IT Service Management Revisited – Insights from Seven Years of Action Research

A reliable IT infrastructure and smoothly running IT applications are nowadays essential to every organization. Hence, the field of IT Operations Management (ITOM) has drawn much attention in practice. However, this field has hardly been subjected to academic research in the past. Therefore, organizations that are willing to professionalise their IT operations have to rely on industry standards rather than well-reasoned recommendations from academia. The predominant approach taken to ITOM in these standards is that of IT service management (ITSM). But the ideas and concepts associated with ITSM have hardly been evaluated by research so far. We have addressed this shortfall in five action research projects. This paper reports on three of these projects which had the objective in common to introduce ITSM to the organisation and that all build on four ITSM core concepts: the IT service, the IT service portfolio, the IT service catalogue, and IT service cost accounting and pricing. We found that these concepts were difficult to implement in the organisations we studied. While some of the difficulties might be due to organisational peculiarities, we found strong indications for problems being inherent to these concepts. These lead us to call for more academic attention to be paid to ITOM in general and the ITSM approach in particular. We also put forward desiderata for future research

Informal caregivers during the COVID-19 pandemic perceive additional burden: findings from an ad-hoc survey in Germany

Background: While the relation between care involvement of informal caregivers and caregiver burden is well-known, the additional psychosocial burden related to care involvement during the COVID-19 pandemic has not yet been investigated. Methods: A total of 1000 informal caregivers, recruited offline, participated in a cross-sectional online survey from April 21 to May 2, 2020. Questionnaires were used to assess COVID-19-specific changes in the care situation, negative feelings in the care situation, problems with implementation of COVID-19 measures, concerns/excessive demands, loss of support, change in informal caregivers' own involvement in care and problems with provision, comprehension & practicability of COVID-19 information, and to relate these issues to five indicators of care involvement (i.e., being the main caregiver, high expenditure of time, high level of care, dementia, no professional help). Binomial and multiple regression analyses were applied. Results: Across indicators of care involvement, 25.5-39.7% reported that the care situation rather or greatly worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially for those caring for someone with dementia or those usually relying on professional help. In a multiple regression model, the mean number of involvement indicators met was associated with age (beta = .18; CI .10-.25), excessive demands (beta = .10, CI .00-.19), problems with implementation of COVID-19 measures (beta = .11, CI .04-.19), an increase in caregiving by the informal caregivers themselves (beta = .14, CI .03-.24) as well as with no change in the amount of caregiving (beta = .18, CI .07-.29) and loss of support (beta = -.08, CI -.16-.00). No significant associations with the mean number of involvement indicators met were found for gender, educational level, change in the care situation, negative feelings, and provision, comprehension & practicability of COVID-19 information. Conclusion: Those caregivers who perceived extensive care burden were those who suffered most during the pandemic, calling for structural support by the healthcare system now and in the future

Eine Fallstudie zur Einführung des IT-Servicemanagement in einer Lehr- und Forschungseinrichtung

[Vorwort] Das IT Service Management (ITSM) ist ein relativ neuer Ansatz für das Informationsmanagement (IM), der die vorliegenden Erkenntnisse zum IM in entscheidenden Bereichen ergänzt. Denn während die IM-Forschung sich überwiegend für die Entwicklung und Umsetzung von IT-Strategien interessiert, liegt der Schwerpunkt des ITSM auf dem Management des IT-Betriebs. Damit ergänzt das ITSM das vorliegende Wissen zum IM im Hinblick auf eine gravierende inhaltliche Lücke. Dabei stützt sich das ITSM allerdings vorwiegend auf Industriestandards und Best Practices, die bislang wissenschaftlich kaum abgesichert sind. Der vorliegende Arbeitsbericht berichtet über Erfahrungen aus einem Projekt, in dem die Anwendungsmöglichkeiten und -potenziale des ITSM am Beispiel des Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik (IWI) der Westfälischen Wilhelms-Universität Münster untersucht wurden. Hierbei handelt es sich um eine Lehr- und Forschungseinrichtung, die hohe Anforderungen an die IT-Unterstützung stellt. Das Institut ist Teil der Wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Fakultät der Universität Münster und gleichzeitig zentraler Knotenpunkt des European Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS), eines Verbunds von europäischen und internationalen Hochschulen und Forschungseinrichtungen im Bereich Wirtschaftsinformatik und Information Systems. Das Projekt wurde im Sommersemester 2013 mit Unterstützung der Teilnehmer einer projektorientieren Lehrveranstaltung, des sog. Projektseminares, durchgeführt. In diese Veranstaltung waren das Universitätsrechenzentrum, vertreten durch dessen Leiter Dr. R. Vogel, und die Informationsversorgungseinheit der Wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Fakultät, vertreten durch dessen Leiter Herrn Dr. J.-A. Reepmeyer, eingebunden. Im Nachgang des Projektseminars wurden die Ergebnisse von den Autoren zusammen mit den Mitarbeitern des Rechenzentrums mit Blick auf ihre Bedeutung für eine universitätsweite Einführung des ITSM diskutiert. Der vorliegende Arbeitsbericht stellt die Projektergebnisse inklusive der Einsichten aus der nachfolgenden Validierung und Diskussion dar

