Centralized vs. decentralized computing : organizational considerations and management options

The long-standing debate over whether to centralize or decentralize computing is examined in terms of the fundamental organizational and economic factors at stake. The traditional debate is examined and found to focus predominantly on issues of efficiency vs. effectiveness, with solutions based on a rationalistic strategy of optimizing in this tradeoff. A more behavioralistic assessment suggests that the driving issues in the debate are the politics of organization and resources, centering on the issue of control. The economics of computing deployment decisions is presented as an important issue, but one that often serves as a field of argument that is based on more political concerns. The current situation facing managers of computing, given the advent of small and comparatively inexpensive computers, is examined in detail, and a set of management options for dealing with this persistent issue is presented

Reading with new tools: An evaluation of Personal Digital Assistants as tools for reading course materials

Lightweight, palmtop devices such as personal digital assistants (PDAs) can now be used for reading electronic text, opening up their potential as learning tools. This paper reports a study that evaluated the use of PDAs for reading course materials by students on an Open University master's course. The research is grounded in activity theory, which provides a useful framework for examining how the introduction of a new tool changes an existing activity. Student perceptions of the possibilities and constraints of the PDA, as determined by questionnaires and interviews, reveal the impact the new tool had upon reading. The PDA constrained reading with limitations such as the small screen size, new requirements for navigating through the text and awkward methods for taking notes. These conditions made it difficult for students to skim‐read the text, to move back and forth within the document and to interact with the text as easily as they could with paper. Nevertheless, students welcomed the opportunity to have the course materials on a portable, lightweight device that could be used at any time and in any place. This made it easier to fit the reading activity around the various other activities in which students were involved In addition, the PDA was used in conjunction with existing tools, such as the printed version of the course materials and the desktop computer. Therefore, it was not seen to replace paper but rather to extend and complement it. The findings are discussed using concepts from activity theory to interpret how the new tool modified the reading activity

AI and OR in management of operations: history and trends

The last decade has seen a considerable growth in the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for operations management with the aim of finding solutions to problems that are increasing in complexity and scale. This paper begins by setting the context for the survey through a historical perspective of OR and AI. An extensive survey of applications of AI techniques for operations management, covering a total of over 1200 papers published from 1995 to 2004 is then presented. The survey utilizes Elsevier's ScienceDirect database as a source. Hence, the survey may not cover all the relevant journals but includes a sufficiently wide range of publications to make it representative of the research in the field. The papers are categorized into four areas of operations management: (a) design, (b) scheduling, (c) process planning and control and (d) quality, maintenance and fault diagnosis. Each of the four areas is categorized in terms of the AI techniques used: genetic algorithms, case-based reasoning, knowledge-based systems, fuzzy logic and hybrid techniques. The trends over the last decade are identified, discussed with respect to expected trends and directions for future work suggested