Client Influence on IT Outsourcing Vendors’ Operational Capabilities: A Relationship Learning Perspective

Operational capabilities are essential for any business in today’s highly competitive environment. Whereas prior research on IT outsourcing vendors’ operational capabilities has examined internal mechanisms, little is known about the effect of clients. This study focuses on clients’ influence based on multiple cases drawn from the Japan-China IT outsourcing context. What is unique about this context is that the majority of Japanese clients are large mature IT vendors themselves. As a result, the clients play a “teacher” role for the vendors, which emphasize a strong client orientation. From a relationship learning perspective, this study shows that client characteristics, i.e., the purpose of outsourcing, level of project management maturity, and sustainability and length of projects, contribute to vendors’ development of operational capabilities

How Do IT Outsourcing Vendors Respond to Shocks in Client Demand? A Resource Dependence Perspective

IT outsourcing vendors depend on projects from their clients to reap gains and develop capabilities. Because of this dependence, vendors are vulnerable to shocks in client demand. However, the extant literature on how vendors mitigate the damage from demand shocks is very limited. This multiple case study examined five pairs of relationships between Chinese vendors and their Japanese clients, drawing on resource dependence theory, which considers two response strategies: bridging and buffering. Our findings suggest that both bridging and buffering should be specified further on the basis of their explorative and exploitative dimensions, and that the choice of a particular strategy depended on the power relation between the vendor and client. Results show that when the client was in a highpower advantage, the vendor chose bridging. More specifically, if the vendor also had high power, it adopted explorative bridging; otherwise, it adopted exploitative bridging. When the client was in a low-power position, the vendor would pursue explorative buffering. Exploitative buffering was a common response to demand shocks, independent of the dyadic power relation

How do IT capabilities support fast delivery of big data services to clients across industries?

IT capabilities have been an important research area, especially in the big data era, when much business value can be drawn from external data. This study reports an interesting phenomenon, the transformation of an internal IT department of a traditional manufacturing company into an IT service provider. It adopts the single case study approach to explaining how the newly transformed business unit rapidly delivers IT services to external clients across industries. Results show that the IT service providers can provide fast service delivery to different clients across industries through developing digital assets, bridging business-data and standardizing services/products, which interact with each other. The whole process of service delivery is supported by IT capabilities such as IT infrastructures, IT managerial skills and IT technical skills. We extend the IT capability and IT service provider literature to the big data context

Tris(2-hydroxy­ethyl)ammonium 1,3-benzo­thia­zole-2-thiol­ate

In the title compound, C6H16NO3 +·C7H4NS2 −, the cations and anions are connected by O—H⋯N and O—H⋯S hydrogen bonding. Weak C—H⋯O hydrogen bonding between adjacent cations helps to stabilize the crystal structure

Engineered neutrophil-derived exosome-like vesicles for targeted cancer therapy

Neutrophils are the most abundant innate immune cells in human circulation; however, their derived exosomes have been rarely studied for tumor treatment. Here, we reported that exosomes from neutrophils (N-Ex) induce tumor cell apoptosis by delivering cytotoxic proteins and activating caspase signaling pathway. In addition, we decorated N-Ex with superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles ( SPIONs) to achieve higher tumor-targeting therapeutic effect. We further fabricated exosome-like nanovesicles from neutrophils (NNVs) at high yield. Compared with liposome-loaded doxorubicin (DOX) and natural NNVs, DOX-loaded NNVs show an improved inhibition of tumor cell proliferation. Moreover, DOX-loaded, SPION-decorated NNVs selectively accumulate at the tumor sites under an external magnetic field, effectively restraining tumor growth and extensively prolonging the survival rate in mice. Overall, a simple and effective method to engineer N-Ex and NNVs at clinical applicable scale was developed, which enables the efficient and safe drug delivery for targeted and combined tumor therapy.Peer reviewe

Influencing factors and health risk assessment of microcystins in the Yongjiang river (China) by Monte Carlo simulation

The Yongjiang river is a large, shallow, hyper-trophic, freshwater river in Guangxi, China. To investigate the presence of microcystin-RR, microcystin-LR, and microcystin-YR (MC-RR, MC-LR, and MC-YR) in the Yongjiang river and describe their correlation with environmental factors, as well as, assess health risk using Monte Carlo simulation, 90 water samples were collected at three sample points from March to December 2017. Results showed that during the monitoring period, total concentrations of MC-RR (TMC-RR), MC-YR (TMC-YR), and MC-LR (TMC-LR) varied from 0.0224 to 0.3783 μg/L, 0.0329 to 0.1433 μg/L, and 0.0341 to 0.2663 μg/L, respectively. Total phosphorus (TP) content appeared to be related to TMC-LR and the total concentrations of microcystins (TMCs), while pH and total nitrogen (TN)/TP ratio appeared to be related to TMC-RR and TMC-YR, respectively. Using the professional health risk assessment software @Risk7.5, the risks of dietary intake of microcystins (MCs), including the carcinogenic risk and non-carcinogenic risk, were evaluated. It was found that the carcinogenic risk of MC-RR from drinking water was higher than MC-LR and MC-YR, and the presence of MCs would lead to high potential health risks, especially in children. The carcinogenic risk of MC-RR to children was >1 × 10−4, the maximum allowance level recommended by the US Environmental Protection Agency; as for adults, it was >5 × 10−5, the maximum allowance level recommended by the International Commission on Radiological Protection. The non-carcinogenic hazard index (HI) of MC-RR, MC-YR, and MC-LR increased successively, indicating that MC-LR was more hazardous to human health than MC-YR and MC-RR, but its HI was <1. This suggests that MCs pose less risk to health. However, it is necessary to strengthen the protection and monitoring of drinking water source for effective control of water pollution and safeguarding of human health