Agricultural information dissemination using ICTs: a review and analysis of information dissemination models in China

Open Access funded by China Agricultural UniversityOver the last three decades, China’s agriculture sector has been transformed from the traditional to modern practice through the effective deployment of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Information processing and dissemination have played a critical role in this transformation process. Many studies in relation to agriculture information services have been conducted in China, but few of them have attempted to provide a comprehensive review and analysis of different information dissemination models and their applications. This paper aims to review and identify the ICT based information dissemination models in China and to share the knowledge and experience in applying emerging ICTs in disseminating agriculture information to farmers and farm communities to improve productivity and economic, social and environmental sustainability. The paper reviews and analyzes the development stages of China’s agricultural information dissemination systems and different mechanisms for agricultural information service development and operations. Seven ICT-based information dissemination models are identified and discussed. Success cases are presented. The findings provide a useful direction for researchers and practitioners in developing future ICT based information dissemination systems. It is hoped that this paper will also help other developing countries to learn from China’s experience and best practice in their endeavor of applying emerging ICTs in agriculture information dissemination and knowledge transfer

Predictive policing management: a brief history of patrol automation

Predictive policing has attracted considerably scholarly attention. Extending the promise of being able to interdict crime prior to its commission, it seemingly promised forms of anticipatory policing that had previously existed only in the realms of science fiction. The aesthetic futurism that attended predictive policing did, however, obscure the important historical vectors from which it emerged. The adulation of technology as a tool for achieving efficiencies in policing was evident from the 1920s in the United States, reaching sustained momentum in the 1960s as the methods of Systems Analysis were applied to policing. Underpinning these efforts resided an imaginary of automated patrol facilitated by computerised command and control systems. The desire to automate police work has extended into the present, and is evident in an emergent platform policing – cloud-based technological architectures that increasingly enfold police work. Policing is consequently datafied, commodified and integrated into the circuits of contemporary digital capitalism

Examining the Impact of Information Technology on Healthcare Performance: A Theory of Swift and Even Flow (TSEF) Perspective

The impact of information technologies on manufacturing operations and performance is well established. However, scant research has been devoted to examining information technology (IT) investment among hospitals and how it influences patient care and financial performance. Using the lens of the Theory of Swift Even Flow (TSEF), we present an operations management-based perspective on the effect of IT in streamlining hospital operations. Specifically, we examined the role of IT on patient flow and its consequences for improved hospital efficiency and performance. Analysis of data from 567 U.S. hospitals shows that IT is associated with swift and even patient flow, which in turn is associated with improved revenues. Interestingly, we find that the improvement in financial performance is not at the expense of quality because we find similar effects of IT and patient flow in improvements in the quality of patient care. Further, we observed differential effects of swift flow and even flow on various measures of hospital performance. Although swift flow affects financial performance, even flow primarily affects quality performance. Taken together, they have a mutually reinforcing overall impact on hospital performance. The implications of these findings for hospital decision makers are that patient flow is an important mediating variable that is affected by IT and can significantly affect the quality of patient care and financial performance

HOW TO CULTIVATE ANALYTICS CAPABILITIES WITHIN AN ORGANIZATION? – DESIGN AND TYPES OF ANALYTICS COMPETENCY CENTERS

Today, the ability to exploit big data using advanced analytics bears considerable potential to create competitive advantages. Therefore, business leaders need to make crucial design decisions on how to cultivate these capabilities within their organization. Analytics Competency Centers (ACCs) are an important organizational solution to spread analytics capabilities by providing leadership, expertise and infrastructure. In this paper, we analyze nine analytics competency centers of major global players across several industries - based on a series of interviews with executives, consultants and data scientists. We identify strategic and structural design options, common processes, best-practices, and potential future development paths. In particular, we distinguish between two generic types of centers that differ in their strategic orientation and their choice of design options. Our work contributes to organizational design theory addressing the question on how analytics capabilities can be nurtured for competitive advantage. It should provide concrete guidance to business leaders on how to design and apply ACCs as an organizational option

Improving Information Alignment and Distributed Coordination for Secure Information Supply Chains

