2,092 research outputs found
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Aligning flexibility with uncertainty in software development arrangements through a contractual typology
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to identify a typology of procurement contracts in the context of software development projects that allows firms to align design flexibility with design uncertainty at the project level. The theoretical lenses of contract theory and software engineering are used to explain why the five archetypes in the proposed typology provide gradually increasing levels of design flexibility and to develop hypotheses about the associations between design flexibility and a set of project cost dimensions.
Design/methodology/approach
The hypotheses are tested with objective contractual data from 270 software development contracts entered into by a leading international bank over a period of three years.
Findings
Data analysis confirms the existence of the proposed typology and shows that design flexibility is negatively associated with control and positively associated with coordination, trust, duration and price.
Research limitations/implications
Although the findings are based on the contracting practices of a single, albeit sophisticated, organization, they shed light on the ability of firms to align flexibility with uncertainty at the onset of new projects by taking advantage of nuanced contractual mechanisms to produce a broader set of contractual archetypes.
Originality/value
This paper is the first in the outsourcing literature to analyze a nuanced contractual typology in software development projects through the perspectives of both contract theory and software engineering
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Engaging Students in MIS Course through the Creation of e-Businesses: A Self Determination Theory Analysis
We describe an entrepreneurial approach for teaching a Management Information Systems (MIS) course. The course builds on the psychological needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness to encourage student motivation and engagement. Students are required to create new electronic businesses and to build prototypes of their electronic web fronts. Students are also required to use the concepts taught in the course and to analyze the ventures’ strategies, related network externalities, as well as business processes and data analytics. The course was taught since 2009 to five classes with more than two hundred students. Using student evaluation questionnaires and four detailed interviews, we find that more than half of the students are enthusiastic about the new approach, feeling satisfied and even proud of their projects. However, a minority of students found the course over-complicated and even boring. We found also that students who expressed autonomy orientation engaged with the course, while students who expressed impersonal or controlled orientation did not. We believe that this analysis should help instructors in aligning new teaching opportunities created by IT to fit students’ orientations and needs
Electronic Structure and Magnetic Properties of Solids
We review basic computational techniques for simulations of various magnetic
properties of solids. Several applications to compute magnetic anisotropy
energy, spin wave spectra, magnetic susceptibilities and temperature dependent
magnetisations for a number of real systems are presented for illustrative
purposes.Comment: Review article; To appear in Journal of Computational Crystallograph
Non-quasiparticle states in CoMnSi evidenced through magnetic tunnel junction spectroscopy measurements
We investigate the effects of electronic correlations in the full-Heusler
CoMnSi, by combining a theoretical analysis of the spin-resolved density of
states with tunneling-conductance spectroscopy measurements using CoMnSi as
electrode. Both experimental and theoretical results confirm the existence of
so-called non-quasiparticle states and their crucial contribution to the
finite-temperature spin polarisation in this material.Comment: Repalced Fig. 1. of PRL, 100, 086402 (2008), better k-space
resolution for DOS around Fermi energ
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Strategies for Competing in the Automotive Industry’s Software Ecosystem: Standards and Bottlenecks
The automotive industry includes many actors engaged in software that span small and large companies within old and new sectors. This paper focuses on the controlling position of car manufacturers in the automotive software ecosystem and suggests three strategies for participating software innovators – contesting, cooperating and circumventing. The strategies are exemplified with current cases: Tesla as contestation, Bosch cooperation with a car manufacturer in a data collection project as a basis for future services, and circumventing in a project based on the mobile Internet
Correlated band theory of spin and orbital contributions to Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions
A new approach for calculations of Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions in
molecules and crystals is proposed. It is based on the exact perturbation
expansion of total energy of weak ferromagnets in the canting angle with the
only assumption of local Hubbard-type interactions. This scheme leads to a
simple and transparent analytical expression for Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya vector
with a natural separation into spin and orbital contributions. The main problem
was transferred to calculations of effective tight-binding parameters in the
properly chosen basis including spin-orbit coupling. Test calculations for
LaCuO give the value of canting angle in a good agreement with
experimental data.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figur
First-principles modelling of magnetic excitations in Mn12
We have developed a fully microscopic theory of magnetic properties of the
prototype molecular magnet Mn12. First, the intra-molecular magnetic properties
have been studied by means of first-principles density functional-based
methods, with local correlation effects being taken into account within the
local density approximation plus U (LDA+U) approach. Using the magnetic force
theorem, we have calculated the interatomic isotropic and anisotropic exchange
interactions and full tensors of single-ion anisotropy for each Mn ion.
Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interaction parameters turned out to be unusually
large, reflecting a low symmetry of magnetic pairs in molecules, in comparison
with bulk crystals. Based on these results we predict a distortion of
ferrimagnetic ordering due to DM interactions. Further, we use an exact
diagonalization approach allowing to work with as large Hilbert space dimension
as 10^8 without any particular symmetry (the case of the constructed magnetic
model). Based on the computational results for the excitation spectrum, we
propose a distinct interpretation of the experimental inelastic neutron
scattering spectra.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures. To appear in Physical Review
Half-metallicity in NiMnSb: a Variational Cluster Approach with ab-initio parameters
Electron correlation effects in the half-metallic ferromagnet NiMnSb are
investigated within a combined density functional and many-body approach.
Starting from a realistic multi-orbital Hubbard-model including Mn and Ni-d
orbitals, the many-body problem is addressed via the Variational Cluster
Approach. The density of states obtained in the calculation shows a strong
spectral weight transfer towards the Fermi level in the occupied conducting
majority spin channel with respect to the uncorrelated case, as well as states
with vanishing quasiparticle weight in the minority spin gap. Although the two
features produce competing effects, the overall outcome is a strong reduction
of the spin polarisation at the Fermi level with respect to the uncorrelated
case. This result emphasizes the importance of correlation in this material.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure
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