DISKNET – A Platform for the Systematic Accumulation of Knowledge in IS Research

The accumulation of knowledge is key for any discipline, IS being no exception. With the number of publications, theoretical constructs, and empirical findings growing, surging demand for structuring and meta-analysis is foreseeable. We introduce DISKNET, an online platform that enables the extraction, exploration, and aggregation of construct’s definitions, semantic relations, and analytical relations. While these aspects exhibit a rather standardized structure in theory, their practical documentation is non-uniform, highly dispersed, and tricky to seize technically. This has impeded the efficiency and effectiveness of review and meta-analytical processes, and resulted in a fragmented theoretical superstructure. We suggest that tool support for systematic knowledge accumulation is a central step to counteract these issues and to build to a consistent body of knowledge within the IS discipline. The current prototype of DISKNET draws on a large sample of SEM-based studies to demonstrate relevant design principles for a platform for systematic accumulation of knowledge

Exclusive top production at a Linear Collider at and off the threshold

We review exclusive top pair production including decays at a future high-energy lepton collider, both in the threshold region and for higher energies. For the continuum process, we take complete QCD next-to-leading order matrix elements for the $2\to 6$ process with leptonic W decays into account. At threshold, we match the fixed-order relativistic QCD-NLO cross section to a nonrelativistic cross section with next-to-leading logarithmic (NLL) threshold resummation implemented via a form factor.Comment: Talk presented at the International Workshop on Future Linear Colliders (LCWS2017), Strasbourg, France, 23-27 October 2017. C17-10-23.

Remote heart rate monitoring - Assessment of the Facereader rPPg by Noldus

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) allows contactless monitoring of human cardiac activity through a video camera. In this study, we assessed the accuracy and precision for heart rate measurements of the only consumer product available on the market, namely the Facereader™ rPPG by Noldus, with respect to a gold standard electrocardiograph. Twenty-four healthy participants were asked to sit in front of a computer screen and alternate two periods of rest with two stress tests (i.e. Go/No-Go task), while their heart rate was simultaneously acquired for 20 minutes using the ECG criterion measure and the Facereader™ rPPG. Results show that the Facereader™ rPPG tends to overestimate lower heart rates and underestimate higher heart rates compared to the ECG. The Facereader™ rPPG revealed a mean bias of 9.8 bpm, the 95% limits of agreement (LoA) ranged from almost -30 up to +50 bpm. These results suggest that whilst the rPPG Facereader™ technology has potential for contactless heart rate monitoring, its predictions are inaccurate for higher heart rates, with unacceptable precision across the entire range, rendering its estimates unreliable for monitoring individuals

The end of global constitutionalism and rise of antidemocratic politics

Drawing upon the idea of “constitutional antagonism” this article offers a critique of the liberal cosmopolitan framing global constitutionalism and its response to the rise of antidemocratic and “populist” authoritarian politics. Liberal cosmopolitan approaches to global constitutionalism generally pay inadequate attention to the ways in which neoliberal ideology and rationality have come to dominate the fragmented networks and structures of global constitutionalism and the connected emergence of an anti-cosmopolitan and authoritarian discourse of “nationalist neoliberalism”. Against the limits of liberal cosmopolitanism, and against the twin threats of neoliberal transnational governance and neoliberal nationalist, interstate conflict, it is argued that if an idea of transnational or global constitutionalism is to be held onto and retain any value then it must be based upon socially transformative ideas of egalitarian and ecological social justice and enacted through legal and political strategies and struggles that attempt to actively displace neoliberal ideology and rationality

QDB: A new database of plasma chemistries and reactions

One of the most challenging and recurring problems when modeling plasmas is the lack of data on the key atomic and molecular reactions that drive plasma processes. Even when there are data for some reactions, complete and validated datasets of chemistries are rarely available. This hinders research on plasma processes and curbs development of industrial applications. The QDB project aims to address this problem by providing a platform for provision, exchange, and validation of chemistry datasets. A new data model developed for QDB is presented. QDB collates published data on both electron scattering and heavy-particle reactions. These data are formed into reaction sets, which are then validated against experimental data where possible. This process produces both complete chemistry sets and identifies key reactions that are currently unreported in the literature. Gaps in the datasets can be filled using established theoretical methods. Initial validated chemistry sets for SF 6 /CF 4 /O 2 and SF 6 /CF 4 /N 2 /H 2 are presented as examples