Interpreting infrastructure: Defining user value for digital financial intermediaries.

The 3DaRoC project is exploring digital connectivity and peer-to-peer relationships in financial services. In the light of the near collapse of the UK and world financial sector, understanding and innovating new and more sustainable approaches to financial services is now a critical topic. At the same time, the increasing penetration and take-up of robust high-speed networks, dependable peerto- peer architectures and mobile multimedia technologies offer novel platforms for offering financial services over the Internet. These new forms of digital connectivity give rise to opportunities in doing financial transactions in different ways and with radically different business models that offer the possibility of transforming the marketplace. One area in the digital economy that has had such an effect is in the ways that users access and use digital banking and payment services. The impact of the new economic models presented by these digital financial services is yet to be fully determined, but they have huge potential as disruptive innovations, with a potentially transformative effect on the way that services are offered to users. Little is understood about how technical infrastructures impact on the ways that people make sense of the financial services that they use, or on how these might be designed more effectively. 3DaRoC is exploring this space working with our partners and end users to prototype and evaluate new online, mobile, ubiquitous and tangible technologies, exploring how these services might be extended.Executive Summary: Drawing from Studies of Use - the value, use and interpretation of infrastructure in digital intermediaries to their users. The UK economy has a huge dependence on financial services, and this is increasingly based on digital platforms. Innovating new economic models around consumer financial services through the use of digital technologies is seen as increasingly important in developed economies. There are a number of drivers for this, ranging from national economic factors to the prosaic nature of enabling cheap, speedy and timely interactions for users. The potential for these new digital solutions is that they will allay an over-reliance on the traditional banking sector, which has proved itself to be unstable and risky, and we have seen a number of national policy moves to encourage growth in this sector. Partly as a result of the 2008 banking crisis, there has been an explosion in peer-to-peer financial services for non-professional consumers. These organisations act as intermediaries between users looking to trade goods or credit. However, building self-sustaining or profitable financial services within this novel space is itself fraught with commercial, regulatory, technical and social problems. This document reports on the value, use and interpretation of infrastructure in digital intermediaries to their users, describing analysis of contextual field studies carried out in two retail digital financial intermediary organisations: Zopa Limited and the Bristol Pound. It forms the second milestone document in the 3DaRoC project, developing patterns of use that have arisen on the back of the technical infrastructures in the two organisations that form cases for examination. Its purpose is to examine how the two different technical infrastructures that underpin the transactions that they support–composed of the back-office hardware and software, data structures, the networking and communications technologies used, supported consumer devices, and the user interfaces and interaction design–have provided opportunities for users to realise their financial and other needs. While we orient towards the issues of service use (and its problems), we also examine the activities and expectations of their various users. Our research has involved teams from Lancaster University examining Zopa and Brunel University focusing on the Bristol Pound over approximately a one-year period from October 2013 to October 2014. Extensive interviews, document analysis, observation of user interactions, and other methods have been employed to develop the process analyses of the firms presented here. This report comprises of three key sections: descriptions of the user demographics for Zopa and the Bristol Pound, a discussion about the user experience and its role in community, and an examination of the role of usage data in the development of these a products. We conclude with final analytical section drawing preliminary conclusions from the research presented.The 3DaRoC project is funded by the RCUK Digital Economy ‘Research in the Wild’ theme (grant no. EP/K012304/1)

Understanding the relationship between emotional intelligence and team effectiveness in global, high-technology engineering teams

This research focused on engineers in the high technology industry as a distinct population that remains understudied in research on workplace emotional intelligence (EI). A mixed-method field study was used to examine the relationship between emotional intelligence and team effectiveness in engineering teams in a global high-tech organization. The study population was 27 self-directed, global software development engineering teams whose work was structured using Agile / Scrum methodology. Team member EI was measured through use of the short form Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire. Group emotional intelligence was measured through use of the Team EI Survey, which assesses team norms that support group-level emotional intelligence. Team effectiveness was measured via surveys completed by both team members and their managers. Findings revealed the study population of engineers had significantly higher mean levels of individual trait EI and their teams had significantly higher group-level EI scores than the overall populations in the survey databases for both instruments. Individual trait EI and group-level EI were found to be significantly positively correlated with one another at the overall mean level and among many of their dimensions. Team member ratings of team effectiveness were shown to have a significant positive correlation with group-level EI, while manager ratings of team effectiveness showed an inverse, negative (although not significant) relationship. Qualitative responses from both managers and team members stated a strong valuing of emotionally-intelligent behaviors and norms as enablers of successful team performance. Consistent with the data, comments also suggested a strong connection between the practices of the Agile / Scrum methodology and the development and reinforcement of individual trait EI and group-level EI norms. Implications for practice include establishing a common definition of team effectiveness across managers and team members. Findings also support the development and use of group-level emotional intelligence norms for engineering teams. Further research is recommended to explore the relationship between use of the Agile/Scrum methodology and individual and group emotional intelligence. This study contributes to the literature on emotional intelligence and team effectiveness, particularly for self-directed engineering teams using the Agile / Scrum methodology

