From the open road to the high seas? Piracy, damnation and resistance in academic consumption of publishing

Armin Beverungen conducts research on how universities retain their charitable status in a market environment, and on the teaching of ethics in business schools. Steffen Böhm has a particular interest in the economics and management of sustainability. He has also founded an open access journal and an open access press, MayFlyBooks. Christopher Land works on artists and the management of their creativity

Integration of Novel Sensors and Machine Learning for Predictive Maintenance in Medium Voltage Switchgear to Enable the Energy and Mobility Revolutions

The development of renewable energies and smart mobility has profoundly impacted the future of the distribution grid. An increasing bidirectional energy flow stresses the assets of the distribution grid, especially medium voltage switchgear. This calls for improved maintenance strategies to prevent critical failures. Predictive maintenance, a maintenance strategy relying on current condition data of assets, serves as a guideline. Novel sensors covering thermal, mechanical, and partial discharge aspects of switchgear, enable continuous condition monitoring of some of the most critical assets of the distribution grid. Combined with machine learning algorithms, the demands put on the distribution grid by the energy and mobility revolutions can be handled. In this paper, we review the current state-of-the-art of all aspects of condition monitoring for medium voltage switchgear. Furthermore, we present an approach to develop a predictive maintenance system based on novel sensors and machine learning. We show how the existing medium voltage grid infrastructure can adapt these new needs on an economic scale

Design and value of service oriented technologies for smart business networking

Business networks that effectively use technologies and outperform competing networks are known as smart business networks. Theory hypothesizes that smart business networking requires a ‘Networked Business Operating System’ (NBOS), a technological architecture consisting of business logic, that enables high performance business networking. At the heart of the NBOS architecture are services (provided and used by organizations in the business network) and a centralized directory that contributes to finding, selecting and executing the services available. While the idea of SOA for NBOS is compelling, SOA has largely remained a technological concept mainly applied in intra-organizational settings and received only limited adoption in business networks. The key question addressed in this paper is how firms in a business network can develop a NBOS so that SOA technologies create business value. This research aims to contribute to the understanding of the business value of SOA for smart business networking. An in-depth case study in a German banking network is used to obtain profound insights in the intricacies of service design and the business value of SOA technologies in practice. The findings are generalized in an initial research model, distinguishing between service network design and service directory design within business networks

Granularity of Services – an Economic Analysis

Service-oriented architectures are widely discussed as a design principle for application and enterprise architectures. Nevertheless, an adequate granularity of services has not yet been researched sufficiently from an economic perspective. The finer the granularity to realize the functions of a process, the higher the number of services is, and the more effort has to be directed towards composing them. In contrast, very coarse grained services bear the disadvantages of higher implementation costs and lower reuse potential (e.g., in different processes). The aim of the decision model proposed in this paper is to determine an adequate granularity of services from an economical perspective. Thus, degrees of freedom, which often exist for the choice of granularity after a domain analysis, can be leveraged to realize a cost-efficient solution. We illustrate the applicability and practical benefits of the decision model with an example from the context of a financial services provider