Impliance: A Next Generation Information Management Appliance

ably successful in building a large market and adapting to the changes of the last three decades, its impact on the broader market of information management is surprisingly limited. If we were to design an information management system from scratch, based upon today's requirements and hardware capabilities, would it look anything like today's database systems?" In this paper, we introduce Impliance, a next-generation information management system consisting of hardware and software components integrated to form an easy-to-administer appliance that can store, retrieve, and analyze all types of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured information. We first summarize the trends that will shape information management for the foreseeable future. Those trends imply three major requirements for Impliance: (1) to be able to store, manage, and uniformly query all data, not just structured records; (2) to be able to scale out as the volume of this data grows; and (3) to be simple and robust in operation. We then describe four key ideas that are uniquely combined in Impliance to address these requirements, namely the ideas of: (a) integrating software and off-the-shelf hardware into a generic information appliance; (b) automatically discovering, organizing, and managing all data - unstructured as well as structured - in a uniform way; (c) achieving scale-out by exploiting simple, massive parallel processing, and (d) virtualizing compute and storage resources to unify, simplify, and streamline the management of Impliance. Impliance is an ambitious, long-term effort to define simpler, more robust, and more scalable information systems for tomorrow's enterprises.Comment: This article is published under a Creative Commons License Agreement (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/.) You may copy, distribute, display, and perform the work, make derivative works and make commercial use of the work, but, you must attribute the work to the author and CIDR 2007. 3rd Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR) January 710, 2007, Asilomar, California, US

A holistic review of public-private partnership literature published between 2008 and 2018

© 2019 Liang Ma et al. Adopting a holistic approach in the review of the public-private partnership (PPP) literature published since 2008 by incorporating scientometric analysis and further systematic analysis, this study aims to provide the big picture of the state-of-the-art research in PPP by addressing major issues and suggesting research trends in PPP. Following a three-step research methodology, this study started from a bibliometric analysis with science mapping to provide the state-of-the-art information on PPP research keywords, scholars, journal articles, institutions, and countries. A further systematic review was also conducted to identify future research directions of PPP in project management. The review of the existing literature in PPP revealed that there had been insufficient systematic approach in summarizing the research topics and proposing new research trends in PPP-related project management. It was further indicated that sustainability and innovation in PPP could be further studied, such as integrating building information modeling with PPP. Factors related to barriers in PPP implementation would continue growing. Future research directions in PPP were also proposed following the systematic review, for example, comparative studies of PPP practice between developing and developed countries. The current study provides a comprehensive approach by integrating bibliometric analysis, science mapping, and qualitative analysis in the latest PPP research. It reveals the contemporary research themes in PPP and provides directions for near-future directions of PPP research in project management

A Holistic Review of Public-Private Partnership Literature Published between 2008 and 2018

Adopting a holistic approach in the review of the public-private partnership (PPP) literature published since 2008 by incorporating scientometric analysis and further systematic analysis, this study aims to provide the big picture of the state-of-the-art research in PPP by addressing major issues and suggesting research trends in PPP. Following a three-step research methodology, this study started from a bibliometric analysis with science mapping to provide the state-of-the-art information on PPP research keywords, scholars, journal articles, institutions, and countries. A further systematic review was also conducted to identify future research directions of PPP in project management. The review of the existing literature in PPP revealed that there had been insufficient systematic approach in summarizing the research topics and proposing new research trends in PPP-related project management. It was further indicated that sustainability and innovation in PPP could be further studied, such as integrating building information modeling with PPP. Factors related to barriers in PPP implementation would continue growing. Future research directions in PPP were also proposed following the systematic review, for example, comparative studies of PPP practice between developing and developed countries. The current study provides a comprehensive approach by integrating bibliometric analysis, science mapping, and qualitative analysis in the latest PPP research. It reveals the contemporary research themes in PPP and provides directions for near-future directions of PPP research in project management

IT Workforce Trends: Implications for Curriculum and Hiring

A panel on workforce trends in the information technology industry was held at the AMCIS meeting in Toronto, Canada, in August 2008. Panelists discussed a continuing research project about the current state of the IT workforce and future trends, sponsored by the Society for Information Management (SIM). The initial phase was a study of workforce trends in IT client companies, completed in 2006. Results from phase one revealed a shift in the mission of the information system function from delivering technology-based solutions to managing the process of delivering solutions. Client-facing capabilities were found to be critical to this mission as well as business and project-management capabilities. Phase two examined workforce trends in IT provider companies. Results indicate that provider firms are also seeking client-facing capabilities, project management and business domain knowledge over technical capabilities. Panelists compared the results of the two phases and the implications for curriculum design, hiring, and training practices. The results of this research underline a looming crisis in several areas: 1) graduates who are not trained in areas that the marketplace is seeking; 2) thin pipeline for specific technical skills; 3) increasing pressure to source IT capability; and 4) lag in university responsiveness to the needs of the marketplace

ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE MANAGEMENT FROM A KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT PERSPECTIVE – RESULTS FROM AN EMPIRICAL STUDY

