Relationships and Responsibilities of Software Experimentation.

The ESE research has dependence relationships with Ethical control, Good Laboratory Practices, and related Guidelines. In other fields there are many types of experiments, to conduct orderly (in case of success only!) E0 acts on things, “in-vitro”; experimenters are the only humans allowed to come in contact; ESE scientists should simulate their experiment processes before involving volunteers. E1 acts on primary animals; seems not applicable for ESE experiments. E2 acts on formally informed human volunteers performing as subjects. En>2 act on dependent humans: the lower is n the greater is the level of dependency of the involved subjects. Based on the ESE practices, to the best or our knowledge, ESE experiments usually skip the stages E0, and still limit to enact (part of) E2, which is a quite frustrating fact that we should work to remove

Thought for Food: the impact of ICT on agribusiness

This report outlines the impact of ICT on the food economy. On the basis of a literature review from four disciplines - knowledge management, management information systems, operations research and logistics, and economics - the demand for new ICT applications, the supply of new applications and the match between demand and supply are identified. Subsequently the impact of new ICT applications on the food economy is discussed. The report relates the development of new technologies to innovation and adoption processes and economic growth, and to concepts of open innovations and living lab

Sustaining a federation of future internet experimental facilities

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Preparing to Preserve: Three Essential Steps to Building Experience with Long-Term Digital Preservation

Many organizations face complex questions of how to implement affordable and sustainable digital preservation practices. One strategic priority at the University Libraries at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, United States, is increased focus toward preservation of unique digital assets, whether digitized from physical originals or born digital. A team comprised of experts from multiple functional library departments (including the special collections/archives area and the technology area) was established to help address this priority, and efforts are beginning to translate into operational practice. This work outlines a three-step approach: Partnership, Policy, Pilot taken by one academic research library to strategically build experience utilizing a collaborative team approach. Our experience included the formation of a team, education of all members, and a foundational attitude that decisions would be undertaken as partners rather than competing departments or units. The team’s work included the development of an initial digital preservation policy, helping to distill the organizational priority and values associated with digital preservation. Several pilot projects were initiated and completed, which provided realistic, first-person experience with digital preservation activities, surfaced questions, and set the stage for developing and refining sustainable workflows. This work will highlight key activities in our journey to date, with the hope that experience gained through this effort could be applicable, in whole or part, to other organizations regardless of their size or capacity

Faith, Librarianship and Technology

Technology is transforming many venues. Some suggest that the transformation is happening much too quickly, others suggest not quickly enough. As Christians, we have a responsibility to observe this technological transformation through the lens of faith and act upon what we learn. As academic librarians, we have a responsibility to use technology to further the spread of resources to our patrons. How does a Christian librarian respond to changes? Is there a measuring rod by which technology should be evaluated? This article argues that relationships are the measuring rod by which technology should be evaluated; relationships meaning not simply a casual acquaintance, but an effort to restore Eden in every interaction that takes place, both online and face to face. When these efforts are made, faith, librarianship, and technology can serve a unified purpose

A research experiment on facilitation and formation of joint research and development programs between government, industry, and universities: Overview, preliminary findings, and observations

Presented is an overview of an experiment to explore the free-market approach to public-private collaboration through the development and implementation of a joint venture mechanism to enable formation of R&D projects between government, industry and academia. Some preliminary results related to time-to-commercialization and economic competitiveness are discussed

Coordinating Changes in M-form and U-form Organizations

We introduce a method of modelling coordination inside an organization as a process of "attribute matching." Using this method, we compare organizational forms (U-form and M-form) in coordinating changes. In our model, organizational forms affect the information structure of an organization and thus the way to coordinate changes. Compared to the U-form, the M-form organization achieves better coordination but suffers from higher costs due to a lack of scale economies or a lack of what we call "attribute compatibility." The M-form has a distinctive advantage in carrying out experimentation which gives the organization more flexibility leading to more innovation and reform. We apply our theory to business firms, transition economies, and the organization of government (especially federalism). In the case of transition economies, our theory relates the initial conditions of organizational differences with reform strategies, especially the "big-bang" approach in Eastern Europe and the "experimental" approach in China.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39668/3/wp284.pd

Final report of work-with-IT: the JISC study into evolution of working practices

Technology is increasingly being used to underpin business processes across teaching and learning, research, knowledge exchange and business support activities in both HE and FE. The introduction of technology has a significant impact on the working practices of staff, often requiring them to work in a radically different way. Change in any situation can be unsettling and problematic and, where not effectively managed, can lead to poor service or functionality and disenfranchised staff. These issues can have a direct impact on institutional effectiveness, reputation and the resulting student experience. The Work-with-IT project, based at the University of Strathclyde, sought to examine changes to working practices across HE and FE, the impact on staff roles and relationships and the new skills sets that are required to meet these changes

Collaborative information systems and business process design using simulation

The Information Systems (IS) community promotes the idea that IS analyst should have a clear understanding of the way the organization operates before attempting to propose an IS solution. It is argued that to take a complete advantage of the underlying Information Technology (IT), organizations should first identify any process flaw and then propose a suitable IT solution. Similarly, many process design approaches claim that Business Process (BP) design should be done considering the advantages provided and the limitations imposed by the underlying (IT). Despite this fact research in these domains provides little indication of which mechanisms or tools can help BP and IS analyst to understand the complex relationships amongst these two areas. This paper describes the insights gained during a UK funded research project, namely ASSESS-IT, that aimed to depict the dynamic relationships between IT and BP using simulation. One of the major limitations of the ASSESS-IT project is that it looked at relationship between BP and IT as a three layered structure, namely BP, IS and Computer Networks (CN), and did not explore in detail the relationships between BP and IS alone. This paper uses the outcomes derived from this project and suggests that, is some cases, the relationship between BP and IT could be analyzed by looking at the relationship between BP and IS alone. It then proposes an alternative simulation framework, namely BPISS, that provides the guideline to develop simulation models that portray BP and IS behavior performance measurements, offering in this way an alternative mechanism that can help BP and IS analyst to understand in more detail the dynamic interactions between BP and IS domains