Free and open source software development of IT systems

IT system development, integration, deployment, and administration benefit significantly from free and open source software (FOSS) tools and services. Affordability has been a compelling reason for adopting FOSS in computing curricula and equipping computing labs with support infrastructure. Using FOSS systems and services, however, is just the first step in taking advantage of how FOSS development principles and practices can impact student learning in IT degree programs. Above all, FOSS development of IT systems requires changes to how students, instructors, and other contributors work collaboratively and openly and get involved and invested in project activities. In this paper I examine the challenges to engage students in FOSS development projects proposed by real clients. A six-week course project revealed problems with adopting FOSS development and collaboration across different activities and roles that student team members have assumed. Despite these problems, students have showed a genuine and strong interest in gaining more practice with FOSS development. FOSS development teaching was further refined in two other courses to learn about adequate teaching strategies and the competencies that students achieve when they participate in FOSS development of IT systems

Virtual Team Collaboration: A Review of Literature and Perspectives

Along with the widespread use of information technologies (IT) and the increasing geographical span of tasks held by various organizations, Virtual Teams (VTs) rose as an alternative organizational form which has the potential to deeply change the workplace. This article provides a review of previously published work on collaboration in VTs. The review is organized around two perspectives adopted by scholars, namely technological and managerial. This analysis underlines two major constructs that leads to an efficient VT collaboration, i.e. the context in which the collaboration is held and the collaboration style. While the former is illustrated by knowledge and team characteristics, the latter is identified by technological media and leadership. Building on this classification, we suggest a model and explore future research directions with a particular attention to the implications for collaboration in organizations.Collaboration, Virtual Team, Knowledge Sharing, Literature Review

MEASURING WEB 2.0 EFFICIENCY

Any potential investment assumes, from the investor’s point of view, answering alegitimate question: What is the value returned by the current investment? Investing in the newsemantic technologies in the area of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 are no exception to this rule. Theresearch at hand combines a review of the relevant literature with action research, in order toidentify coherent and relevant methods for the measurement of the benefits arising from aninvestment in the new wave of knowledge management and organizational memory buildingtechnologies. The paper is based on the classic ROI computation, attempting to build a newcomputation model, well suited to measure the success of an implementation of the informationalmemory. The valuation model (enforced and explained by means of a case study) may be alsoregarded as a measurement model for the costs and benefits of building organizational memory atthe economic entity level.Organizational knowledge, ROI, computation model, Web 2.0, Semantic Web

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Teaching telecommunication standards: bridging the gap between theory and practice

©2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Telecommunication standards have become a reliable mechanism to strengthen collaboration between industry and research institutions to accelerate the evolution of communications systems. Standards are needed to enable cooperation while promoting competition. Within the framework of a standard, the companies involved in the standardization process contribute and agree on appropriate technical specifications to ensure diversity and compatibility, and facilitate worldwide commercial deployment and evolution. Those parts of the system that can create competitive advantages are intentionally left open in the specifications. Such specifications are extensive, complex, and minimalistic. This makes telecommunication standards education a difficult endeavor, but it is much demanded by industry and governments to spur economic growth. This article describes a methodology for teaching wireless communications standards. We define our methodology around six learning stages that assimilate the standardization process and identify key learning objectives for each. Enabled by software-defined radio technology, we describe a practical learning environment that facilitates developing many of the needed technical and soft skills without the inherent difficulty and cost associated with radio frequency components and regulation. Using only open source software and commercial of-the-shelf computers, this environment is portable and can easily be recreated at other educational institutions and adapted to their educational needs and constraints. We discuss our and our students' experiences when employing the proposed methodology to 4G LTE standard education at Barcelona Tech.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft