Information Systems in University Learning

The authors of this article are going to bring into light the significance, the place and the role of information systems in the university education process. At the same time they define the objectives and the target group of the subject named Economic Information Systems and state the competence gained by students by studying this subject. Special attention is given to the curriculum to be taught to students and to a suggestive enumeration of a series of economic applications that can be themes for laboratory practice and for students’ dissertation (graduation thesis).Information System, Academic Partnership, Curriculum, General Competence, Specific Competence, Open Systems

The long sale: future-setting strategies for enterprise technologies

Markets for enterprise technologies are complex socio-technical arrangements where the nature of the goods or services available for exchange is frequently uncertain. Early offerings may appear obfuscated, in part ontologically due to contested boundary definitions, and in part through the intentional and unintentional work of sales actors. While it is difficult for actors to know what they are transacting with certainty before an exchange occurs, expectations are partly shaped in practice during a protracted and multipartite sales process. In the early stages, such technologies may be nothing more than ‘slideware’ or ‘vapourware’, with the promise of the offering yet to be realised. Suppliers are therefore faced with the challenge of how to bring an immature product to the serious attention of users. One such example which has dominated the ICT landscape in recent times is ‘cloud computing’, a vision for on-demand utility computing which on the one hand promised computing resources accessible like an infrastructure commodity such as electricity, but on the other declared by some as simply everything we already do in computing today. This thesis offers a longitudinal case study of the way in which a major ICT supplier, IBM, attempted to galvanise the market for its cloud-enabled products amongst user organisations. In doing so the supplier had the challenge of selling a model of outsourced services to organisations with deeply embedded ICT systems around which the sales processes had to be made to fit. The research centers on four empirical chapters which bring together contextual narratives of cloud computing, findings related to the sales work users do, the sales challenges encountered during crisis management, and the shadow activity that occurs during professional user groups and conferences. The discussion explains how actors work together to construct an imagined community of technology artefacts and practices that extends our understanding of how technology constituencies hold together without overt forms of control. The study draws together a number of years of fieldwork investigating user group events in the corporate ICT arena and a major UK customer implementation. These are explored through a mobile ethnography under the banner of a Biography of Artefacts and Practices (Pollock & Williams, 2008) making use of participant observation, and selective interviewing, with a particular focus on naturally occurring data

From access and integration to mining of secure genomic data sets across the grid

The UK Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) funded BRIDGES project (Biomedical Research Informatics Delivered by Grid Enabled Services) has developed a Grid infrastructure to support cardiovascular research. This includes the provision of a compute Grid and a data Grid infrastructure with security at its heart. In this paper we focus on the BRIDGES data Grid. A primary aim of the BRIDGES data Grid is to help control the complexity in access to and integration of a myriad of genomic data sets through simple Grid based tools. We outline these tools, how they are delivered to the end user scientists. We also describe how these tools are to be extended in the BBSRC funded Grid Enabled Microarray Expression Profile Search (GEMEPS) to support a richer vocabulary of search capabilities to support mining of microarray data sets. As with BRIDGES, fine grain Grid security underpins GEMEPS

Information Systems in University Learning

The authors of this article are going to bring into light the significance, the place and the role of information systems in the university education process. At the same time they define the objectives and the target group of the subject named Economic Information Systems and state the competence gained by students by studying this subject. Special attention is given to the curriculum to be taught to students and to a suggestive enumeration of a series of economic applications that can be themes for laboratory practice and for students’ dissertation (graduation thesis)

Technological Advancements in E-Commerce and Customer Relationship Management

In the recent past, for any business to be successful it is essential to acquire, serve and retain customers. The number of users of commercial purposes has led to increased demand for E-Commerce in the global market. There has been a remarkable progress in E-Commerce due to globalization and technological advancements which led to sustainable quantum of business at affordable price. Technologies used in E-Commerce includes: Augmented Reality: The Future of E-Commerce Stores, Artificial Intelligence: Improving E-Commerce services and Optimizing Customer Experience, Voice Search, Chatbot, Blockchain Technology: A Faster, Safer and More Transparent used as E-Commerce Payment System, Security and Supply chain management. This paper focuses on the evolution of E-Commerce, development of CRM initiatives, leading E-Commerce companies, technological advancement in E-Commerce: E-Commerce platforms and service providers; software and tools used in E-Commerce and recent trends in E-Commerce and CRM in streamlining the CRM process thereby minimizing the cost of CRM

Web services strategy

Thesis (S.M.M.O.T.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, Management of Technology Program, 2003.June 2003.Includes bibliographical references (p. 116-123).This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Everything is connected to everything. El Aleph (1945), by Jorge Luis Borges[1] This thesis addresses the need to simplify and streamline web service network infrastructure and to identify business models that best leverage Web services technology and industry dynamics to generate positive business results. Web services have evolved from the simple page-display protocol of their origin and now reach beyond the links that simply updated web data dynamically from corporate databases, to where systems can automatically transact. These Web services represent a series of network business technology standards and capabilities that irrevocably change the way in which businesses will do business. In fact, every business today is a networked business and has opportunities to grow using Web services. This study focuses on the implementation challenges in the financial services market, specifically the On Line Transaction Processing (OLTP) sector where legacy mainframes interface with multiple tiers of distribution through proprietary EDI links. The OLTP industry operates under stringent regulatory requirements for availability and audit-ability of not only who performed what transaction, but who had access to the information about the information. In this environment organizational demands on network infrastructure including hardware, software and personnel are changing radically, while concurrently Information Technology (IT) budgets are under pressure. The strategic choices for deploying web services in this environment may contain lessons for other industries where cost effective large scale processing, high availability, security, manageability and Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) are paramount concerns. In this paper we use a systems dynamics model to simulate the impact of market changes on the adoption of innovative technologies and their commoditization on the industry value chain, with the aim of identifying business models and network topologies which best support the growth of an Open Systems network business. From the results of the simulation we will derive strategic recommendations for networked business models and web services integration strategies to meet Line Of Business (LOB) objectives.by Stephen B. Miles.S.M.M.O.T

A smart hill-climbing algorithm for application server configuration

The overwhelming success of the Web as a mechanism for facilitating information retrieval and for conducting business transactions has led to an increase in the deployment of complex enterprise applications. These applications typically run on Web Application Servers, which assume the burden of managing many tasks, such as concurrency, memory management, database access, etc., required by these applications. The performance of an Application Server depends heavily on appropriate configuration. Configuration is a difficult and error-prone task due to the large number of configuration parameters and complex interactions between them. We formulate the problem of finding an optimal configuration for a given application as a black-box optimization problem. We propose a Smart Hill-Climbing algorithm using ideas of importance sampling and Latin Hypercube Sampling (LHS). The algorithm is efficient in both searching and random sampling. It consists of estimating a local function, and then, hill-climbing in the steepest descent direction. The algorithm also learns from past searches and restarts in a smart and selective fashion using the idea of importance sampling. We have carried out extensive experiments with an online brokerage application running in a WebSphere environment. Empirical results demonstrate that our algorithm is more efficient than and superior to traditional heuristic methods. Categories and Subject Descriptor

Natural language processing

Beginning with the basic issues of NLP, this chapter aims to chart the major research activities in this area since the last ARIST Chapter in 1996 (Haas, 1996), including: (i) natural language text processing systems - text summarization, information extraction, information retrieval, etc., including domain-specific applications; (ii) natural language interfaces; (iii) NLP in the context of www and digital libraries ; and (iv) evaluation of NLP systems