Generating Procedural Controls to Facilitate Trade: The Role of Control in the Absence of Trust

Over the years, Trust has been recognized in the Bled community as a key enabling factor to stimulate Electronic Commerce. Authors have discussed formal aspects of trust, the role trust plays in the adoption of both B2B and B2C Electronic Commerce, as well as mechanisms to build trust and/or overcome the lack of it. This article first provides a brief overview of the Trust-related articles in the Bled eConference. It then focuses on one specific aspect of the facilitation of trade in absence of trust: the development of procedural controls that enable Electronic Commerce at arms’ length, summarizing the contributions of the authors on this theme at the Bled Conference since the early 1990s. The paper concludes with the authors’ current view on developing procedural controls, focusing on the design process itself, which is often a rather lengthy process consisting of trial-and -error. Here a more analytical approach is proposed to the identification of control requirements for inter-organizational procedures. The approach involves abstracting the process to identify its basic deontic elements. A model checking approach is then applied to identify needed controls

25 Years of Research into the Management of eTechnology Projects

Over the last 25 years, information technology has evolved from intra-organizational systems to inter-organizational electronic technologies (eTechnology) that span organizations and industries and to extra-organizational systems delivered via the Internet, which involve individuals rather than organizationss. Project management research has largely sought reasons for project outcomes (Factor Research), and considered projects either as a process (Engineering Tradition) or as a form of organization (Social Science Tradition). This meta-analysis of 284 research papers identified key findings that provide insights and guidance for eTechnology project management in different technical and organizational environments. As the management context of eTechnology projects changed and project implementation moved beyond the control of a single organization, research focus shifted to examining topics within inter-organizational environments. Although some shift in focus occurred towards the social aspects of eTechnology project management, there was comparatively little use of multiple levels of analysis or interdisciplinary research within the Social Science Tradition

Solving key design issues for massively multiplayer online games on peer-to-peer architectures

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are increasing in both popularity and scale on the Internet and are predominantly implemented by Client/Server architectures. While such a classical approach to distributed system design offers many benefits, it suffers from significant technical and commercial drawbacks, primarily reliability and scalability costs. This realisation has sparked recent research interest in adapting MMOGs to Peer-to-Peer (P2P) architectures. This thesis identifies six key design issues to be addressed by P2P MMOGs, namely interest management, event dissemination, task sharing, state persistency, cheating mitigation, and incentive mechanisms. Design alternatives for each issue are systematically compared, and their interrelationships discussed. How well representative P2P MMOG architectures fulfil the design criteria is also evaluated. It is argued that although P2P MMOG architectures are developing rapidly, their support for task sharing and incentive mechanisms still need to be improved. The design of a novel framework for P2P MMOGs, Mediator, is presented. It employs a self-organising super-peer network over a P2P overlay infrastructure, and addresses the six design issues in an integrated system. The Mediator framework is extensible, as it supports flexible policy plug-ins and can accommodate the introduction of new superpeer roles. Key components of this framework have been implemented and evaluated with a simulated P2P MMOG. As the Mediator framework relies on super-peers for computational and administrative tasks, membership management is crucial, e.g. to allow the system to recover from super-peer failures. A new technology for this, namely Membership-Aware Multicast with Bushiness Optimisation (MAMBO), has been designed, implemented and evaluated. It reuses the communication structure of a tree-based application-level multicast to track group membership efficiently. Evaluation of a demonstration application shows i that MAMBO is able to quickly detect and handle peers joining and leaving. Compared to a conventional supervision architecture, MAMBO is more scalable, and yet incurs less communication overheads. Besides MMOGs, MAMBO is suitable for other P2P applications, such as collaborative computing and multimedia streaming. This thesis also presents the design, implementation and evaluation of a novel task mapping infrastructure for heterogeneous P2P environments, Deadline-Driven Auctions (DDA). DDA is primarily designed to support NPC host allocation in P2P MMOGs, and specifically in the Mediator framework. However, it can also support the sharing of computational and interactive tasks with various deadlines in general P2P applications. Experimental and analytical results demonstrate that DDA efficiently allocates computing resources for large numbers of real-time NPC tasks in a simulated P2P MMOG with approximately 1000 players. Furthermore, DDA supports gaming interactivity by keeping the communication latency among NPC hosts and ordinary players low. It also supports flexible matchmaking policies, and can motivate application participants to contribute resources to the system

The First 25 Years of the Bled eConference: Themes and Impacts

The Bled eConference is the longest-running themed conference associated with the Information Systems discipline. The focus throughout its first quarter-century has been the application of electronic tools, migrating progressively from Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) via Inter-Organisational Systems (IOS) and eCommerce to encompass all aspects of the use of networking facilities in industry and government, and more recently by individuals, groups and society as a whole. This paper reports on an examination of the conference titles and of the titles and abstracts of the 773 refereed papers published in the Proceedings since 1995. This identified a long and strong focus on categories of electronic business and corporate perspectives, which has broadened in recent years to encompass the democratic, the social and the personal. The conference\u27s extend well beyond the papers and their thousands of citations and tens of thousands of downloads. Other impacts have included innovative forms of support for the development of large numbers of graduate students, and the many international research collaborations that have been conceived and developed in a beautiful lake-side setting in Slovenia

GeNeMe 2000 - Virtuelle Organisation und Neue Medien 2000: Workshop GeNeMe2000 Gemeinschaften in Neuen Medien: TU Dresden, 5. und 6. Oktober 2000

