Towards IS-enabled Sustainable Communities – A Conceptual Framework and Research Agenda

The trend of urbanization leads to several environmental problems such as shortage of resource, pollution, and rising carbon emissions. In the smart city context sustainable communities are considered as promising measures to tackle these issues. The technological evolution of the recent years offers versatile opportunities to convince people in their behavior and the potential of information systems to support ecological improvements gains increasing importance and interest in research. In this paper we propose a theoretical framework for the design of citizen-centric environmental sustainable information systems to build sustainable communities in smart cities. The framework considers theories and counter measures from psychological, social, environmental, and IS science to create a holistic architecture for green IS implementations. The goal is to drive further research and practical implementations in this domain

Impact of IT Service Management Frameworks on the IT Organization An Empirical Study on Benefits, Challenges, and Processes

Over 90 percent of companies are estimatedto use IT Service Management(ITSM) frameworks, yet there is little researchon their benefits to the InformationTechnology (IT) department andthe business units. An international surveyof 491 firms was conducted to assessthe benefits of the IT InfrastructureLibrary (ITIL), the de-facto ITSM framework,specifically on how these benefitsevolve as companies increase theiradoption of the ITIL model. Also studiedare the perception of challenges ofthe implementation and the number ofITIL processes implemented in relationto the progress of the adoption of ITIL.Results indicate that as the maturity ofimplementation increases, the perceptionof challenges decreases. Findingsalso showthat as thematurity of implementationincreases, the number of realizedbenefits increases, as well as thenumber of implemented ITIL processes.Implications for practitioners and researchersare also discussed

TOWARDS A CONTINGENCY MODEL FOR GREEN IT GOVERNANCE

Although practitioners have begun to implement Green IT into their companies, the governance of Green IT varies significantly. No research has been done to explain these differences in Green IT governance. Building upon contingency theory and IT governance, we develop a contingency model for Green IT governance which demonstrates the fit between contingencies and the company-specific configuration of Green IT. In the first step, three archetypes of Green IT governance reaching from centralized over federal to decentralized are presented. In the second step, we identify from literature competitive strategy, firm size, organization structure, performance strategy, environmental impact of industry, environmental strategy, IT infusion, and IT diffusion as contingency factors determining the ideal type of Green IT governance. The contingency model for Green IT governance is validated based on insights from five case studies. With the enhanced understanding of how Green IT governance is shaped by contingency factors, organizations are able to select the most successful Green IT governance form

ITIL and the Creation of Benefits: An Empirical Study on Benefits, Challenges and Processes

Over 90 percent of companies are estimated to use IT Service Management (ITSM) frameworks, yet there is little research on their benefits to the Information Technology (IT) department and the business units. An international survey of 503 firms was conducted to examine the benefits of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), the de-facto ITSM framework, specifically on how these benefits evolve as companies increase their adoption of the ITIL model. Also studied are the perception of challenges of the implementation and the number of ITIL processes implemented in relation to the progress of the adoption of ITIL. Results indicate that as the maturity of implementation increases, the perception of challenges decreases. Findings also show that as the maturity of implementation increases, the number of realized benefits increases, as well as the number of implemented ITIL processes. Implications for practitioners and researchers are also discussed.12 page(s

Do You Know Your Terms? - A Procedure Model for Terminology Management

Due to the extensive development und use of information technology, a lot of companies gained access to vast internal and external information sources. Yet nonetheless, efficiency when dealing with information and trying to find the right content is not on an appropriate level. Managing terms and classifying information has a long tradition in Knowledge Management, namely by the usage of glossaries and taxonomies as two instruments of Terminology Management. But even with today’s portals, search engines and auto-classifiers, it does not work without human interaction and high costs. Therefore, we propose a procedure model for Terminology Management to build up and maintain glossaries and taxonomies. To discover the evidence of our approach three action research cases have been analysed. The first focuses on the introduction of a glossary for a Swiss insurance company whereas the second case illustrates the initial activities and results for setting up a corporate taxonomy at an international professional services firm. Based on the learnings we developed a prototype (third case) which combines glossary and taxonomy for document classification and retrieval. We conclude that only a well suited trade-off between centralized and decentralized Terminology Management activities will be sustainable

Natural Language Processing for Medical Texts – A Taxonomy to Inform Integration Decisions into Clinical Practice

Electronic health records (EHR) have significantly amplified the volume of information accessible in the healthcare sector. Nevertheless, this information load also translates into elevated workloads for clinicians engaged in extracting and generating patient information. Natural Language Process (NLP) aims to overcome this problem by automatically extracting and structuring relevant information from medical texts. While other methods related to artificial intelligence have been implemented successfully in healthcare (e.g., computer vision in radiology), NLP still lacks commercial success in this domain. The lack of a structured overview of NLP systems is exacerbating the problem, especially with the emergence of new technologies like generative pre-trained transformers. Against this background, this paper presents a taxonomy to inform integration decisions of NLP systems into healthcare IT landscapes. We contribute to a better understanding of how NLP systems can be integrated into daily clinical contexts. In total, we reviewed 29 papers and 36 commercial NLP products

A Unified Statistical Framework for Evaluating Predictive Methods

Predictive analytics is an important part of the business intelligence and decision support systems literature and likely to grow in importance with the emergence of big data as a discipline. Despite their importance, the accuracy of predictive methods is often not assessed using statistical hypothesis tests. Furthermore, there is no commonly agreed upon standard as to which questions should be examined when evaluating predictive methods. We fill this gap by defining three questions that involve the overall and comparative predictive accuracy of the new method. We then present a unified statistical framework for evaluating predictive methods that can be used to address all three of these questions. The framework is particularly versatile and can be applied to most problems and datasets. In addition to these practical advantages over hypotheses tests used in previous literature, the framework has the theoretical advantage that it is not necessary to assume a normal distribution

Information Security in the Extended Enterprise: A Research Agenda

Today most companies are closely knit together with and thus dependent on suppliers, allies, customers, and public authorities. Member companies in such an extended enterprise or “business network ” are either forced or volunteer to meet certain security objectives as a whole. As a consequence, the business network needs to agree on a common strategy, joint processes and technical interfaces to meet regulatory or voluntary requirements from industry standards. Reality shows that – even if standards exist – they are not harmonized and access and reconciliation between partners is sometimes legally, if not technically impossible, or simply too expensive. The serious and economic assessment of risks, already tough on the internal scale, becomes almost an insurmountable obstacle when considering the entire business network. This paper’s objective is to emphasize the importance of security in business networks for research and practice. Since there is little research available, it raises major questions to be answered by a future research agenda. A basic research framework is derived based on related research, an observation of the interdependencies of firms and a series of cases from different industry sectors. Finally, the paper discusses which factors and incentives might be catalysts for the adoption of such a framework by a single firm, business network, or even public welfare

Towards Managing IT Complexity: An IT Governance Framework to Measure Business-IT Responsibility Sharing and Structural IT Organization

For large enterprises, IT governance is a major lever to influence the way how IT enables business. The authors hypothesizethat a part of IT governance, namely business-IT responsibility sharing and structural IT organization, has a strong influenceon IT architecture complexity of large enterprises. IT complexity is challenging CIOs of large enterprises all over the worldday-by-day. Yet, IT complexity so far has been analyzed by scientific research only to a small degree. To prove or falsify thehypothesis that IT governance influences IT architecture complexity, the authors developed concepts to measure both aspectswith a framework. In this research, the concept for business-IT responsibility sharing and its scientific background arepresented. The IT complexity measurement concept is shown, focusing on IT architecture complexity. An outlook for thisresearch, an empirical study that is currently in progress is given