Current and Future Issues in BPM Research: A European Perspective from the ERCIS Meeting 2010

Business process management (BPM) is a still-emerging field in the academic discipline of Information Systems (IS). This article reflects on a workshop on current and future issues in BPM research that was conducted by seventeen IS researchers from eight European countries as part of the 2010 annual meeting of the European Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS). The results of this workshop suggest that BPM research can meaningfully contribute to investigating a broad variety of phenomena that are of interest to IS scholars, ranging from rather technical (e.g., the implementation of software architectures) to managerial (e.g., the impact of organizational culture on process performance). It further becomes noticeable that BPM researchers can make use of several research strategies, including qualitative, quantitative, and design-oriented approaches. The article offers the participants’ outlook on the future of BPM research and combines their opinions with research results from the academic literature on BPM, with the goal of contributing to establishing BPM as a distinct field of research in the IS discipline

Veiklos analitikos priemonėmis grindžiama studijų modulių dėstymo efektyvumo analizės metodika

As Lithuanian higher education institutions are forced to compete between themselves and with foreign universities, the ability to constantly monitor and improve study quality becomes paramount. Among the internal resources available for this task comprehensive data stored by local Academic Information Systems have been used. However, standard data analysis capabilities often fail to transform this data into conclusive, knowledge-containing insights. The aim of the presented research was to address this issue by developing a framework for monitoring teaching efficiency of study course with the help of modern Business Intelligence solutions. The framework has been implemented at the Faculty of Informatics of Kaunas University of Technology, and the developed prototype proved to be a promising decision-making tool. It is possible to presume our findings could be beneficial to other higher education institutions willing to invest in solutions of monitoring the teaching quality. At the center of the proposal, there is a developed set of seven key indicators of the performance that can be combined to get an objective and easily understandable evaluation of efficiency of course teaching

SARS-CoV-2 infection, sex-related differences, and a possible personalized treatment approach with valproic acid: a review

Sex differences identified in the COVID-19 pandemic are necessary to study. It is essential to investigate the efficacy of the drugs in clinical trials for the treatment of COVID-19, and to analyse the sex-related beneficial and adverse effects. The histone deacetylase inhibitor valproic acid (VPA) is a potential drug that could be adapted to prevent the progression and complications of SARS-CoV-2 infection. VPA has a history of research in the treatment of various viral infections. This article reviews the preclinical data, showing that the pharmacological impact of VPA may apply to COVID-19 pathogenetic mechanisms. VPA inhibits SARS-CoV-2 virus entry, suppresses the pro-inflammatory immune cell and cytokine response to infection, and reduces inflammatory tissue and organ damage by mechanisms that may appear to be sex-related. The antithrombotic, antiplatelet, anti-inflammatory, immunomodulatory, glucose- and testosterone-lowering in blood serum effects of VPA suggest that the drug could be promising for therapy of COVID-19. Sex-related differences in the efficacy of VPA treatment may be significant in developing a personalised treatment strategy for COVID-19