An ideal model of an assistive technology assessment and delivery process

The purpose of the present work is to present some aspects of the Assistive Technology Assessment (ATA) process model compatible with the Position Paper 2012 by AAATE/EASTIN. Three aspects of the ATA process will be discussed in light of three topics of the Position Paper 2012: (i) The dimensions and the measures of the User eXperience (UX) evaluation modelled in the ATA process as a way to verify the efficient and the evidence-based practices of an AT service delivery centre; (ii) The relevance of the presence of the psychologist in the multidisciplinary team of an AT service delivery centre as necessary for a complete person-centred assistive solution empowering users to make their own choices; (iii) The new profession of the psychotechnologist, who explores users needs by seeking a proper assistive solution, leading the multidisciplinary team to observe critical issues and problems. Through the foundation of the Position Paper 2012, the 1995 HEART study, the Matching Person and Technology model, the ICF framework, and the pillars of the ATA process, this paper sets forth a concept and approach that emphasise the personal factors of the individual consumer and UX as key to positively impacting a successful outcome and AT solution

SLA-Oriented Resource Provisioning for Cloud Computing: Challenges, Architecture, and Solutions

Cloud computing systems promise to offer subscription-oriented, enterprise-quality computing services to users worldwide. With the increased demand for delivering services to a large number of users, they need to offer differentiated services to users and meet their quality expectations. Existing resource management systems in data centers are yet to support Service Level Agreement (SLA)-oriented resource allocation, and thus need to be enhanced to realize cloud computing and utility computing. In addition, no work has been done to collectively incorporate customer-driven service management, computational risk management, and autonomic resource management into a market-based resource management system to target the rapidly changing enterprise requirements of Cloud computing. This paper presents vision, challenges, and architectural elements of SLA-oriented resource management. The proposed architecture supports integration of marketbased provisioning policies and virtualisation technologies for flexible allocation of resources to applications. The performance results obtained from our working prototype system shows the feasibility and effectiveness of SLA-based resource provisioning in Clouds.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, Conference Keynote Paper: 2011 IEEE International Conference on Cloud and Service Computing (CSC 2011, IEEE Press, USA), Hong Kong, China, December 12-14, 201

A new model to support the personalised management of a quality e-commerce service

The paper presents an aiding model to support the management of a high quality e-commerce service. The approach focuses on the service quality aspects related to customer relationship management (CRM). Knowing the individual characteristics of a customer, it is possible to supply a personalised and high quality service. A segmentation model, based on the "relationship evolution" between users and Web site, is developed. The method permits the provision of a specific service management for each user segment. Finally, some preliminary experimental results for a sport-clothing industry application are described

A framework on information behaviour of SME managers for decision-making on emerging ICTs

The aim of this study is to explore the perceived information needs and information behaviours of manager of UK small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). As technology advancement and innovation are changing rapidly affecting organisations in different ways, organization executives are introducing new technologies for their operations and business environment becomes more complex and dynamic, government introducing different policies to guide the use of these emerging ICTs. As a result, information becomes significant during adoption decision-making process for SME managers to make an inform decision. To achieve this aim, a framework is developed based on existing literature, using the technology organization environmental (TOE) model as the theoretical underpinning for empirical investigation on information behaviour of SME managers in this study. This study is qualitative in nature, and semi-structured face-to-face interviews were conducted with twenty SME managers in the UK service sector. The interviews were recorded and transcribed. Following Myers and Newman’s (2007) guidelines for qualitative interview and triangulation method were used to validate the conceptual framework and established the research rigour and quality. The research findings explained information behaviours of SME managers in the contexts of technology organisation environment as information behaviour triggered and perceived information needs during the adoption decision in SMEs. These findings provide further insight into ICT adoption in SMEs through information behaviours and highlighted the significant of sources of information and pre-information needed during the decision-making process. The research also contributes to theory in the information systems field by using relevant literature from information science field to explore information behaviours of SME managers. Future research can be done in other sectors of the economy to show more holistic behaviours of SME managers

Value Creation in a QoE Environment

User behavior of multimedia services currently undergoes strong changes. This is reflected in several recent trends, e.g. the increase of rich media content consumption, preferences for more individual and personalized services and the higher sensitivity of end users for quality issues. These changes will eventually lead to strong changes in network traffic characteristics: rising congestion in peak times and less availability of bandwidth for the individual user. As a result, the quality as perceived by the end-user will decrease if network operators and service providers do not anticipate the required changes for the network. Measurable network requirements such as available video and speech quality, security and reliability are addressed by technologies that are commonly summed up in the Quality of Service (QoS) concept. However, the end-users' perception of quality is only reflected in the wider concept of Quality of Experience (QoE). This takes the measurable network requirements into account as well as customer needs, wants and preferences. For the implementation of QoE technologies several network components need to be added or changed resulting in high capital expenditures. Yet, it is not clear if these costs can be compensated with efficiency increases. Thus, new revenue streams for the network operator are necessary to incentivize investments in QoE technologies. In this paper we address four new value creation models that can serve as basis for more elaborated business models for network operators and other actors. We show how interest in QoE of the user, the content provider, the service provider and the advertiser induces new revenue streams. These models are embedded in five possible future QoE scenarios that reveal regulation, end user quality sensibility and end-to-end support as major issues for the future. --Business Models,Quality of Experience (QoE),Quality of Service (QoS),Value Creation