Realizing Business Benefits from Company IT Standardization: Case Study Research into the Organizational Value of IT Standards, Towards a Company IT Standardization Management Framework.

From a practical point of view, this research provides insight into how company IT standards affect business process performance. Furthermore it gives recommendations on how to govern and manage such standards successfully with regard to their selection, implementation and usage. After evaluating this research Business may wish to reconsider the way it currently views the value of company IT standards and the manner with which it deals with them.

Information Technology Standards in eResearch: A Conceptual Model of the Primary Adoption Process in Higher Education Organizations

Current research on IT standards tends to focus on their lifecycle: from the development and selection, to their implementation and use. This work proposed an interdisciplinary perspective to analyze primary adoption process in the eResearch domain. As organizations are the core entities in the innovation process, the analysis of IT standards adoption was applied to eResearch infrastructures within higher education organizations. The core argument was built on the adopter s viewpoint as it provides the most explanatory process about adoption. Two international case studies probed the suitability of a model to identify the determinant role of factors like external and internal networks, top management support and organization structure. This dissertation delivers new insights that contribute to bring certainty about one relevant context of standards adoption

The adoption of ICT in Malaysian public hospitals: the interoperability of electronic health records and health information systems

There have been a number of researches that investigated ICT adoption in Malaysian healthcare. With the small number of hospitals that adopt ICT in their daily clinical and administrative operations, the possibility to enable data exchange across 131 public hospitals in Malaysia is still a long journey. In addition to those studies, this research was framed under six objectives, which aim to critically review existing literature on the subject matter, identify barriers of ICT adoption in Malaysia, understand the administrative context during the pre and post-ICT adoption, and recommend possible solutions to the Ministry of Health of Malaysia (MoHM) in its efforts to implement interoperable electronic health records (EHR) and health information systems (HTIS). Specifically, this research aimed to identify the factors that had significant impacts to the processes of implementing interoperable EHR and HTIS by the MoHM. Furthermore, it also aimed to propose relevant actors who should involve in the implementation phases. These factors and actors were used to develop a model for implementing interoperable EHR and HTIS in Malaysia. To gather the needed data, series of interviews were conducted with three groups of participants. They were ICT administrators of MoHM, ICT and medical record administrators of three hospitals, and physicians of three hospitals. To ensure the interview feedback was representing the context of EHR and HTIS implementation in Malaysia, two hospital categories were selected, which included the hospitals with HTIS and non-HTIS hospitals. The government documents were then used to triangulate the feedback to ensure dependability, credibility, transferability and conformity of the findings. Two techniques were used to analyse the data, which were thematic analysis and theme matching. These two techniques were modified from its original method, known as pattern matching. The originality of this research was presented in the findings and methods to transform them into solutions and provide recommendation to the MoHM. In general, the results showed that the technological factors contributed less to the success of the implementation of interoperable EHR and HTIS compared to the managerial and administrative factors. Four main practical and social contributions were identified from this research, which included synchronisation of managerial elements, political determination and change management transformation, optimisation of use of existing legacy system (Patient Management System) and finally the roles of actors. Nevertheless, the findings of this research would be more dependable and transferable if more participants had been willing to participate especially among the physicians and those who managed the ICT adoptions under the MoHM

Efficient Decision Support Systems

This series is directed to diverse managerial professionals who are leading the transformation of individual domains by using expert information and domain knowledge to drive decision support systems (DSSs). The series offers a broad range of subjects addressed in specific areas such as health care, business management, banking, agriculture, environmental improvement, natural resource and spatial management, aviation administration, and hybrid applications of information technology aimed to interdisciplinary issues. This book series is composed of three volumes: Volume 1 consists of general concepts and methodology of DSSs; Volume 2 consists of applications of DSSs in the biomedical domain; Volume 3 consists of hybrid applications of DSSs in multidisciplinary domains. The book is shaped upon decision support strategies in the new infrastructure that assists the readers in full use of the creative technology to manipulate input data and to transform information into useful decisions for decision makers

Uma abordagem para interoperabilidade entre plataformas heterogêneas de serviços web para redes colaborativas de organizações

