Achieving IT diffusion within the fragments: an IT culture perspective

Many organizations still fail to make a return from the huge investments they make in implementing complex Information Technology (IT). This is usually due to cultural forces that inhibit the level of usage required to facilitate IT Diffusion. An emerging stream of research highlights the IT culture perspective, a perspective vital for understanding individuals’ social practices when they interact with IT. This paper adopted a case study approach to explore how the IT culture perspective may explain how organizational diffusion of an IT may happen despite opposing cultural forces causing a stalemate to the diffusion process. This study identified three IT culture archetypes - embracing, rejecting and confused, depicting a fragmented IT culture during the adaption, acceptance and routinization stages of diffusion of an IT. This study highlights how a salient element of a fragmented IT culture-embracing IT culture archetype could explain how diffusion of an IT happened despite the manifestations of negative IT culture archetypes - ‘confused’ and ‘rejecting’ during the diffusion process

The influence of organizational culture on the outcome of an IS implementation

A number of information system (IS) studies have adopted organizational culture (OC) theory to investigate IS implementations. The studies highlight that members will reach consensus or agreement in the use of an IS but also experience inevitable tensions and ambiguities in the use of the IS. However, literature related to IS implementation/OC has rarely examined the influence that the saliency of specific cultural practices may have on the success or failure of IS implementations. Using a case study approach, we adopted the “soft positivism” research philosophy to collect data, underpinned by Martin’s (1992) integration and differentiation perspectives of OC to study organizational implementation of an IS. These perspectives served as interpretive lenses through which to explain how members’ salient behaviors towards an IS evolved during the implementation process. Our study augments the IS implementation/OC literature by demonstrating how salient cultural practices influence the outcome of IS implementatio

Learning the lessons from the developed world: e-banking security in Nigeria

In the past decade banks invested heavily in internet technology so as to engage in e-business and e-commerce activities. However, this development exposed banks to threats, such as online fraud. Consequently, there was a need to adopt security measures and controls to mitigate such threats. Banks in developed countries have developed a level of ‘best practice’ to reduce such online threats. The objective of this study was to explore the extent to which banks in the developing world were benefitting from the experiences of banks in the developed world in terms of how they address online security threats. Case studies of two Nigerian Banks were undertaken using interviews and short questionnaire. The findings show respondents perceived the level of threats to e-banking in Nigeria to be low. When adopting e-banking security controls, the case study banks placed more emphasis on the technical dimension than the human dimension. Senior management commitment is a significant barrier to adopting best practice, which is highlighted in limited financial resources being provided for new investment in training or customer education. The study concludes that senior managers need to change their perceptions and priorities towards IT security to reduce the vulnerability of their e-banking services

Preliminary design study of nuclear Brayton cycle/Heat Exchanger and Duct Assembly /HXDA/, phase 3 Topical report

Nuclear Brayton cycle heat exchanger and duct assembl

Pressure containment tests in support of the nuclear Brayton cycle heat exchanger and duct assembly /HXDA/, phase 2

Plate-fin heat exchangers for nuclear reactor Brayton cycl

Talking about persons--thinking about patients: An ethnographic study in critical care.

BACKGROUND: Nursing involves caring for the 'whole person' and it is considered inappropriate for nurses to think or talk about patients in objectifying or dehumanising ways. Objectifying discourses can dominate within the arena of critical care, and critical care nurses can experience moral distress as they struggle to think about patients as persons. No previous study has examined the role played by 'impersonal' talk in the delivery of nursing care. This paper reports a study which examined the relationship between nursing practice and the way(s) in which critical care nurses think and talk about patients. OBJECTIVES: The study objectives were to (1) identify and characterise the ways in which critical care nurses think and talk about patients; and (2) describe patterns of nursing practice associated with these different ways of thinking. STUDY DESIGN: An ethnographic study was undertaken within one critical care unit in the United Kingdom. Data were collected over 8 months through 92h of participant observation and 13 interviews. Seven critical care nurses participated in the study. Data analysis adopted the perspective of linguistic ethnography. FINDINGS: Analysis of these data led to the identification of seven Discourses, each of which was characterised by a particular way of talking about patients, a particular way of thinking about patients, and a particular pattern of practice. Four of these seven Discourses were of particular significance because participants characterised it as 'impersonal' to think and talk about patients as 'routine work', as a 'body', as '(un)stable' or as a 'medical case'. Although participants frequently offered apologies or excuses for doing so, these 'impersonal' ways of thinking and talking were associated with practice that was essential to delivering safe effective care. CONCLUSIONS: Critical care practice requires nurses to think and talk about patients in many different ways, yet nurses are socialised to an ideal that they should always think and talk about patients as whole persons. This means that nurses can struggle to articulate and reflect upon aspects of their practice which require them to think and talk about patients in impersonal ways. This may be an important source of distress to critical care nurses and emotional exhaustion and burnout can arise from such dissonance between ideals and the reality of practice. Nursing leaders, scholars and policy makers need to recognise and legitimise the fact that nurses must think about patients in many ways, some of which may be considered impersonal

