A Framework for Analysis on the Process of Information System Evaluation and Investment Decision

Information System (IS) investment evaluation has long been issue in the IS research. Traditional positivistic research dealt with cost-benefit rationale regarding why and how evaluate. Afterwards social and political view added issue to this stream by embedding the organizational context that makes evaluation more fraught with difficulties. The purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretical foundation and justification of the various organizational aspects of IS evaluation and decision process. By reviewing recent research that adopts institutional theory perspective on this issue and we develop two-staged evaluation process model constructed by the interaction among stakeholders and their roles. Participants of the process are two groups: IS evaluator group who evaluate the benefit of investment, and decision makers who examine suggestion of evaluator group and finally determine to invest or not. We argue that, during this interaction process, the organization’s institutional context influences the extent of the formality of evaluation criteria and the procedural rationality. From this dynamic process perspective, we propose a multidimensional analysis framework that constitutes four types of evaluation orientation: Mixed, Positive, Negative, and Control Evaluation Orientation. With this framework we discuss how stakeholders behave and affect investment decision under each evaluation orientation. Likewise, we also discuss how financially justified IS investments can be sometimes rejected or otherwise accepted in the politically situated evaluation process. We believe that this framework expands our understanding of IS evaluation and decision process and therefore contribute to IS research in this field. Also to practitioners, this study provides several implications regarding how to maintain the formal/rational evaluation procedure and how to acquire organizational consensus under socially complex organizational environment

Simple coordination complex-derived three-dimensional mesoporous graphene as an efficient bifunctional oxygen electrocatalyst

3D mesoporous graphene (mesoG) was synthesized from [Ni<inf>2</inf>(EDTA)] (EDTA = ethylenediaminetetraacetate). The material is comprised of interconnected 4 nm-sized hollow carbon shells composed of 3-4 layers of graphene and exhibits high bifunctional electrocatalytic activity as well as high durability for use in oxygen evolution and reduction reactions. This journal is ??? 2015 The Royal Society of Chemistryopen11

Accelerating Large-Scale Graph-based Nearest Neighbor Search on a Computational Storage Platform

K-nearest neighbor search is one of the fundamental tasks in various applications and the hierarchical navigable small world (HNSW) has recently drawn attention in large-scale cloud services, as it easily scales up the database while offering fast search. On the other hand, a computational storage device (CSD) that combines programmable logic and storage modules on a single board becomes popular to address the data bandwidth bottleneck of modern computing systems. In this paper, we propose a computational storage platform that can accelerate a large-scale graph-based nearest neighbor search algorithm based on SmartSSD CSD. To this end, we modify the algorithm more amenable on the hardware and implement two types of accelerators using HLS- and RTL-based methodology with various optimization methods. In addition, we scale up the proposed platform to have 4 SmartSSDs and apply graph parallelism to boost the system performance further. As a result, the proposed computational storage platform achieves 75.59 query per second throughput for the SIFT1B dataset at 258.66W power dissipation, which is 12.83x and 17.91x faster and 10.43x and 24.33x more energy efficient than the conventional CPU-based and GPU-based server platform, respectively. With multi-terabyte storage and custom acceleration capability, we believe that the proposed computational storage platform is a promising solution for cost-sensitive cloud datacenters.Comment: Extension of FCCM 20201 and Accepted in Transaction on Computer