The Demand for Information Technology Knowledge and Skills: An Exploratory Investigation

Organizations are always in search of appropriate information technology knowledge and skills to carry out normal business operations. Such demand is directly impacted by the overall economic conditions. During stressful economic times, managers, facing tough budgetary pressure, are farced to examine more thoroughly what knowledge and skills are needed to survive. This paper investigates the desired information technology knowledge and skills that employers are searching for in these turbulent times. We examine the content ofjob advertisements for information technology professionals placed in an online job placement website over a 2 year period, 2001-2002

Information Technology Wages and the Value of Certifications: A Human Capital Perspective

Although the value of Information Technology (IT) certifications has been widely debated in the IT industry, academia has largely ignored the issue. This study intends to bridge such a gap. Anchored on human capital theory and previous literature, we build a comprehensive model to estimate the value of various IT certifications in terms of their contributions to IT professionals\u27 wages. We estimate our model using third-party survey data. The three main findings from the study are: 1) IT certifications are valuable in general; 2) there is a substitution effect between IT certifications and education and between IT certifications and experience; and 3) the value of IT certifications are job and industry specific. In addition, we estimate wage premiums of various IT certifications in the study. From these findings, we draw managerial implications for current and future IT professionals, IT managers, and human resource managers

Enhancing Manufacturing Planning and Control Systems Through Artificial Intelligence Techniques

Manufacturing planning and control systems are currently dominated by systems based upon Material Requirements Planning (MRP). MRP systems have a number of fundamental flaws. A potential alternative to MRP systems is suggested after research into the economic batch scheduling problem. Based on the ideas of economic batch scheduling, and enhanced through artificial intelligence techniques, an alternative approach to manufacturing planning and control is developed. A framework for future research on this alternative to MRP is presented

The Human Capital Value of OOP

If object-oriented programmers are more productive than other programmers, they should be paid more, assuming that wages are determined based on the value of a worker\u27s marginal productivity. The human capital model is used to assess the current salary premiums of programmers who know object-oriented programming (OOP). While the human capital model employed quantifies this premium, it also controls for the effects of different amounts of technical experience and different levels of education (highest attained degree) that the programmers possess. Using two samples, the incremental value of OOP skills is shown to be about the same over the two different time periods (2000/2001 and 2003)

STOCHASTIC MODELS FROM EVENT COUNT DATA

In practice, information characterizing the interevent times (time lengths between consecutive events) of a process may be unavailable or difficult to obtain. On the other hand, the number of events per unit time (count data) are simple and economical to collect. In addition, the only information available in many situations consists of count data. In the last few years, there has been much research in the area of stochastic modeling using point processes by a varied group of researchers. Despite this extensive and diverse research effort, little attention has been given to modeling techniques that are based on event count data rather than event time data. In addition, the existing techniques based on count data are either too narrow in scope (for example, fit a Poisson process), employ limit theorem results, or provide unsatisfactory fits. In this work, a general framework for modeling processes given only count data is developed. In addition, an estimation procedure for the interevent time distribution of a renewal process from event count data is developed and examined. This estimation procedure performs best when the count data consists (primarily) of a sequence of zeros and ones

A Verification-Based Conflict Resolution Strategy for Knowledge Management Systems

Knowledge Management Systems may store knowledge in many diverse forms such as people, intellectual assets, documents, databases, directories, and expert systems. When knowledge is integrated from a wide variety of sources, it is inevitable that conflicts between knowledge will occur. Many knowledge sources inherently constrain the stored knowledge for criteria such as consistency or referential integrity, removing opportunities for inaccuracies and potentially increasing accuracy. This paper presents a conflict resolution strategy for knowledge stored in diverse sources that uses the rigor of the verification of each knowledge source as an indicator of its potential accuracy