Understanding supply chain security strategy

In the post-9/11 environment, organizations are acutely aware of the need to secure their supply chains from risks of being a target of, or an unwilling participant in, a terror attack. However, supply chain security (SCS) comes at a cost and increasing levels of protection have increasing levels of costs to the firm. So some firms engage in strategic initiatives to secure the supply chain (SC) while others do not; and each firm engages in varying degrees of activities to ensure SCS. Therefore, in this study, the researchers sought to explore what types of SCS strategies exist. The researchers analyze 162 responses to a SCS survey completed by executives from a broad range of firms and industries and identify three general SCS strategies: Advanced, Laggards, and Compliant. Implications for researchers and practitioners are presented

Everyone everywhere: A distributed and embedded paradigm for usability

We present a new paradigm to address the persistence of difficulties that people have in accessing and using information. Our idea consists of two main aspects: engaging wider society with usability and distributing the topic across disciplines. We claim that bad usability is a social justice issue. Primarily, we propose that usability should become the subject of widespread activism across society, enabling more people to realize that their usability problems are not due to inadequacies in themselves but in current designs. People should be encouraged and enabled to complain about their experiences with an expectation of improvements. We also propose that the current restriction of this topic to certain disciplinary units is overly narrow and that instead there should be radical embedding of usability concepts across many different fields and settings. We believe that the usability of information systems is core to information science and that information scientists should resume their historic role as heralds and pioneers of human–computer interaction

INTCare: a knowledge discovery based intelligent decision support system for intensive care medicine

This paper introduces the INTCare system, an intelligent information system based on a completely automated Knowledge Discovery process and on the Agents paradigm. The system was designed to work in Hospital Intensive Care Units, supporting the physicians’ decisions by means of prognostic Data Mining models. In particular, these techniques were used to predict organ failure and mortality assessment. The main intention is to change the current reactive behaviour to a pro-active one, enhancing the quality of service. Current applications and experimentations, the functional and structural aspects, and technological options are presented

Economics education and value change: The role of program-normative homogeneity and peer influence

In the light of corporate scandals and the recent financial crisis, there has been an increased interest in the impact of business education on the value orientations of graduates. Yet our understanding of how students' values change during their time at business school is limited. In this study,weinvestigate the effects of variations in the normative orientations of economics programs. We argue that interaction among economics students constitutes a key mechanism of value socialization, the effects of which are likely to vary across more-or-less normatively homogeneous economics programs. In normatively homogeneous programs, students are particularly likely to adopt economics values as a result of peer interaction. We specifically explore changes in power, hedonism, and self-direction values in a 2-year longitudinal study of economics students (N 5 197) in a normatively homogeneous and two normatively heterogeneous economics programs. As expected, for students in a normatively homogeneous economics program, interaction with peers was linked with an increase in power and hedonism values, and a decrease in self-direction values. Our findings highlight the interplay between program normative homogeneity and peer interaction as an important factor in value socialization during economics education and have important practical implications for business school leaders