Narratives of an outsourced information systems failure in a small enterprise

In this study we investigate a case of an outsourced information systems (IS) failure (OISF) within the collaborative partnership among asymmetric partners. A small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) is dealing with an independent software vendor (ISV) conducting a project of implementing an IS that fails. We used a narrative research methodology for our enquiry. In the construction of our narrative we followed the OISF framework as a theoretical touchstone. As a major conclusion we found that asymmetric collaborations with partners with inadequate managerial and technical IT capabilities are extremely prone to OISF’s. We showed that an outcome-based and fixed price contract is not an adequate instrument to conduct such a partnership and to avoid a failure

Narratives of an outsourced information systems failure in a small enterprise

In this study we investigate a case of an outsourced information systems (IS) failure (OISF) within the collaborative partnership among asymmetric partners. A small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) is dealing with an independent software vendor (ISV) conducting a project of implementing an IS that fails. We used a narrative research methodology for our enquiry. In the construction of our narrative we followed the OISF framework as a theoretical touchstone. As a major conclusion we found that asymmetric collaborations with partners with inadequate managerial and technical IT capabilities are extremely prone to OISF’s. We showed that an outcome-based and fixed price contract is not an adequate instrument to conduct such a partnership and to avoid a failure

IT governance in SMEs: trust or control?

It is believed by many scholars that a small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) cannot be seen through the lens of a large firm. Theories which explain IT governance in large organizations and methodologies used by practitioners can therefore not be extrapolated to SMEs, which have a completely different economic, cultural and managerial environment. SMEs suffer from resource poverty, have less IS experience and need more external support. SMEs largely contribute to the failure of many IS projects. We define an out-sourced information system failure (OISF) as a failure of IT governance in an SME environment and propose a structure for stating propositions derived from both agency theory and theory of trust. The theoretical question addressed in this paper is: how and why do OISFs occur in SMEs? We have chosen a qualitative and positivistic IS case study research strategy based on multiple cases. Eight cases of IS projects were selected. We found that trust is more important than control issues like output-based contracts and structured controls for eliminating opportunistic behaviour in SMEs. We conclude that the world of SMEs is significantly different from that of large companies. This necessitates extra care to be taken on the part of researchers and practitioners when designing artefacts for SMEs

Machine Protection and Interlock Systems for Circular Machines - Example for LHC

This paper introduces the protection of circular particle accelerators from accidental beam losses. Already the energy stored in the beams for accelerators such as the TEVATRON at Fermilab and Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) at CERN could cause serious damage in case of uncontrolled beam loss. With the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the energy stored in particle beams has reached a value two orders of magnitude above previous accelerators and poses new threats with respect to hazards from the energy stored in the particle beams. A single accident damaging vital parts of the accelerator could interrupt operation for years. Protection of equipment from beam accidents is mandatory. Designing a machine protection system requires an excellent understanding of accelerator physics and operation to anticipate possible failures that could lead to damage. Machine protection includes beam and equipment monitoring, a system to safely stop beam operation (e.g. extraction of the beam towards a dedicated beam dump block or stopping the beam at low energy) and an interlock system providing the glue between these systems. This lecture will provide an overview of the design of protection systems for accelerators and introduce various protection systems. The principles are illustrated with examples from LHC.Comment: 23 pages, contribution to the 2014 Joint International Accelerator School: Beam Loss and Accelerator Protection, Newport Beach, CA, USA , 5-14 Nov 201

User resistance strategies and the problems of blanket prescriptions: a case study of resistance success

There is a growing body of research on resistance in IS projects, a good deal of which focuses on strategies for overcoming resistance. However, within this strand of research, it appears that there is a ‘blanket prescription’ approach that does not account for diversity in resistance reasoning. We offer a qualitative study of the response of diverse actors to a pilot of a custom developed client tracking information system, which brought about diverse covert and overt resistance activities. This empirical research is used to explore the heterogeneous user and how such a ‘blanket prescription’ to avert organisational-wide resistance went wrong and how resistance succeeded. This paper aims to contribute to the body of existing literature on IS user resistance by emphasizing the injurious continuous error of excluding such constructs as the heterogeneous user within user resistance research

