Be vicarious: the challenge for project management in the service economy

Purpose. The paper aims to answer to the following questions: which are the critical dynamic capabilities to survive in the rubber landscape of service economy? Does it exist in service economy a dynamic capabilities provider? Methodology. The paper combines the literature review on dynamic capability perspective and that on vicariance to the Project Management professional services. Findings. Firstly, the paper identifies vicariance as an intriguing dynamic capability, crucial to survive in the rubber landscape of service economy. Secondly, the paper sheds light on Project Management (PM) as a vicarious that provides vicariance. Practical implications. For each critical organizational dimension, the paper identifies the links among the service economy challenges and the vicariance typology required to the project manager to face those challenge. Originality/value.The approach to conceive the PM as a vicarious that provides vicariance is original and leads to new insights on the professional services management. In fact, on one hand, dynamic capabilities cannot easily be bought through a market transaction; on the other hand, they must be built. This building can be achieved internally, by the organization itself (i.e. hierarchy), or through a partnership (i.e. hybrid form among hierarchy and market). PM professional services enrich organizations with additional information variety according to a hybrid (i.e. non- market) coordination model

A Taxonomy of Data Grids for Distributed Data Sharing, Management and Processing

Data Grids have been adopted as the platform for scientific communities that need to share, access, transport, process and manage large data collections distributed worldwide. They combine high-end computing technologies with high-performance networking and wide-area storage management techniques. In this paper, we discuss the key concepts behind Data Grids and compare them with other data sharing and distribution paradigms such as content delivery networks, peer-to-peer networks and distributed databases. We then provide comprehensive taxonomies that cover various aspects of architecture, data transportation, data replication and resource allocation and scheduling. Finally, we map the proposed taxonomy to various Data Grid systems not only to validate the taxonomy but also to identify areas for future exploration. Through this taxonomy, we aim to categorise existing systems to better understand their goals and their methodology. This would help evaluate their applicability for solving similar problems. This taxonomy also provides a "gap analysis" of this area through which researchers can potentially identify new issues for investigation. Finally, we hope that the proposed taxonomy and mapping also helps to provide an easy way for new practitioners to understand this complex area of research.Comment: 46 pages, 16 figures, Technical Repor

Algorithms for advance bandwidth reservation in media production networks

Media production generally requires many geographically distributed actors (e.g., production houses, broadcasters, advertisers) to exchange huge amounts of raw video and audio data. Traditional distribution techniques, such as dedicated point-to-point optical links, are highly inefficient in terms of installation time and cost. To improve efficiency, shared media production networks that connect all involved actors over a large geographical area, are currently being deployed. The traffic in such networks is often predictable, as the timing and bandwidth requirements of data transfers are generally known hours or even days in advance. As such, the use of advance bandwidth reservation (AR) can greatly increase resource utilization and cost efficiency. In this paper, we propose an Integer Linear Programming formulation of the bandwidth scheduling problem, which takes into account the specific characteristics of media production networks, is presented. Two novel optimization algorithms based on this model are thoroughly evaluated and compared by means of in-depth simulation results