103,704 research outputs found
Information Systems Skills Differences between High-Wage and Low-Wage Regions: Implications for Global Sourcing
Developing Information Systems (IS) skills for a company’s workforce has always been challenging, but global sourcing growth has caused the determination of needed IS skills to be more complex. The increased use of outsourcing to an IS service provider and from high-wage regions to low-wage regions has affected what IS skills are required globally and how to distribute the workforce to meet these needs. To understand what skills are needed in locations that seek and those that provide outsourcing, we surveyed IS service provider managers in global locations. Results from 126 reporting units provide empirical evidence that provider units in low-wage regions value technical skills more than those in high-wage regions. Despite the emphasis on commodity skills in low-wage areas, high- and low-wage providers value project management skills. Low-wage regions note global and virtual teamwork more than high-wage regions do. The mix of skills and the variation by region have implications for domestic and offshore sourcing. Service providers can vary their staffing models in global regions which has consequences for recruiting, corporate training, and curriculum
Digital Ecosystems: Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures
We view Digital Ecosystems to be the digital counterparts of biological
ecosystems. Here, we are concerned with the creation of these Digital
Ecosystems, exploiting the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems
to evolve high-level software applications. Therefore, we created the Digital
Ecosystem, a novel optimisation technique inspired by biological ecosystems,
where the optimisation works at two levels: a first optimisation, migration of
agents which are distributed in a decentralised peer-to-peer network, operating
continuously in time; this process feeds a second optimisation based on
evolutionary computing that operates locally on single peers and is aimed at
finding solutions to satisfy locally relevant constraints. The Digital
Ecosystem was then measured experimentally through simulations, with measures
originating from theoretical ecology, evaluating its likeness to biological
ecosystems. This included its responsiveness to requests for applications from
the user base, as a measure of the ecological succession (ecosystem maturity).
Overall, we have advanced the understanding of Digital Ecosystems, creating
Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures where the word ecosystem is more than just a
metaphor.Comment: 39 pages, 26 figures, journa
Geo-located Twitter as the proxy for global mobility patterns
In the advent of a pervasive presence of location sharing services
researchers gained an unprecedented access to the direct records of human
activity in space and time. This paper analyses geo-located Twitter messages in
order to uncover global patterns of human mobility. Based on a dataset of
almost a billion tweets recorded in 2012 we estimate volumes of international
travelers in respect to their country of residence. We examine mobility
profiles of different nations looking at the characteristics such as mobility
rate, radius of gyration, diversity of destinations and a balance of the
inflows and outflows. The temporal patterns disclose the universal seasons of
increased international mobility and the peculiar national nature of overseen
travels. Our analysis of the community structure of the Twitter mobility
network, obtained with the iterative network partitioning, reveals spatially
cohesive regions that follow the regional division of the world. Finally, we
validate our result with the global tourism statistics and mobility models
provided by other authors, and argue that Twitter is a viable source to
understand and quantify global mobility patterns.Comment: 17 pages, 13 figure
InfoInternet for Education in the Global South: A Study of Applications Enabled by Free Information-only Internet Access in Technologically Disadvantaged Areas (authors' version)
This paper summarises our work on studying educational applications enabled
by the introduction of a new information layer called InfoInternet. This is an
initiative to facilitate affordable access to internet based information in
communities with network scarcity or economic problems from the Global South.
InfoInternet develops both networking solutions as well as business and social
models, together with actors like mobile operators and government
organisations. In this paper we identify and describe characteristics of
educational applications, their specific users, and learning environment. We
are interested in applications that make the adoption of Internet faster,
cheaper, and wider in such communities. When developing new applications (or
adopting existing ones) for such constrained environments, this work acts as
initial guidelines prior to field studies.Comment: 16 pages, 1 figure, under review for a journal since March 201
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