Within the context of EAM numerous approaches proposed by researches exist. Still, it is not easy for companies to choose the most suitable one from the multitude of architecture frameworks and methods. Additionally trends in the global economy and the resulting pressure on the part of competitors force companies to introduce more effective management processes. As a consequence, EAM faces the similar challenge as that of knowledge management that is identifying, collecting and maintaining process-specific information in an efficient way. This research article addresses the aforementioned challenge by identifying weaknesses of existing approaches to enterprise architecture management and proposing future areas of research. Thereby, the future research topics are identified in two steps. Firstly, an extensive literature analysis from a knowledge management perspective derives hypotheses on possible fields for improvement and future research. These hypotheses are evaluated according to their relevance in practice in an online survey conducted among enterprise architecture management practitioners from companies belonging to various industry branches in Europe

From Sensor to Observation Web with Environmental Enablers in the Future Internet

This paper outlines the grand challenges in global sustainability research and the objectives of the FP7 Future Internet PPP program within the Digital Agenda for Europe. Large user communities are generating significant amounts of valuable environmental observations at local and regional scales using the devices and services of the Future Internet. These communities’ environmental observations represent a wealth of information which is currently hardly used or used only in isolation and therefore in need of integration with other information sources. Indeed, this very integration will lead to a paradigm shift from a mere Sensor Web to an Observation Web with semantically enriched content emanating from sensors, environmental simulations and citizens. The paper also describes the research challenges to realize the Observation Web and the associated environmental enablers for the Future Internet. Such an environmental enabler could for instance be an electronic sensing device, a web-service application, or even a social networking group affording or facilitating the capability of the Future Internet applications to consume, produce, and use environmental observations in cross-domain applications. The term ?envirofied? Future Internet is coined to describe this overall target that forms a cornerstone of work in the Environmental Usage Area within the Future Internet PPP program. Relevant trends described in the paper are the usage of ubiquitous sensors (anywhere), the provision and generation of information by citizens, and the convergence of real and virtual realities to convey understanding of environmental observations. The paper addresses the technical challenges in the Environmental Usage Area and the need for designing multi-style service oriented architecture. Key topics are the mapping of requirements to capabilities, providing scalability and robustness with implementing context aware information retrieval. Another essential research topic is handling data fusion and model based computation, and the related propagation of information uncertainty. Approaches to security, standardization and harmonization, all essential for sustainable solutions, are summarized from the perspective of the Environmental Usage Area. The paper concludes with an overview of emerging, high impact applications in the environmental areas concerning land ecosystems (biodiversity), air quality (atmospheric conditions) and water ecosystems (marine asset management)

IT Workforce Trends: Implications for Curriculum and Hiring

At the 2007 Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS), panelists discussed a continuing research project about the current IT workforce and future trends, presenting the latest results of an international Web-based survey. The project is sponsored by the Society for Information Management (SIM) International Advocacy Program and consists of two phases. The initial phase was a study of workforce trends in IT client companies and was completed in 2006. IT executives from client firms say it is critical to own business and project management capabilities, and they especially value them in their mid-level hires. Technical capabilities are more likely to be externally sourced, but they are also sought in entry-level hires. The second phase is a study of trends in service provider companies and is ongoing. Our preliminary results indicate that provider firms also value project management and business domain capabilities over technical capabilities. In the panel, we compared the Phase 2 (provider) results to the Phase 1 results from client organizations and discussed the implications of the data for curriculum design, hiring and training practices

Enterprise Content Management - A Literature Review

Managing information and content on an enterprise-wide scale is challenging. Enterprise content management (ECM) can be considered as an integrated approach to information management. While this concept received much attention from practitioners, ECM research is still an emerging field of IS research. Most authors that deal with ECM claim that there is little scholarly literature available. After approximately one decade of ECM research, this paper provides an in-depth review of the body of academic research: the ECM domain, its evolution, and main topics are characterized. An established ECM research framework is adopted, refined, and explained with its associated elements and working definitions. On this basis, 68 articles are reviewed, classified, and concepts are derived. Prior research is synthesized and findings are integrated in a concept-centric way. Further, implications for research and practice, including future trends, are drawn

A Look Toward the Future: Decision Support Systems Research is Alive and Well

This commentary examines the historical importance of decision support to the information systems (IS) field from the viewpoint of four researchers whose work spans the several decades of decision support systems (DSS) research. Given this unique “generational” vantage point, we present the changes in and impact of DSS research as well as future considerations for decision support in the IS field. We argue that the DSS area has remained vital as technology has evolved and our understanding of decision-making processes has deepened. DSS work over the last several years has contributed both breadth and depth to decision-making research; the challenge now is to make sense of it all by placing it in an understandable context and by applying our analysis to the relevant issues looming in the future. One major outcome of this commentary is the identification of future trends in DSS research and what the users of these new DSS outlets can learn from the past. Trends include the increasing impact of social and mobile computing on DSS research, as well as knowledge management DSS and negotiation support systems that shift the focus to delivering more customer-centric and marketplace support