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro Tecnológico. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia Elétrica.Cada vez mais as organizações têm enfrentado um ambiente de intensa concorrência e mudanças de mercado. Para se manterem competitivas e melhorar a colaboração entre parceiros e clientes, as organizações vêm participando de redes colaborativas mais complexas e menos rígidas, como, por exemplo, cadeias de suprimento e organizações virtuais. A Tecnologia da Informação e Comunicação (TIC) vem sendo cada vez mais utilizada como forma de suportar essa colaboração. Porém, isso cria um cenário extremamente heterogêneo, onde organizações diferentes e distribuídas utilizam diversos sistemas de TIC, providos por fabricantes variados e desenvolvidos em diversas plataformas e tecnologias. Portanto, é preciso que sejam oferecidos meios de alcançar uma maior interoperabilidade e colaboração entre as organizações, de maneira padronizada, aberta e dinâmica. Para tal, faz-se necessário utilizar uma abordagem que siga um modelo descentralizado e de baixo acoplamento, permitindo que as organizações possam participar de maneira transparente e interoperável nos processos colaborativos. O paradigma de orientação a serviços, que pode ser implementado através da tecnologia e padrões dos serviços Web, vem sendo largamente utilizado para atingir tal interoperabilidade entre organizações e seus sistemas de TIC. Apesar dos serviços Web serem amparados por padrões, quando as organizações desejam fazer seus serviços, que normalmente são desenvolvidos em diferentes plataformas, linguagens e sistemas operacionais, se comunicarem plenamente entre si, diversos problemas de interoperabilidade surgem na prática. Esse trabalho apresenta uma pesquisa acerca da forma como se aumentar a interoperabilidade e a colaboração entre organizações através de serviços Web, propondo uma abordagem para ocultar a complexidade tecnológica e atingir uma maior interoperabilidade, independentemente da plataforma computacional, das tecnologias e linguagens de implementação, e da localização geográfica do serviço

Factors Affecting the Quality of Enterprise Architecture Models

We start our research by introducing the subject of Enterprise Architecture (EA), its content and purpose, as well as discussing what we mean by a ‘model’, and ‘quality’, building on concepts from semiotics and in particular on conceptual model quality. We set out to answer three questions. The first deals with how we measure the quality of a set of Enterprise Architecture models, and to answer this we produce a mathematical framework and then test it using a case study. This extends the conceptual model quality work done by Lindland and Krogstie into the realm of Enterprise Architecture, adding new aspects related to completeness of sets of models, modelling maturity as well as conditions for increasing quality. This incorporates mathematical concepts, including set theory and calculus, and proposes three specific metrics for the quality of sets of models (related to truthfulness, syntax and completeness). This uses a simple case study, based upon purely quantitative data, sampling the contents of an existing Enterprise Architecture repository. The second deals with how we measure the effectiveness of the language used in Enterprise Architecture models. We again use mathematical techniques to construct metrics, this time related to comprehension and utility: the former incorporating a triangulation technique based upon Kvanvig’s concept of moderate factivity of objectual understanding, and the latter being a more subjective measure (i.e. self-assessment). From these two metrics we provide a new conceptual visualisation of the effectiveness of language concepts. We then test this framework using a mixed-mode case study, carrying out 68 interviews, based mostly upon quantitative data again but with additional elements of qualitative data. Although the conceptual framework is independent of any particular language, in order to test it we actually need to select an Enterprise Architecture framework, or more specifically, the modelling language within such a framework; the framework we choose for this purpose is ArchiMate. Through the use of alternative modelling notations in the survey process, we gain insights not just into the understanding and utility of various ArchiMate concepts, as perceived by respondents, we also gain insights into the effect of understanding and utility of using the specific notation provided by ArchiMate through the use of differential analysis of the result sets thus obtained. The final question we address is more practically focused and deals with how we can specify and automate various kinds of changes to Enterprise Architecture models based upon the previous research. We construct a conceptual framework illustrating the kinds of transformations that may be required, given what we have learnt in the previous chapters, demonstrate that these can be deterministic and finally demonstrate, by use of a specific Enterprise Architecture modelling tool (BiZZdesign), that they can be implemented in software, and thus automated. vii In the course of our research, we deliver reusable methodologies and frameworks that will assist future researchers into Enterprise Architecture and related frameworks, as well as Enterprise Architecture practitioners