29,872 research outputs found
When Cost-Efficient Technologies Meet Politics: A Case Study of Radical Wireless Network Implementation
Cost efficiency has been a dominant perspective in the traditional IT literature. However, in complex technology and business environment, the widely recognized cost efficient assumption of information technology has been increasingly challenged. Drawing from a case study of wireless network implementation situated in a politically sensitive workplace, this paper provided practice insights for IT managers in today’s networked economy. More specifically, stories experienced in the case study illustrated that despite well-calculated cost efficiency of wireless network infrastructure, the radical implementation process in the case organization encountered enormous challenges and opposition due to the fact that administrators failed to consider various stakeholders’ positions and interests. Eventually, the implementation objectives and outcome were considerably undermined. Implications from this empirical case research reemphasized the significance of understanding political forces situated in any business environment where different stakeholders hold conflicting interests. Lessons learned from the case story further encouraged IT managers and policy makers to better strategize emerging information technology in general and wireless networks in particular as the whole
global society and business environment are increasingly facing an emerging wireless world
Communication issues in requirements elicitation: A content analysis of stakeholder experiences
The gathering of stakeholder requirements comprises an early, but continuous and highly critical stage in system development. This phase in development is subject to a large degree of error, influenced by key factors rooted in communication problems. This pilot study builds upon an existing theory-based categorisation of these problems through presentation of a four-dimensional framework on communication. Its structure is validated through a content analysis of interview data, from which themes emerge, that can be assigned to the dimensional categories, highlighting any problematic areas. The paper concludes with a discussion on the utilisation of the framework for requirements elicitation exercises
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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
Topicality and Social Impact: Diverse Messages but Focused Messengers
Are users who comment on a variety of matters more likely to achieve high
influence than those who delve into one focused field? Do general Twitter
hashtags, such as #lol, tend to be more popular than novel ones, such as
#instantlyinlove? Questions like these demand a way to detect topics hidden
behind messages associated with an individual or a hashtag, and a gauge of
similarity among these topics. Here we develop such an approach to identify
clusters of similar hashtags by detecting communities in the hashtag
co-occurrence network. Then the topical diversity of a user's interests is
quantified by the entropy of her hashtags across different topic clusters. A
similar measure is applied to hashtags, based on co-occurring tags. We find
that high topical diversity of early adopters or co-occurring tags implies high
future popularity of hashtags. In contrast, low diversity helps an individual
accumulate social influence. In short, diverse messages and focused messengers
are more likely to gain impact.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, 6 table
What proof do we prefer? Variants of verifiability in voting
In this paper, we discuss one particular feature of Internet
voting, verifiability, against the background of scientific
literature and experiments in the Netherlands. In order
to conceptually clarify what verifiability is about, we distinguish
classical verifiability from constructive veriability in
both individual and universal verification. In classical individual
verifiability, a proof that a vote has been counted can
be given without revealing the vote. In constructive individual
verifiability, a proof is only accepted if the witness (i.e.
the vote) can be reconstructed. Analogous concepts are de-
fined for universal veriability of the tally. The RIES system
used in the Netherlands establishes constructive individual
verifiability and constructive universal verifiability,
whereas many advanced cryptographic systems described
in the scientific literature establish classical individual
verifiability and classical universal verifiability.
If systems with a particular kind of verifiability continue
to be used successfully in practice, this may influence the
way in which people are involved in elections, and their image
of democracy. Thus, the choice for a particular kind
of verifiability in an experiment may have political consequences.
We recommend making a well-informed democratic
choice for the way in which both individual and universal
verifiability should be realised in Internet voting, in
order to avoid these unconscious political side-effects of the
technology used. The safest choice in this respect, which
maintains most properties of current elections, is classical
individual verifiability combined with constructive universal
verifiability. We would like to encourage discussion
about the feasibility of this direction in scientific research
Crisis Communication Patterns in Social Media during Hurricane Sandy
Hurricane Sandy was one of the deadliest and costliest of hurricanes over the
past few decades. Many states experienced significant power outage, however
many people used social media to communicate while having limited or no access
to traditional information sources. In this study, we explored the evolution of
various communication patterns using machine learning techniques and determined
user concerns that emerged over the course of Hurricane Sandy. The original
data included ~52M tweets coming from ~13M users between October 14, 2012 and
November 12, 2012. We run topic model on ~763K tweets from top 4,029 most
frequent users who tweeted about Sandy at least 100 times. We identified 250
well-defined communication patterns based on perplexity. Conversations of most
frequent and relevant users indicate the evolution of numerous storm-phase
(warning, response, and recovery) specific topics. People were also concerned
about storm location and time, media coverage, and activities of political
leaders and celebrities. We also present each relevant keyword that contributed
to one particular pattern of user concerns. Such keywords would be particularly
meaningful in targeted information spreading and effective crisis communication
in similar major disasters. Each of these words can also be helpful for
efficient hash-tagging to reach target audience as needed via social media. The
pattern recognition approach of this study can be used in identifying real time
user needs in future crises
Do Social Bots Dream of Electric Sheep? A Categorisation of Social Media Bot Accounts
So-called 'social bots' have garnered a lot of attention lately. Previous
research showed that they attempted to influence political events such as the
Brexit referendum and the US presidential elections. It remains, however,
somewhat unclear what exactly can be understood by the term 'social bot'. This
paper addresses the need to better understand the intentions of bots on social
media and to develop a shared understanding of how 'social' bots differ from
other types of bots. We thus describe a systematic review of publications that
researched bot accounts on social media. Based on the results of this
literature review, we propose a scheme for categorising bot accounts on social
media sites. Our scheme groups bot accounts by two dimensions - Imitation of
human behaviour and Intent.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the Australasian
Conference on Information Systems, 201
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