Revisiting the trajectory of IT implementation in organisations: an IT culture perspective

Purpose - Organisational implementations of information technology (IT) normally fail due to cultural forces that inhibit the usage levels required to facilitate successful IT implementation. This paper explores IT implementation from an IT Culture perspective (Leidner and Kayworth, 2006). In particular, it identifies and follows the trajectory of IT culture archetypes that emerge during the implementation process and further investigates their role in facilitating successful IT implementations. Design/methodology/approach - This research adopts the qualitative single case study approach and draws on the implementation of a management information system (MIS) in a Nigerian global bank. Findings - The findings illustrate three different IT culture archetypes and provide insights into their dynamic nature. The progressive weakening of two IT culture archetypes and the corresponding strengthening of the third archetype shows how initial vision conflicts can get transformed into vision agreements. Originality/value - This paper extends the IT Culture perspective by illustrating how a congruence relationship between IT cultures and IT artefacts can be fostered. The paper shows how diverse IT cultures can develop reasonably quickly in line with initial user experiences of a system. When IT cultures are aligned with the values embedded in IT, positive engagement and usage of the technology results, strengthening the presence of embracing IT cultures

The challenges in caring for morbidly obese patients in Intensive Care: A focused ethnographic study

publisher: Elsevier articletitle: The challenges in caring for morbidly obese patients in Intensive Care: A focused ethnographic study journaltitle: Australian Critical Care articlelink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aucc.2017.02.070 content_type: article copyright: © 2017 Australian College of Critical Care Nurses Ltd. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Three-dimensional FE-EFGM adaptive coupling with application to nonlinear adaptive analysis

Three-dimensional problems with both material and geometrical nonlinearities are of practical importance in many engineering applications, e.g. geomechanics, metal forming and biomechanics. Traditionally, these problems are simulated using an adaptive finite element method (FEM). However, the FEM faces many challenges in modeling these problems, such as mesh distortion and selection of a robust refinement algorithm. Adaptive meshless methods are a more recent technique for modeling these problems and can overcome the inherent mesh based drawbacks of the FEM but are computationally expensive. To take advantage of the good features of both methods, in the method proposed in this paper, initially the whole of the problem domain is modeled using the FEM. During an analysis those elements which violate a predefined error measure are automatically converted to a meshless zone. This zone can be further refined by adding nodes, overcoming computationally expensive FE remeshing. Therefore an appropriate coupling between the FE and the meshless zone is vital for the proposed formulation. One of the most widely used meshless methods, the element-free Galerkin method (EFGM), is used in this research. Maximum entropy shape functions are used instead of the conventional moving least squares based formulations'. These shape functions posses a weak Kronecker delta property at the boundaries of the problem domain, which allows the essential boundary conditions to be imposed directly and also helps to avoid the use of a transition region in the coupling between the FE and the EFG regions. Total Lagrangian formulation is preferred over the updated Lagrangian formulation for modeling finite deformation due to its computational efficiency. The well-established error estimation procedure of Zienkiewicz-Zhu is used in the FE region to determine the elements requiring conversion to the EFGM. The Chung and Belytschko error estimator is used in the EFG region for further adaptive refinement. Numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the performance of the current approach in thre