Technology Target Studies: Technology Solutions to Make Patient Care Safer and More Efficient

Presents findings on technologies that could enhance care delivery, including patient records and medication processes; features and functionality nurses require, including tracking, interoperability, and hand-held capability; and best practices

Cultural diversity and information and communication technology impacts on global virtual teams: An exploratory study.

Modern organizations face many significant challenges because of turbulent environments and a competitive global economy. Among these challenges are the use of information and communication technology (ICT), a multicultural workforce, and organizational designs that involve global virtual teams. Ad hoc teams create both opportunities and challenges for organizations and many organizations are trying to understand how the virtual environment affects team effectiveness. Our exploratory study focused on the effects of cultural diversity and ICT on team effectiveness. Interviews with 41 team members from nine countries employed by a Fortune 500 corporation were analyzed. Results suggested that cultural diversity had a positive influence on decision‐making and a negative influence on communication. ICT mitigated the negative impact on intercultural communication and supported the positive impact on decision making. Effective technologies for intercultural communication included e‐mail, teleconferencing combined with e‐Meetings, and team rooms. Cultural diversity influenced selection of the communication media

Desktop multimedia environments to support collaborative distance learning

Desktop multimedia conferencing, when two or more persons can communicate among themselves via personal computers with the opportunity to see and hear one another as well as communicate via text messages while working with commonly available stored resources, appears to have important applications to the support of collaborative learning. In this paper we explore this potential in three ways: (a) through an analysis of particular learner needs when learning and working collaboratively with others outside of face-to-face situations; (b) through an analysis of different forms of conferencing environments, including desktop multimedia environments, relative to their effectiveness in terms of meeting learner needs for distributed collaboration; and (c) through reporting the results of a formative evaluation of a prototype desktop multimedia conferencing system developed especially for the support of collaborative learning. Via these analyses, suggestions are offered relating to the functionalities of desktop multimedia conferencing systems for the support of collaborative learning, reflecting new developments in both the technologies available for such systems and in our awareness of learner needs when working collaboratively with one other outside of face-to-face situations

Pro-active Meeting Assistants: Attention Please!

This paper gives an overview of pro-active meeting assistants, what they are and when they can be useful. We explain how to develop such assistants with respect to requirement definitions and elaborate on a set of Wizard of Oz experiments, aiming to find out in which form a meeting assistant should operate to be accepted by participants and whether the meeting effectiveness and efficiency can be improved by an assistant at all. This paper gives an overview of pro-active meeting assistants, what they are and when they can be useful. We explain how to develop such assistants with respect to requirement definitions and elaborate on a set of Wizard of Oz experiments, aiming to find out in which form a meeting assistant should operate to be accepted by participants and whether the meeting effectiveness and efficiency can be improved by an assistant at all

Pro-active Meeting Assistants : Attention Please!

This paper gives an overview of pro-active meeting assistants, what they are and when they can be useful. We explain how to develop such assistants with respect to requirement definitions and elaborate on a set of Wizard of Oz experiments, aiming to find out in which form a meeting assistant should operate to be accepted by participants and whether the meeting effectiveness and efficiency can be improved by an assistant at all

Harnessing Intellectual Resources in a Collaborative Context to Create Value

The value of electronic collaboration has arisen as successful organisations recognize that they need to convert their intellectual resources into customized services. The shift from personal computing to interpersonal or collaborative computing has given rise to ways of working that may bring about better and more effective use of intellectual resources. Current efforts in managing knowledge have concentrated on producing; sharing and storing knowledge while business problems require the combined use of these intellectual resources to enable organisations to provide innovative and customized services. In this chapter the collaborative context is developed using a model for electronic collaboration through the use of which organisations may mobilse collaborative technologies and intellectual resources towards achieving joint effect.electronic collaboration;value creation;collaborative computing;knowledge management and intellectual resources

Software como um Serviço: uma plataforma eficaz para oferta de sistemas holísticos de gestão da performance

This study main objective was to assess the viability of development of a Performance Management (PM) system, delivered in the form of Software as a Service (SaaS), specific for the hospitality industry and to evaluate the benefits of its use. Software deployed in the cloud, delivered and licensed as a service, is becoming increasingly common and accepted in a business context. Although, Business Intelligence (BI) solutions are not usually distributed in the SaaS model, there are some examples that this is changing. To achieve the study objective, design science research methodology was employed in the development of a prototype. This prototype was deployed in four hotels and its results evaluated. Evaluation of the prototype was focused both on the system technical characteristics and business benefits. Results shown that hotels were very satisfied with the system and that building a prototype and making it available in the form of SaaS is a good solution to assess BI systems contribution to improve management performance.O objetivo principal deste estudo é avaliar a viabilidade de desenvolvimento de um sistema de Gestão da Performance, entregue sob a forma de “Software como Serviço” (SaaS), específico para o setor hoteleiro, e também avaliar os benefícios de seu uso. O software implantado na cloud, entregue e licenciado como um serviço, é cada vez mais aceite num contexto de negócios. Todavia, não é comum que soluções de Business Intelligence (BI) sejam distribuídas neste modelo SaaS. No entanto, existem alguns exemplos de que isso se está a alterar. Para atingir o objetivo do estudo, foi utilizada Design Science Research como metodologia de pesquisa científica para desenvolvimento de um protótipo. Este protótipo foi implementado em quatro hotéis para que os seus resultados pudessem ser avaliados. A avaliação foi focada tanto nas características técnicas do sistema como nos benefícios para o negócio. Os resultados mostraram que os hotéis estavam muito satisfeitos com o sistema e que construir um protótipo e disponibilizá-lo sob a forma de SaaS é uma boa solução para avaliar a contribuição dos sistemas de BI para melhorar o desempenho da gestão.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A field study of team working in a new human supervisory control system

This paper presents a case study of an investigation into team behaviour in an energy distribution company. The main aim was to investigate the impact of major changes in the company on system performance, comprising human and technical elements. A socio-technical systems approach was adopted. There were main differences between the teams investigated in the study: the time of year each control room was studied (i.e. summer or winter),the stage of development each team was in (i.e. 10 months), and the team structure (i.e. hierarchical or heterarchical). In all other respects the control rooms were the same: employing the same technology and within the same organization. The main findings were: the teams studied in the winter months were engaged in more `planning’ and `awareness’ type of activities than those studies in the summer months. Newer teams seem to be engaged in more sharing of information than older teams, which maybe indicative of the development process. One of the hierarchical teams was engaged in more `system-driven’ activities than the heterarchical team studied at the same time of year. Finally, in general, the heterarchical team perceived a greater degree of team working culture than its hierarchical counterparts. This applied research project confirms findings from laboratory research and emphasizes the importance of involving ergonomics in the design of team working in human supervisory control

Lyceum: internet voice groupware for distance learning

This paper describes the design, implementation and deployment of Lyceum, a groupware system providing students and tutors with real time voice conferencing and visual workspace tools, over the standard internet. Lyceum uses a Java client/server architecture to tackle a formidable set of networking requirements: multi-way voice communication with synchronous shared displays, scalable to hundreds of simultaneous users, running over normal modem connections via unknown internet service providers, on home PCs. Additionally, the design had to support multiple courses with different requirements. We describe the interdisciplinary requirements analysis, and iterative design process, by which an academic course team was able to specify and evaluate prototypes. We present the systemís architecture, describe the technical successes and failures from Lyceumís first large scale deployment, and summarise its affordances for interaction and learning