moderated by implementation by ERP.publishedVersio

The First 25 Years of the Bled eConference: Themes and Impacts

The Bled eConference is the longest-running themed conference associated with the Information Systems discipline. The focus throughout its first quarter-century has been the application of electronic tools, migrating progressively from Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) via Inter-Organisational Systems (IOS) and eCommerce to encompass all aspects of the use of networking facilities in industry and government, and more recently by individuals, groups and society as a whole. This paper reports on an examination of the conference titles and of the titles and abstracts of the 773 refereed papers published in the Proceedings since 1995. This identified a long and strong focus on categories of electronic business and corporate perspectives, which has broadened in recent years to encompass the democratic, the social and the personal. The conference\u27s extend well beyond the papers and their thousands of citations and tens of thousands of downloads. Other impacts have included innovative forms of support for the development of large numbers of graduate students, and the many international research collaborations that have been conceived and developed in a beautiful lake-side setting in Slovenia