Aus dem Vorwort: "Der vorliegende Band faßt die Beiträge des mittlerweile dritten Workshops unserer Arbeits- und Veranstaltungslinie Gemeinschaften in Neuen Medien zusammen. Wir freuen uns, daß auch in diesem Jahr eine große Zahl interessanter und richtungsweisender Studien und Projekte die GeNeMe2000 zu einem Forum für die Präsentation von Ideen und für den Erfahrungsaustausch werden läßt. Das thematische Spektrum der Einreichungen zeugt davon, wie sehr neue Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien unsere Art, im Alltag zu interagieren sowie Wissen zu organisieren und zu verbreiten, nachhaltig verändert haben und immer noch verändern.":A. EINFÜHRUNG 1 A. 1. Communities im geschäftlichen Umfeld: Kunden binden, Kooperationen ERMÖGLICHEN, MITARBEITER QUALIFIZIEREN 1 Dr. J. Niemeier A. 2. Systemarchitektur und Informationsbeziehungen für ein Strajjenmanagement-Informationssystem 13 R. Münster B. ARBEITEN IN GEMEINSCHAFTEN 23 B. l. Kulturelle Merkmale für verteilte Arbeitsgruppen - Chancen und Risiken einer Computerunterstützung 23 D. Glimm, B. Orlowski, 1. Buhse-Jackewitz, A. Bestmann B.2, Verteilte Wissensorganisation in virtuellen Gemeinschaften: Vom serverzentrierten Angebot zur nutzerseitigen Strukturierung 37 T. Hampel, Prof. Dr. R. Keil-SIawik B.3. Agenten organisieren ein Intranet - Ein agentenbasierter Ansatz der Implementierung von Organisation auf Intranets 53 Dr. U. Lechner, M. Klose, Prof. Dr. B. F. Schmid, Dr. U. Hengartner, C. Kefos, Dr. E. Maier, O. Miler, Prof. Dr. L. Richter, Dr. R. Riedl B.4. Vertrauen und Reputation in Onune-Anwendungen und virtuellen Gemeinschaften 69 Dr. M. Koch, Dr. K. Möslein, M. Wagner C. TELE-LEARNINg 85 C. 1. Durchführung von Elektronik-Laborversuchen via Internet von einem entfernten Computer aus 85 Prof. Dr. M. E. Aue C.2. Vorgehen zur Einführung von Community Systemen in Lerngemeinschaften 97 W. Bleek, B. Wolff, W. Kielas, K. Malon, T. Otto C.3. Lerngemeinschaften auf der Net Academy - Modellierung einer internetbasierten Lernplattform für ein Masterprogramm an der Universität St. Gallen 115 S. Seufert, J. Gerhard XII D. MARKTPLÄTZE 133 D. 1. Modelle vertikaler Business-to-Business-Marktplätze - Case Study „Stahl-Industrie“ 133 J. Abrams D.2. Ein allgemein gültiges Abrechnungssystem für Online- und Offline-Dienste - „Report on work in progress“149 Dr. W. Amme, H. Hotzel, Prof. Dr. W. Rossak, R. Stolle D.3. Kundenorientierte Aspekte der Konzeption von Online-Shops 159 A. Barteil, H. Weinreich, W. Lamersdorf D. 4. TECCOM - eine B2B-Lösung für den freien Autoersatzteilhandel 173 Dr. A. Dziolloß E. TOOLS ZUR UNTERSTÜTZUNG VON GEMEINSCHAFTEN 188 E. l. Werkzeugunterstützung für das Controlling virtueller Unternehmen: das System VICOPLAN 188 Dr. T. Hess, M. Zieger E.2. Modellierung gruppenorientierter Software-Entwicklungsprozesse mit Notes/Domino 199 Prof. Dr. R. Liskowsky, R. Pjater E.3. Aspekte der Kommunikationsunterstützung beim elektronischen Handel im World Wide Web 223 Prof. Dr. E. Ortner, S. Overhage E. 4. Communities in groben verteilten Systemen 241 H. Unger F. GEMEINSCHAFTEN IN DER PRAXIS 247 F. 1. Gestaltungsaspekte von Abolventennetzwerken - Werkstattbericht aus dem HSP-geförderten F&E-Projekt „Alumni-Web 2000“ 247 Prof. Dr. W. Beuschel F.2. VCE-KONUS - Community Engine einer Gemeinschaft mit besonderen Anforderungen in den neuen Medien 259 E. Eichenberg, H, Engelien, PD Dr. M. Engelien, M. Halatchev F.3. Eine virtuelle Gemeinschaft für die Planung von Servicerobotern 277 O. Tamlni, Prof. Dr. R, Dillmarm F.4. Wie beeinflubt die Infrastruktur die Informations-Gesellschaft auf dem Lande? - Ein Situationsbericht 289 R. Weihmann G. FACHÜBERGREIFENDE ASPEKTE 299 G.l. GroupProcess: Partizipatives, verteiltes Design und simultane Ausführung von Ad hoc Geschäfts-Prozessen 299 C. Huth, Prof. Dr. L. Nastansky G.2. Knowledge Management - eine alte Management-Strategie neu verpackt? 319 B. Orlowski G. 3. Technologien für den Aufbau von Stadtinformationssystemen auf ARBasis (Abstract) 335 Prof. Dr. Ing. T. Stautmeister H. ASPEKTE DES INTERNETS 341 H. l. AQUILA - Quality of Service fürIP-Netzwerke 341 F. Fünfstück, Prof Dr. H. Hußmann, A. Thomas H.2. ÜBER DIE VERORTUNG VON KOMMUNIKATION - DAS INTERNET UND DER WANDEL SOZIALRÄUMLICHER VERNETZUNG 357 T Hülsmann H.3. Internet - die Revolution der Geschäfts-Beziehungen Anspruch und Realität in der Praxis 373 Matthias Richte