States Buying Smarter: Lessons Learned From Minnesota and Virginia

Profiles successful government procurement practices, including aggregating demand, promoting innovation, streamlining processes, emphasizing price, and strengthening negotiating skills and vendor relationships; challenges; and principles across states

Making multi-dimensional trust decisions on inter-enterprise collaborations

VertaisarvioitupeerReviewe

AGENT-BASED NEGOTIATION PLATFORM IN COLLABORATIVE NETWORKED ENVIRONMENT

This paper proposes an agent-based platform to model and support parallel and concurrent negotiations among organizations acting in the same industrial market. The underlying complexity is to model the dynamic environment where multi-attribute and multi-participant negotiations are racing over a set of heterogeneous resources. The metaphor Interaction Abstract Machines (IAMs) is used to model the parallelism and the non-deterministic aspects of the negotiation processes that occur in Collaborative Networked Environment

Virtual HR Departments: Getting Out of the Middle

In this chapter, we explore the notion of virtual HR departments: a network-based organization built on partnerships and mediated by information technologies in order to be simultaneously strategic, flexible, cost-efficient, and service-oriented. We draw on experiences and initiatives at Merck Pharmaceuticals in order to show how information technology in establishing an infrastructure for virtual HR. Then, we present a model for mapping the architecture of HR activities that includes both internal and external sourcing options. We conclude by offering some recommendations for management practice as well as future research

Automating decisions for inter-enterprise collaboration management

Proceeding volume: 283/2008The current trend towards networked business forces enterprises to enter federated, loosely-coupled business networks, since much of the competition takes place between networks and value nets. The Pilarcos E2B interoperability middleware supports trend by providing services such as business service discovery and selection, interoperability management, eContracting and reputation-based trust management. Although these services automate the interoperability knowledge management and interoperability. testing, and may help in routine decisions, an essential element of the architecture involves oil expert system that automates or supports decisions oil joining collaborations, acting in them, or leaving them. The expert system focuses oil a single enterprise needs. This paper focuses on the ways of governing the automation level in the expert system in a way suitable for autonomous enterprises to control their participation in agile collaborations.Peer reviewe

On Secure Workflow Decentralisation on the Internet

Decentralised workflow management systems are a new research area, where most work to-date has focused on the system's overall architecture. As little attention has been given to the security aspects in such systems, we follow a security driven approach, and consider, from the perspective of available security building blocks, how security can be implemented and what new opportunities are presented when empowering the decentralised environment with modern distributed security protocols. Our research is motivated by a more general question of how to combine the positive enablers that email exchange enjoys, with the general benefits of workflow systems, and more specifically with the benefits that can be introduced in a decentralised environment. This aims to equip email users with a set of tools to manage the semantics of a message exchange, contents, participants and their roles in the exchange in an environment that provides inherent assurances of security and privacy. This work is based on a survey of contemporary distributed security protocols, and considers how these protocols could be used in implementing a distributed workflow management system with decentralised control . We review a set of these protocols, focusing on the required message sequences in reviewing the protocols, and discuss how these security protocols provide the foundations for implementing core control-flow, data, and resource patterns in a distributed workflow environment

Enforcing public data archiving policies in academic publishing: A study of ecology journals

To improve the quality and efficiency of research, groups within the scientific community seek to exploit the value of data sharing. Funders, institutions, and specialist organizations are developing and implementing strategies to encourage or mandate data sharing within and across disciplines, with varying degrees of success. Academic journals in ecology and evolution have adopted several types of public data archiving policies requiring authors to make data underlying scholarly manuscripts freely available. Yet anecdotes from the community and studies evaluating data availability suggest that these policies have not obtained the desired effects, both in terms of quantity and quality of available datasets. We conducted a qualitative, interview-based study with journal editorial staff and other stakeholders in the academic publishing process to examine how journals enforce data archiving policies. We specifically sought to establish who editors and other stakeholders perceive as responsible for ensuring data completeness and quality in the peer review process. Our analysis revealed little consensus with regard to how data archiving policies should be enforced and who should hold authors accountable for dataset submissions. Themes in interviewee responses included hopefulness that reviewers would take the initiative to review datasets and trust in authors to ensure the completeness and quality of their datasets. We highlight problematic aspects of these thematic responses and offer potential starting points for improvement of the public data archiving process.Comment: 35 pages, 1 figure, 1 tabl