Towards a Personalized Assistance in Distributed Group Facilitation

With the advancement of group decision support systems (GDSS), facilitation has been regarded as one of the most important means in enhancing the outcome of group decisions. Many researchers have spent great efforts in creating useful methodologies and techniques to better support group facilitation. However, most of the research in the current literature deals more with facilitation targeted at a group-level than an individual level. With the increasingly available personalization techniques found in e-commerce, personalized facilitation seems to be a natural direction in group system facilitation research to deal with the needs of individual members for the overall gain of the group. In this paper, we address the needs for personalized facilitation in the context of the “EasyWinWin” framework in software requirements analysis by proposing a conceptual framework of personalized facilitation, developing a system architecture towards personalized facilitation and identifying key functions for a personalized facilitation system

On The Theoretical Foundation for Data Flow Analysis in Workflow Management

In workflow management, the data flow perspective specifies how data are produced and consumed by activities in a workflow. Data flow analysis can detect data flow anomalies occurring in a workflow while its control flow can be syntactically error-free. Currently, most commercial workflow management systems do not provide the tools for data flow analysis at design time. We have previously proposed a data flow analysis approach and developed the basic concepts and the essential algorithms. As another step forward, this paper examines the issues of data flow anomalies and their verification from a theoretical point of view and validates the correctness of the proposed approach

AN EVALUATION OF ELECTRONIC MEETING SYSTEMS TO SUPPORT STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT

Strategic management, defined as the overall process of formulating and implementing goals, policies and plans of organizational strategy, is an important organizational task that is typically performed by groups of managers. While information technology has long been used to support strategic management, it has only recently been used to support the group processes of strategic management through the provision of Electronic Meeting Systems (EMS). An EMS can affect meetings by providing process support, process structure, task structure, and task support. Process support improves communication among group members (via an electronic communication channel), while process structure directs the pattern or content of discussion (via an agenda). Task structure refers to the use of a structured technique to analyze the task (a mathematical or conceptual model), while task support refers to the provision of information or computation support without additional structure (a data base or calculator). The objective of this paper is to evaluate the capability of EMS to support strategic management. The results of a series of seventeen case studies indicate that use of EMS technology can enhance six capabilities that prior research has linked to increased strategic management success. Process support and process structure were perceived to be more important than task structure and task support in contributing to success. An analysis of less successful meetings suggests that a lack of communication between the group leader/meeting organizer and meeting participants and extenuating external circumstances were primary causes for the lack of success

A framework for deriving semantic web services

Web service-based development represents an emerging approach for the development of distributed information systems. Web services have been mainly applied by software practitioners as a means to modularize system functionality that can be offered across a network (e.g., intranet and/or the Internet). Although web services have been predominantly developed as a technical solution for integrating software systems, there is a more business-oriented aspect that developers and enterprises need to deal with in order to benefit from the full potential of web services in an electronic market. This ‘ignored’ aspect is the representation of the semantics underlying the services themselves as well as the ‘things’ that the services manage. Currently languages like the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) provide the syntactic means to describe web services, but lack in providing a semantic underpinning. In order to harvest all the benefits of web services technology, a framework has been developed for deriving business semantics from syntactic descriptions of web services. The benefits of such a framework are two-fold. Firstly, the framework provides a way to gradually construct domain ontologies from previously defined technical services. Secondly, the framework enables the migration of syntactically defined web services toward semantic web services. The study follows a design research approach which (1) identifies the problem area and its relevance from an industrial case study and previous research, (2) develops the framework as a design artifact and (3) evaluates the application of the framework through a relevant scenario

Histomorphometric evaluation of bone healing in rabbit fibular osteotomy model without fixation

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Animal models of fracture consolidation are fundamental for the understanding of the biological process of bone repair in humans, but histological studies are rare and provide only qualitative results. The objective of this article is to present the histomorphometric study of the bone healing process using an experimental model of osteotomy in rabbit fibula without interference of synthesis material.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Fifteen rabbits were submitted to fibular osteotomy without any fixation device. Groups of five animals were submitted to pharmacological euthanasia during a period of one (group A), two (group B) and four weeks (group C) after osteotomy. Histomorphometric evaluation was performed in the histological sections.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>During week one there was intense cellularity (67/field), a large amount of woven bone (75.7%) and a small amount of lamellar bone (7.65%). At two weeks there was a decrease in woven bone (41.59%) and an increase in lamellar bone (15.16%). At four weeks there was a decrease of cellularity (19.17/field) and lamellar bone (55.56%) exceeded the quantity of woven bone (31.68%).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Histomorphometric (quantitative) evaluation of the present study was shown to be compatible with bone healing achieved in qualitative experimental models that have been commended in the literature.</p

Scaling Consultative Selling with Virtual Reality: Design and Evaluation of Digitally Enhanced Services

Virtual, augmented, and mixed reality technologies allow creation of powerful customer experiences and illustrative demonstrations especially in use cases that benefit from spatial visualizations. Our study focuses on the natural resource management sector and digitalizing of consultative selling process. More specifically, we look at how to improve customer engagement with the use of virtual reality (VR) and thus digitally scale consultative selling. In this process, a VR application is used to demonstrate various management operations and their economic results. Design research methodology is applied to a pre-development phase and three application development iterations between 2016 and 2018. Data consists of user interviews and video observations (N = 129) during various development iterations and three application development plans. The results show that VR offers an emotionally engaging and illustrative tool in consultative selling. Further, it opens a novel way for interaction between the salesperson and customer and possibilities to scale consultative selling digitally, emphasizing the role of trust.Peer reviewe