61 research outputs found
Coming to Grips with the Management of Information: A Classroom Exercise
Managers and decision makers often claim to be starved for good information while they are also victims of âinformation overload.â The challenge for most decision makers in the early 21st century is the tsunami of data and information received from a multitude of internal and external sources that must be managed on an almost constant basis. The difficulty is distinguishing the good information from the bad, and in developing criteria to assist in this process. This experiential exercise has been used for undergraduate, graduate, MBA, and management training and development courses. The exercise introduces participants to some of the basic concepts about information and the importance of managing information as a resource. It addresses evaluating information on the basis of its quality (i.e., accuracy), quantity, timeliness, and relevance. In addition, the exercise helps participants to recognize the different information needs of managers in different functional areas of the organization as well as at different levels within the organization. This paper provides the reader with the instructions and materials to use this exercise in the classroom setting and discusses related examples from business
Information Systems and Health Care VII - When Success Results in Failure: The Challenge of Extending the IT Infrastructure to Support Organ Procurement and Transplantation
Xpedite was a computer-based information system developed by the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) to enhance organ procurement and placement from cadavers. Using state-of-the-art development approaches and technology at the time of its development, Xpedite was built around Lotus Notes, facsimile machines, and alphanumeric pagers. It was developed to integrate and streamline the collection, transfer, and exchange of data on available organs more fully. The concept was to shorten the time from organ availability (i.e., donor death) to transplant, thus reducing organ wastage. Xpedite met design and operational performance goals (i.e., a reduction in placement times and data errors), yet its operation was terminated after barely twenty-four months of operation. Adoption of the new technology throughout the transplant community was limited due to inexperience with integrated information technology systems and the resistance to change that accompanied Xpedite\u27s launch. The individual and organizational resistance was a surprise to UNOS. The technical and organizational lessons learned from this experience helped UNOS with developing subsequent information technology infrastructure components. The complexity of the technology support environment and low levels of user adoption for Xpedite ultimately led to an evolution beyond this tool, resulting in an Internet-based environment that would be more robust, easier to maintain, and better able to support user needs
Dueling Stakeholders and Dual-Hatted Systems Engineers: Engineering Challenges, Capabilities and Skills in Government Infrastructure Technology Projects
An earlier version of this work was presented at the EGOS 2008 Summer Colloquium.Engineering projects that support government enterprises face substantial challenges due to demands from diverse stakeholders and rapidly-changing technologies. In this paper, we present findings from analysis of five case studies of systems engineering projects for large government enterprises. We focus on what can be learned from systems engineers, their essential role, and their engineering practices. As they work to establish interoperability across pre-existing and new technologies - thereby evolving infrastructure - the engineers commonly face âagonisticâ tensions between groups of stakeholders. Temporal pacing conflicts are especially prevalent, such as those between stakeholder groups concerned with fast-paced streams of innovation and stakeholder groups concerned with current operations. In response, many engineers are following an evolutionary approach, developing new capabilities for managing projects and individual professional skill sets. The engineersâ adaptive response can be understood as incremental modularization and re/integration of technologies and associated practices across organizational (stakeholder) boundaries. Additionally, engineers are developing new skills of influence to support these capabilities for addressing stakeholder tensions. We close by discussing implications of our findings for the management of infrastructure technology projects, emergent design and engineering of organizational infrastructure, and the changing role of systems engineers
The Changing Nature of Systems Engineering and Government Enterprises: Report from a Case Study Research Effort
In this paper, we examine the changing nature of systems engineering work and, in particular, how The MITRE Corporation is confronting the challenges of expanding its role and capabilities to deliver what it calls âEnterprise Systems Engineeringâ to its government clients. Systems engineers exemplify technical knowledge workers whose work is expanding beyond the traditional skills and habits of thought developed through their disciplinary training (cf., Davidz 2006). Changes in technology, systems acquisition practices, and enterprise structures are challenging systems engineers to expand their roles and capabilities to manage the boundaries among technological systems and organizations of many sizes and types (e.g., government customers, systems integrators, suppliers, end users). Systems development takes place in an ever more complex environment of inter-organizational enterprises where implementation increasingly catalyzes enterprise change and demands greatly expanded and often unrecognized roles beyond that of technical expert or project manager