Industries are constantly striving to incorporate the latest technology systems into their operations so that they can maintain a competitive edge in their respective markets. However, even when they are able to stay up to speed with technological advancement, there continues to be a gap between the workforce skill set and available technologies. Organizations may acquire advanced systems, yet end up spending extended periods of time in the implementation and deployment phases, resulting in lost resources and productivity. The primary focus of this research is on streamlining the implementation and integration of new information technology systems to avoid the dire consequences of the process being prolonged or inefficient. Specifically, the goal of this research is to mitigate business challenges in information sharing and availability for employees and managers interacting with business tools and each other. This was accomplished by first interviewing work professionals in order to identify gap parameters. Based on the interview findings, recommendations were made in order to enhance the usability of existing tools. At this point, the research setting was shifted from network operations to supply chain operations due to the restrictive nature of network operations. The research team succeeded in developing a user-centered methodology to implement and deploy new business systems to mitigate risk during integration of new systems as the transition is made from the classic way of performing tasks. While this methodology was studied in supply chain operations, it enabled the identification of a common trend of challenges in operations work settings, regardless of the business application. Hence the findings of this research can be extrapolated to any business setting, besides the ones actually studied by the team. In addition, this research ensures that operational teams are able to maximize their benefit out of the technology available, thus enabling them to keep up with the rapidly evolving world of technology while minimizing sacrifices in resources or productivity in the process

An investigation of analytics and business intelligence applications in improving healthcare organization performance: a mixed methods research

The healthcare ecosystem in the US is currently undergoing series of refinement and reformation due to the need to (i) improve quality of care and (ii) reduce cost. To achieve their key objective, healthcare organizations (HCOs) currently face a fundamental challenge: how to best use or optimize limited resources while providing better care and services to patients? The answer to this question might lie within HCO’s massive data and the ability to identify and apply appropriate analytics and business intelligence (A&BI) techniques and technologies to discern and extract relevant information and knowledge from that data. However, despite the increasing interest in the implementation and utilization of A&BI techniques and technologies by various organizations to improve operational efficiencies and financial performance, HCOs still lag behind other sectors in the adoption and use of A&BI capabilities. Motivated by the “data rich but information poor” syndrome currently facing HCOs, this dissertation applies a mixed method research–case study (interpretivist) and survey (positivist) – to investigate how healthcare organizations can leverage A&BI techniques and technologies to improve their overall performance. In achieving this objective, I illustrate an exemplar of how A&BI techniques and technologies can effectively be applied by specifically answering this high-level research question (RQ): How can A&BI techniques, methods, and technologies be developed and leveraged to improve performance in healthcare organizations? This high-level RQ has been broken down into four sub-questions that will be answered in two different studies in this dissertation. In the first study, I investigate what combination of A&BI techniques and technologies HCOs are currently applying to create value. This study was conducted by using content/literature analysis and case study methods in a large healthcare organization. The second study builds on the first study to investigate, using both interview and survey data, how A&BI capabilities can be developed, cultivated and nurtured as a core competency or capability that significantly helps improve healthcare organizations’ overall performance (such as cost reduction, quick access to providers and treatment, effective diagnostics, etc.). I found very novel and interesting results in both studies that not only address the research questions, but also provide significant theoretical and practical contributions. Major contributions of study 1 include: revising and remodeling of an outdated healthcare value chain (HCVC) framework that is more realistic and applicable to current care delivery practices in the healthcare industry and mapping of A&BI capabilities to the different domains of the revised HCVC framework. Study 2 provides theoretical contribution to the existing literature by conceptualizing and empirically validating A&BI capability as a third-order multi-dimension construct and its significant influence on performance

Using Collaborative Visual Analytics for Innovative Industry-inspired Learning Activities

Inspired by leading industry practices, this paper describes an innovative learning activity designed to combine data visualisation and cross-functional collaboration supported by enterprise social media. The activity is structured around sharing, co-creation and negotiation of departmental/disciplinary insights across data silos, using both internal and external data. In addition to giving students access to state-of-the-art tools for visualisation (SAS-VA) and collaboration (Yammer), an even more important educational objective is to expose students to the complexities of deriving information (i.e. meaning) from enterprise-wide (meaning-free) data stored by business intelligence & analytics systems. This human-driven and human-centric process of making sense of data in context requires collaboration across functional silos, especially when dealing with complex multi-disciplinary challenges. Starting from an industry-informed business scenario, the paper describes the main steps of an innovative data visualisation and collaboration activity, discusses possible alternative software platforms and offers some ideas for the future work