Security-Driven Software Evolution Using A Model Driven Approach

High security level must be guaranteed in applications in order to mitigate risks during the deployment of information systems in open network environments. However, a significant number of legacy systems remain in use which poses security risks to the enterprise’ assets due to the poor technologies used and lack of security concerns when they were in design. Software reengineering is a way out to improve their security levels in a systematic way. Model driven is an approach in which model as defined by its type directs the execution of the process. The aim of this research is to explore how model driven approach can facilitate the software reengineering driven by security demand. The research in this thesis involves the following three phases. Firstly, legacy system understanding is performed using reverse engineering techniques. Task of this phase is to reverse engineer legacy system into UML models, partition the legacy system into subsystems with the help of model slicing technique and detect existing security mechanisms to determine whether or not the provided security in the legacy system satisfies the user’s security objectives. Secondly, security requirements are elicited using risk analysis method. It is the process of analysing key aspects of the legacy systems in terms of security. A new risk assessment method, taking consideration of asset, threat and vulnerability, is proposed and used to elicit the security requirements which will generate the detailed security requirements in the specific format to direct the subsequent security enhancement. Finally, security enhancement for the system is performed using the proposed ontology based security pattern approach. It is the stage that security patterns derived from security expertise and fulfilling the elicited security requirements are selected and integrated in the legacy system models with the help of the proposed security ontology. The proposed approach is evaluated by the selected case study. Based on the analysis, conclusions are drawn and future research is discussed at the end of this thesis. The results show this thesis contributes an effective, reusable and suitable evolution approach for software security

Assessing the Character of Place to Guide Geotourism in Montana: A Case Study of Whitefish and White Sulphur Springs, Montana

In 2007 the governor’s Montana Tourism Advisory Council adopted the Montana Tourism and Recreation Charter. Its guiding principle of geotourism pledged to sustain and enhance the character of the places that the people of Montana call home. How can the state’s efforts to keep this pledge be assessed when “character of place” has never been clearly defined or understood in detail? To keep this pledge, and chart the future of geotourism in the state, it was important to clarify what is meant by character of place and identify the full range of present and potential problems that threaten the integrity of a character. Only by assessing character of place can we understand whether and how geotourism sustains the local environment and its aesthetic appeal, enhances the local community and its culture, and enriches the local heritage and well-being of its people

Assessing Character of Place to Guide Geotourism - A Case Study of Two Montana Communities

In 2007 the governor’s Montana Tourism Advisory Council adopted the Montana Tourism and Recreation Charter. Its guiding principle of geotourism pledges to sustain and enhance the character of the places that the people of Montana call home. How can the state’s efforts to keep this pledge be assessed when “character of place” has never been defined in detail? To keep this pledge, and chart the future of geotourism in the state, it was important to clarify what is meant by character of place and identify the full range of present and potential problems that threaten the integrity of a character. Only by assessing character of place can we understand whether and how geotourism sustains the local environment and its aesthetic appeal, enhances the local community and its culture, and enriches the local heritage and well-being of its people

Emergence and early institutionalization of competition in higher education: evidence from Finnish business schools

This paper investigates the emergence and early institutionalization of competition in higher education (HE), specifically in business schools. First, building on key contributions from economics, management studies, sociology, and HE research, we develop propositions on competition in HE and formulate our theoretical framework. Second, we apply this framework to explore competition in Finnish business schools. We argue that business schools constitute an interesting field for studying competition in HE because they are the frontrunners and champions of competition-based views in HE. Our main contribution is a novel explanation of the preconditions, emergence, and early processes of institutionalization that drive HE institutions to compete and collectively produce the observed competitive transformation.publishedVersio

The application of Software Metrics to the area of Formal Specification

In this work our aim has been to investigate the application of software metrics to the area of formal specification. We first look at the nature of Formal Methods and those most commonly in use. This suggests the scope for the type of specifications that should come under investigation. Metrics and the nature of measurement become an important consideration as we discuss how to assess Formal Methods themselves and their impact on software development. We look at the work already done in software metrics to see if parallels can be drawn with the proposed work on formal specification. To establish current knowledge about the use and effectiveness of Formal Methods we investigate to see how their benefits had been assessed by two major surveys. Further information on the impact of the methods is obtained by analysing the results from a series of case studies. We build on work done in a previous study to investigate and compare attributes of three formal specification notations. This gives valuable insights into possible attributes, the way measurements might be made and possible metrics to establish. Drawing together the knowledge and experiences gained from the background research we design three experiments to look at metrics for comprehensibility in formal specifications. The experiments together with their results and statistical analysis are described. The main findings show that the variable names, comment levels and structure of Z specifications have an effect on their comprehensibility