Transcending IT Managemtn Traditions: Transforming from Technology-Oriented to Service-Oriented Management

Large organizations establish departments for managing information technologies (IT) used to support their activities. Historically, this led to a view of the IT department as an important but costly technology-oriented department whose main activity was to keep things running. Recently, best practice has called for service-oriented management of IT departments. This report seeks to report from an organizations attempt to transform from technology- to service-oriented management. To structure the study we use Pettigrew’s framework for understanding organizational change, emphasizing the content, the context, and the process of the transformation. IT management principles of technology- and service-orientation are considered as the content. The context is taken into account from an organization-centric analysis of structures, people, management practices, and technical structures. Finally, a punctuated process model that focused on event sequences of the transformation effort guided the process analysis. We us this contextual approach couched in an interpretive case study to understand the transformation to service-oriented IT management, and by so-doing, offer lessons for how managers can enact this change

Using Recent Graduates as Five-minute Guest Speakers to Provide Professional Socialization and Topical Context for Students

Information systems (IS) professors sometimes employ guest speakers in the classroom. Teaching online with synchronous video affords new ways to use guest speakers. We relate the benefits of using recent alumni at the beginning of synchronous online class sessions for short question-and-answer discussions on class topics. These sessions provide a useful context for professors to use during lectures and for students to socialize into IS professions. We found it easier to invite professionals and recent alumni back into our classroom to “meet with” our students and provide context for lectures in a time when many professionals work from home

Characteristics of “Walled Garden” Crowdsourcing Platforms for Global Development

Technological advances in distributed labor have made it possible for low-income individuals in developing nations to have access to labor opportunities from around the world. Seeing opportunities to develop skilled labor forces, governments, and private groups are currently seeking to utilize distributed work and increase the prosperity of citizens. In this research in progress, we present a dual case study of two efforts in online outsourcing to aid in job growth, employment of marginalized populations, and participation in the digital economy for two nations, Kenya and Malaysia. We contrast the different approaches based on our initial data collection efforts. More data including documents and interviews will be collected before analysis is complete

Microfluidic Selection of Aptamers towards Applications in Precision Medicine

Precision medicine represents a shift in medicine where large datasets are gathered for massive patient groups to draw correlations between disease cohorts. An individual patient can then be compared to these large datasets to determine the best treatment strategy. While electronic health records and next generation sequencing techniques have enabled much of the early applications for precision medicine, the human genome only represents a fraction of the information present and important to a person’s health. A person’s proteome (peptides and proteins) and glycome (glycans and glycosylation patterns) contain biomarkers that indicate health and disease; however, tools to detect and analyze such biomarkers remain scarce. Thus, precision medicine databases are lacking a major source of phenotypic data due to the absence of available methods to explore these domains, despite the potential of such data to allow further stratification of patients and individualized therapeutic strategies. Available methods to detect non-nucleic acid biomarkers are currently not well suited to address the needs of precision medicine. Mass spectrometry techniques, while capable of generating high throughput data, lack standardization, require extensive preparative steps, and have many sources of errors. Immunoassays rely on antibodies which are time consuming and expensive to produce for newly discovered biomarkers. Aptamers, analogous to antibodies but composed of nucleotides and isolated through in vitro methods, have potential to identify non-nucleic acid biomarkers but methods to isolate aptamers remain labor and resource intensive and time consuming. Recently, microfluidic technology has been applied to the aptamer discovery process to reduce the aptamer development time, while consuming smaller amounts of reagents. Methods have been demonstrated that employ capillary electrophoresis, magnetic mixers, and integrated functional chambers to select aptamers. However, these methods are not yet able to fully integrate the entire aptamer discovery process on a single chip and must rely on off-chip processes to identify aptamers. In this thesis, new approaches for aptamer selection are developed that aim to integrate the entire process for aptamer discovery on a single chip. These approaches are capable of performing efficient aptamer selection and polymerase chain reaction based amplification while utilizing highly efficient bead-based reactions. The approaches use pressure driven flow, electrokinetic flow or a combination of both to transfer aptamer candidates through multiple rounds of affinity selection and PCR amplification within a single microfluidic device. As such, the approaches are capable of isolating aptamer candidates within a day while consuming <500 µg of a target molecule. The utility of the aptamer discovery approach is then demonstrated with examples in precision medicine over a broad spectrum (small molecule to protein) of molecular targets. Seeking to demonstrate the potential of the device to generate probes capable of accessing the human glycome (an emerging source of precision medicine biomarkers), aptamers are isolated against gangliosides GM1, GM3, and GD3, and a glycosylated peptide. Finally, personalized, patient specific aptamers are isolated against a multiple myeloma patient serum sample. The aptamers have high affinity only for the patient derived antibody