The Impact of Situational Factors On Information System (Is) Managerial Leader Behaviors: What Information Systems Employees Want
Information systems leadership has evolved dramatically over the past 40 years. Early in the era of computing most attention was focused on the technical skills of IS managers. As IS has become ubiquitous in our organizations and increasingly embedded in our everyday lives, the need for a broader approach to IS management has emerged with an increasing emphasis on non-technical skills in business practices and an appreciation of the impact of organizational culture. Further, information systems managers increasingly find themselves in crisis situations that may require different leadership skills to successfully navigate. These crises may be caused by the physical destruction of computer hardware, the loss of critically sensitive data, sophisticated hacking of company computers, or a coding error in a mission critical software program. The research on managerial leadership in crisis situations is relatively sparse; however, the research on managerial leadership behaviors for the information systems sector is essentially nonexistent. This research study attempts to fill that gap, finding that there are a few desired managerial leadership behaviors in common between the information systems group and other studied groups, as well as differences and desired shifts in priorities
TESS Giants Transiting Giants V -- Two hot Jupiters orbiting red-giant hosts
In this work we present the discovery and confirmation of two hot Jupiters
orbiting red-giant stars, TOI-4377 b and TOI-4551 b, observed by TESS in the
southern ecliptic hemisphere and later followed-up with radial-velocity (RV)
observations. For TOI-4377 b we report a mass of $0.957^{+0.089}_{-0.087} \
M_\mathrm{J}1.348 \pm 0.081 \ R_\mathrm{J}1.36 \ \mathrm{M}_\odot3.52 \
\mathrm{R}_\odot4.3781.49 \pm 0.13 \ M_\mathrm{J}1.058^{+0.110}_{-0.062} \ R_\mathrm{J}1.31 \ \mathrm{M}_\odot3.55 \
\mathrm{R}_\odot9.9561.91 \pm 0.48\%2.19 \pm 0.45\%$ for
TOI-4377 b and TOI-4551 b respectively. These values are in line with the known
population of hot Jupiters, including hot Jupiters orbiting main sequence
hosts, which suggests that the radii of our planets have reinflated in step
with their parent star's brightening as they evolved into the
post-main-sequence. Finally, we evaluate the potential to observe orbital decay
in both systems.Comment: 14 pages with 8 figures and 6 tables. Accepted for publication in the
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Societ
Overfitting Affects the Reliability of Radial Velocity Mass Estimates of the V1298 Tau Planets
Mass, radius, and age measurements of young (<100 Myr) planets have the power
to shape our understanding of planet formation. However, young stars tend to be
extremely variable in both photometry and radial velocity, which makes
constraining these properties challenging. The V1298 Tau system of four ~0.5
Rjup planets transiting a pre-main sequence star presents an important, if
stress-inducing, opportunity to directly observe and measure the properties of
infant planets. Su\'arez-Mascare\~no et al. (2021) published
radial-velocity-derived masses for two of the V1298 Tau planets using a
state-of-the-art Gaussian Process regression framework. The planetary densities
computed from these masses were surprisingly high, implying extremely rapid
contraction after formation in tension with most existing planet formation
theories. In an effort to further constrain the masses of the V1298 Tau
planets, we obtained 36 RVs using Keck/HIRES, and analyzed them in concert with
published RVs and photometry. Through performing a suite of cross validation
tests, we found evidence that the preferred model of SM21 suffers from
overfitting, defined as the inability to predict unseen data, rendering the
masses unreliable. We detail several potential causes of this overfitting, many
of which may be important for other RV analyses of other active stars, and
recommend that additional time and resources be allocated to understanding and
mitigating activity in active young stars such as V1298 Tau.Comment: 26 pages, 12 figures; published in A
The TESS-Keck Survey. III. A Stellar Obliquity Measurement of TOI-1726 c
We report the measurement of a spectroscopic transit of TOI-1726c, one of two planets transiting a G-type star with V = 6.9 in the Ursa Major Moving Group (~400 Myr). With a precise age constraint from cluster membership, TOI-1726 provides a great opportunity to test various obliquity excitation scenarios that operate on different timescales. By modeling the RossiterâMcLaughlin (RM) effect, we derived a sky-projected obliquity of â1^(+35)_(â32)â. This result rules out a polar/retrograde orbit and is consistent with an aligned orbit for planet c. Considering the previously reported, similarly prograde RM measurement of planet b and the transiting nature of both planets, TOI-1726 tentatively conforms to the overall picture that compact multitransiting planetary systems tend to have coplanar, likely aligned orbits. TOI-1726 is also a great atmospheric target for understanding differential atmospheric loss of sub-Neptune planets (planet b 2.2 Râ and c 2.7 Râ both likely underwent photoevaporation). The coplanar geometry points to a dynamically cold history of the system that simplifies any future modeling of atmospheric escape
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