Stakeholder Status And The Effects On Product Usability

Organizations dedicate considerable resources to developing software tools and often utilize usability studies to improve their products.  Unfortunately, usability studies can be costly and some companies are using internal employees as participants in an effort to improve their product while controlling costs.  However, the effects of using internal employees on usability study requirement identification and implementation is not yet understood.This field research was conducted at a Fortune 100 Company and investigates the relationship between participants’ organizational status and the implementation of usability requirements they identify for an Enterprise Storage Resource Management product.  A theoretical model based on status characteristics theory is proposed.  Regression analysis suggests that organizational status is a significant indicator of the likelihood of usability study requirement implementation.  Organizational status of an individual should be carefully considered when soliciting product feedback

A General E-Commerce Data Model For Strategic Advantage: Mapping Site Structure To Site Visit Behavior

This paper includes a general data model that supports e-commerce activity. Numerous data models have been presented which support traditional business activities, but none has yet addressed the specific needs of e-commerce systems. An e-commerce system has unique opportunities to capture information about the entire online experience of each customer. Our general e-commerce data model (GEM) captures information such as the length of time a customer spends on a given web page, pictures that are examined or are “clicked on”, and the characteristics of visits which lead to customer purchases. GEM will be extremely useful to many e-commerce personnel including marketing strategists as they will be able to determine which parts of a web page visit lead to successful and unsuccessful visits. Additionally, GEM is designed to facilitate business intelligence (BI), which concerns the area of electronically monitoring competitors’ web presence. GEM can be used to monitor those accessing a given website and understanding their site behavior. GEM is presented using the CASE dialect of the entity-relationship (E/R) modeling paradigm

Accounting Information Systems (AIS) Course Design: Current Practices and Future Trajectories

The accounting information systems (AIS) course is a core component of most accounting programs, but what it typically covers and how it’s typically taught is as varied as the number of instructors. As the AACSB Standard A7 indicates: “accounting degree programs include learning experiences that develop skills and knowledge related to the integration of information technology in accounting and business”. In this panel presentation, we looked at the approach of five experienced AIS instructors and compared and contrasted them. We highlight lessons learned and best practices

A Taxonomy of Software Delivery Performance Profiles: Investigating the Effects of DevOps Practices

This research develops a taxonomy of Software Delivery Performance Profiles for DevOps development settings. We base the underlying Software Delivery Performance measure on the application of the Economic Order Quantity (EOQ) model to software development. Consistent with the objectives of both, development and operations departments, the measure includes attributes for throughput (release frequency and lead-time to delivery) and for stability (mean time to restore). Using a sample of 7,522 DevOps professionals globally, we conduct a hierarchical cluster analysis and find that the throughput and stability measures move in tandem and form three distinct Software Delivery Performance Profiles. Further analysis will show how the use of individual DevOps practices impacts Performance Profiles of development settings. When completed, the study will support the utility of DevOps and the effectiveness of individual DevOps practices

Segmenting Lecture Videos by Topic: From Manual to Automated Methods

More and more universities and corporations are starting to provide videotaped lectures online for knowledge sharing and learning. Segmenting lecture videos into short clips by topic can extract the hidden information structure of the videos and facilitate information searching and learning. Manual segmentation has high accuracy rates but is very labor intensive. In order to develop a high performance automated segmentation method for lecture videos, we conducted a case study to learn the segmentation process of humans and the effective segmentation features used in the process. Based on the findings from the case study, we designed an automated segmentation approach with two phases: initial segmentation and segmentation refinement. The approach combines segmentation features from three information sources of video (speech text transcript, audio and video) and makes use of various knowledge sources such as world knowledge and domain knowledge. Our preliminary results show that the proposed two-phase approach is promising

A pan-European epidemiological study reveals honey bee colony survival depends on beekeeper education and disease control

Reports of honey bee population decline has spurred many national efforts to understand the extent of the problem and to identify causative or associated factors. However, our collective understanding of the factors has been hampered by a lack of joined up trans-national effort. Moreover, the impacts of beekeeper knowledge and beekeeping management practices have often been overlooked, despite honey bees being a managed pollinator. Here, we established a standardised active monitoring network for 5 798 apiaries over two consecutive years to quantify honey bee colony mortality across 17 European countries. Our data demonstrate that overwinter losses ranged between 2% and 32%, and that high summer losses were likely to follow high winter losses. Multivariate Poisson regression models revealed that hobbyist beekeepers with small apiaries and little experience in beekeeping had double the winter mortality rate when compared to professional beekeepers. Furthermore, honey bees kept by professional beekeepers never showed signs of disease, unlike apiaries from hobbyist beekeepers that had symptoms of bacterial infection and heavy Varroa infestation. Our data highlight beekeeper background and apicultural practices as major drivers of honey bee colony losses. The benefits of conducting trans-national monitoring schemes and improving beekeeper training are discussed

An Examination of Work Practices and Tool Use in High Risk Environments

This research presents an in-depth investigation and description of a single user group, system administrators. Following an overview of these computing professionals and their complex, risky work environment, system administrator work practices were investigated using data collected from previous experience, interviews, a usability study, and the literature. This research contributes to existing knowledge by presenting an analysis of system administrator work practices and identifying them as broker technicians. As such, many of the findings of this study may apply to other broker technicians. Because the work of system administration is so dependent upon technology and the way sysadmins access and control that technology, investigations of tool use were then studied. Through an analysis of work practices related to tool use, attributes important to system administrator work practices were identified. These attributes fell into two categories: information quality (currency, completeness, accuracy, format, logging, and verification) and system quality (reliability, flexibility, integration, accessibility, speed, scriptability, credibility, situation awareness, and monitoring).This research proposes the use of Wixom and Todd's (2005) integrated user satisfaction model in the context of system administration. This theoretical model provides an opportunity to link the identified characteristics with system administrator beliefs and tool usage. This research contributes to existing knowledge by identifying information and system quality attributes important to system administrators, and empirically testing the modified user satisfaction model in the untested context of system administration. The user satisfaction model was found to be significant and predictive of system administrator tool use behaviors, with two information quality attributes (accuracy and verification) and two system quality attributes (reliability and credibility) significant

Sökandet efter tillhörighet : Hur studenters känsla av tillhörighet påverkades under pandemin

Att flytta för studier till en annan stad än den man vuxit upp i är inget nytt fenomen, men att flytta under en pandemi däremot är inte lika vanligt. Som ny i en stad är det till fördel att finna en känsla av tillhörighet för att känna sig trygg och inneha ett gott välmående. Det finns flera aspekter av tillhörighet och därför fokuserar denna studie på boendet, sociala relationer, samt platsen (staden Uppsala), för att ta reda på hur studenter kom till rätta i staden under Covid-19 pandemin. Den här uppsatsen undersöker hur människor skapar tillhörighet i en tid av bristande interaktion. Empirin för uppsatsen har samlats in genom semistrukturerade intervjuer utifrån metoden purposive sampling. Sammanfattningsvis visar resultatet av undersökningen att ”känsla av hem”, sociala relationer och relationen till platsen är betydande för att känna tillhörighet, samt att dessa faktorer försvårades under pandemin