Foundations for measuring IT-outsourcing success and failure

We implemented five easy-to-complete questionnaires in Excel, which could serve as early warning signals for practitioners interested in the odds of their IT-outsourcing deals and could serve to redirect their course when still possible. The questionnaires are based on our earlier published longitudinal, observational study on 30 representative ITO-deals in the Netherlands, of which we know whether they failed or not. Our questionnaires predicted their outcome correctly. To help redirect the course of a dubious deal, we developed a questionnaire estimating the odds in relation to boosting strongly significant critical success determinants. Another questionnaire guides practitioners how to further improve on less critical factors. There are no specific reasons that limit our results to the Dutch situation, which makes it promising, therefore, to apply the Excel as an aid in improving ITO deals in other contexts

History and trends in solar irradiance and PV power forecasting: A preliminary assessment and review using text mining

Text mining is an emerging topic that advances the review of academic literature. This paper presents a preliminary study on how to review solar irradiance and photovoltaic (PV) power forecasting (both topics combined as “solar forecasting” for short) using text mining, which serves as the first part of a forthcoming series of text mining applications in solar forecasting. This study contains three main contributions: (1) establishing the technological infrastructure (authors, journals & conferences, publications, and organizations) of solar forecasting via the top 1000 papers returned by a Google Scholar search; (2) consolidating the frequently-used abbreviations in solar forecasting by mining the full texts of 249 ScienceDirect publications; and (3) identifying key innovations in recent advances in solar forecasting (e.g., shadow camera, forecast reconciliation). As most of the steps involved in the above analysis are automated via an application programming interface, the presented method can be transferred to other solar engineering topics, or any other scientific domain, by means of changing the search word. The authors acknowledge that text mining, at its present stage, serves as a complement to, but not a replacement of, conventional review papers