Integrating information and knowledge for enterprise innovation

It has widely been accepted that enterprise integration, can be a source of socio-technical and cultural problems within organisations wishing to provide a focussed end-to-end business service. This can cause possible “straitjacketing” of business process architectures, thus suppressing responsive business re-engineering and competitive advantage for some companies. Accordingly, the current typology and emergent forms of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) technologies are set in the context of understanding information and knowledge integration philosophies. As such, key influences and trends in emerging IS integration choices, for end-to-end, cost-effective and flexible knowledge integration, are examined. As touch points across and outside organisations proliferate, via work-flow and relationship management-driven value innovation, aspects of knowledge refinement and knowledge integration pose challenges to maximising the potential of innovation and sustainable success, within enterprises. This is in terms of the increasing propensity for data fragmentation and the lack of effective information management, in the light of information overload. Furthermore, the nature of IS mediation which is inherent within decision making and workflow-based business processes, provides the basis for evaluation of the effects of information and knowledge integration. Hence, the authors propose a conceptual, holistic evaluation framework which encompasses these ideas. It is thus argued that such trends, and their implications regarding enterprise IS integration to engender sustainable competitive advantage, require fundamental re-thinking

Time-Reversal Symmetry Breaking and Spontaneous Anomalous Hall Effect in Fermi Fluids

We study the spontaneous non-magnetic time-reversal symmetry breaking in a two-dimensional Fermi liquid without breaking either the translation symmetry or the U(1) charge symmetry. Assuming that the low-energy physics is described by fermionic quasiparticle excitations, we identified an "emergent" local $U(1)^N$ symmetry in momentum space for an $N$-band model. For a large class of models, including all one-band and two-band models, we found that the time-reversal and chiral symmetry breaking can be described by the $U(1)^N$ gauge theory associated with this emergent local $U(1)^N$ symmetry. This conclusion enables the classification of the time-reversal symmetry-breaking states as types I and II, depending on the type of accompanying spatial symmetry breaking. The properties of each class are studied. In particular, we show that the states breaking both time-reversal and chiral symmetries are described by spontaneously generated Berry phases. We also show examples of the time-reversal symmetry-breaking phases in several different microscopically motivated models and calculate their associated Hall conductance within a mean-field approximation. The fermionic nematic phase with time-reversal symmetry breaking is also presented and the possible realizations in strongly correlated models such as the Emery model are discussed.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figure

Are digital natives a myth or reality?: Students’ use of technologies for learning

This paper outlines the findings of a study investigating the extent and nature of use of digital technologies by undergraduate students in Social Work and Engineering, in two British universities. The study involved a questionnaire survey of students (n=160) followed by in-depth interviews with students (n=8) and lecturers and support staff (n=8) in both institutions. Firstly, the findings suggest that students use a limited range of technologies for both learning and socialisation. For learning, mainly established ICTs are used- institutional VLE, Google and Wikipedia and mobile phones. Students make limited, recreational use of social technologies such as media sharing tools and social networking sites. Secondly, the findings point to a low level of use of and familiarity with collaborative knowledge creation tools, virtual worlds, personal web publishing, and other emergent social technologies. Thirdly, the study did not find evidence to support the claims regarding students adopting radically different patterns of knowledge creation and sharing suggested by some previous studies. The study shows that students’ attitudes to learning appear to be influenced by the approaches adopted by their lecturers. Far from demanding lecturers change their practice, students appear to conform to fairly traditional pedagogies, albeit with minor uses of technology tools that deliver content. Despite both groups clearly using a rather limited range of technologies for learning, the results point to some age differences, with younger, engineering students making somewhat more active, albeit limited, use of tools than the older ones. The outcomes suggest that although the calls for radical transformations in educational approaches may be legitimate it would be misleading to ground the arguments for such change solely in students’ shifting expectations and patterns of learning and technology use