The influence of organizational culture on the outcome of an IS implementation

A number of information system (IS) studies have adopted organizational culture (OC) theory to investigate IS implementations. The studies highlight that members will reach consensus or agreement in the use of an IS but also experience inevitable tensions and ambiguities in the use of the IS. However, literature related to IS implementation/OC has rarely examined the influence that the saliency of specific cultural practices may have on the success or failure of IS implementations. Using a case study approach, we adopted the “soft positivism” research philosophy to collect data, underpinned by Martin’s (1992) integration and differentiation perspectives of OC to study organizational implementation of an IS. These perspectives served as interpretive lenses through which to explain how members’ salient behaviors towards an IS evolved during the implementation process. Our study augments the IS implementation/OC literature by demonstrating how salient cultural practices influence the outcome of IS implementatio

Machine Protection

The protection of accelerator equipment is as old as accelerator technology and was for many years related to high-power equipment. Examples are the protection of powering equipment from overheating (magnets, power converters, high-current cables), of superconducting magnets from damage after a quench and of klystrons. The protection of equipment from beam accidents is more recent. It is related to the increasing beam power of high-power proton accelerators such as ISIS, SNS, ESS and the PSI cyclotron, to the emission of synchrotron light by electron-positron accelerators and FELs, and to the increase of energy stored in the beam (in particular for hadron colliders such as LHC). Designing a machine protection system requires an excellent understanding of accelerator physics and operation to anticipate possible failures that could lead to damage. Machine protection includes beam and equipment monitoring, a system to safely stop beam operation (e.g. dumping the beam or stopping the beam at low energy) and an interlock system providing the glue between these systems. The most recent accelerator, the LHC, will operate with about 3x10 14 protons per beam, corresponding to an energy stored in each beam of 360 MJ. This energy can cause massive damage to accelerator equipment in case of uncontrolled beam loss, and a single accident damaging vital parts of the accelerator could interrupt operation for years. This article provides an overview of the requirements for protection of accelerator equipment and introduces the various protection systems. Examples are mainly from LHC, SNS and ESS.Comment: 23 pages, contribution to the CAS - CERN Accelerator School: Advanced Accelerator Physics Course, Trondheim, Norway, 18-29 Aug 201

Labour's record on financial regulation

In 1997 the new Labour government launched major initiatives in the area of financial regulation, setting up the Financial Services Authority as a comprehensive regulatory body, supported by the legislative framework of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. We evaluate the Labour government’s record on financial regulation in terms of its achievements and failures, especially in dealing with the global financial crisis that started in 2007. While we identify some clear flaws in regulatory design and enforcement, our evaluation highlights some inherent difficulties of financial regulation

Bayes-TrEx: a Bayesian Sampling Approach to Model Transparency by Example

Post-hoc explanation methods are gaining popularity for interpreting, understanding, and debugging neural networks. Most analyses using such methods explain decisions in response to inputs drawn from the test set. However, the test set may have few examples that trigger some model behaviors, such as high-confidence failures or ambiguous classifications. To address these challenges, we introduce a flexible model inspection framework: Bayes-TrEx. Given a data distribution, Bayes-TrEx finds in-distribution examples with a specified prediction confidence. We demonstrate several use cases of Bayes-TrEx, including revealing highly confident (mis)classifications, visualizing class boundaries via ambiguous examples, understanding novel-class extrapolation behavior, and exposing neural network overconfidence. We use Bayes-TrEx to study classifiers trained on CLEVR, MNIST, and Fashion-MNIST, and we show that this framework enables more flexible holistic model analysis than just inspecting the test set. Code is available at https://github.com/serenabooth/Bayes-TrEx.Comment: Accepted at AAAI 202