Understanding the Fusion and Maturation of Tissue Engineered Linear Blood Vessels Using Magnetic Cellular Spheroids

Cellular spheroids are attractive for tissue fabrication due to having precise control over cell and extracellular matrix (ECM) composition, the ability for upscaled production and repeatability, their three-dimensional nature and the fact that spheroids will produce their own ECM over time. A critical process in the fabrication of complex tissue structures with cellular spheroids is related to their fusion and maturation. Tissue fusion is a self-assembly process in which two or more distinct cell populations, or tissues, make contact and coalesce to form a single cohesive structure. Maturation of tissue engineered constructs involves developing the mechanical properties and ECM compositions that mimic native vasculature. However, the fusion and maturation of spheroids and tissues composed of spheroids over time is not clearly understood. Therefore, developing methods to understand and accelerate the fusion and maturation of tissues composed of spheroids will improve upon current techniques for tissue fabrication with spheroids. Here, the fusion and maturation of vascular tissues mediated by magnetic forces was modeled using Janus Magnetic Cellular Spheroids (JMCSs). JMCSs contain two distinct domains: cells and extracellular iron oxide magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs). This separation of cells and MNPs has no adverse effects on long-term viability or cellular phenotype, allowing for magnetic manipulation of spheroids for building larger tissues. Here, spheroid composition was manipulated, by varying ECM and cell contents, in order to study the resulting effects on JMCS fusion mediated by magnetic forces. Next, the influence of iron oxide MNPs on ECM production in JMCSs was studied over time. Further, magnetic sheets composed of JMCSs were fabricated and their maturation mediated by cyclic longitudinal stretching using magnetic forces. The objective of this work was to determine the mechanisms associated with the fusion and maturation of JMCSs and tissues composed of JMCSs. The hypotheses driving this work were that spheroid composition dictates their fusion and that magnetic forces can be utilized to dynamically condition tissues composed of JMCSs for maturation. Results demonstrated the critical importance of magnetic forces for promoting the fusion of JMCSs, when compared to JMCSs not exposed to magnetic forces. Further, results demonstrate the critical role of cell-cell and cell-ECM interactions for mediating cellular spheroid fusion over time. Results showed that the addition of iron oxide magnetic nanoparticles in JMCSs caused a significant increase in collagen production, when compared to no iron oxide controls. Quantitative results demonstrate that cyclic longitudinal stretching of tissue sheets mediated by magnetic forces increases the Young’s modulus, enhances ECM production and induces collagen fiber alignment over 7 days, when compared to statically conditioned controls. These findings are expected to provide a strong theoretical and methodological foundation for the development of new tissue engineering technologies

A Micro-labs Design: Informal Learning in a Social Networked Setting

The Internet is fundamentally changing the way learning occurs. In the last 10 years, universities have adopted technology in a way that reinforces a dominant teaching paradigm. As online culture and technology change, new paradigms of learning and teaching become more tenable. As universities adjust their collective teaching styles to incorporate these changes they can continue to prepare students become engaged contributors in a community. We explicate the design of a university course architecture which supports and incorporates web 2.0 informal learning principles, enabling students to entirely create their own curriculum with the goal of contributing all objects created by learning back to a learning community of practice, and an Internet audience. This type of course design builds upon a micro-labs design (Pendleton-Jullian 2009), and seeks to harness both the student\u27s intrinsic desire to learn and the ease of access to knowledge created by advances in communication technologies

Learning Styles as Predictors of Problem-Based Learning Success in the Information Systems Classroom

Problem-Based Learning (PBL) is increasingly used as a mode of instruction to more fully engage students, while at the same time promote self-learning and retention. For many students, PBL is a welcome change from traditional professorial lecture approach. In practice, however, some students do not thrive in this less structured environment. We utilize theories of learning styles to shed light on this apparent tension. This paper develops an approach to arrive at a predictive model of how learning styles determine student acceptance of problem-based learning. First, a chronological view of PBL and the learning style literature is provided. This is followed by a discussion of the research constructs, methodology, and survey instruments to be used to predict the efficacy of PBL techniques, based on learning styles. We use Felder and Solomon’s (1996) freely available and widely validated instrument to assess student learning styles, and develop this predictive model through data analysis using Principle Least Squares (PLS). This model will be used to form specific hypotheses which can be tested further. A discussion of how the results from this study may aid professors, and thus benefit students, is then presented