Enhancing the Supply Chain Performance by Integrating Simulated and Physical Agents into Organizational Information Systems

As the business environment gets more complicated, organizations must be able to respond to the business changes and adjust themselves quickly to gain their competitive advantages. This study proposes an integrated agent system, called SPA, which coordinates simulated and physical agents to provide an efficient way for organizations to meet the challenges in managing supply chains. In the integrated framework, physical agents coordinate with inter-organizations\' physical agents to form workable business processes and detect the variations occurring in the outside world, whereas simulated agents model and analyze the what-if scenarios to support physical agents in making decisions. This study uses a supply chain that produces digital still cameras as an example to demonstrate how the SPA works. In this example, individual information systems of the involved companies equip with the SPA and the entire supply chain is modeled as a hierarchical object oriented Petri nets. The SPA here applies the modified AGNES data clustering technique and the moving average approach to help each firm generalize customers\' past demand patterns and forecast their future demands. The amplitude of forecasting errors caused by bullwhip effects is used as a metric to evaluate the degree that the SPA affects the supply chain performance. The experimental results show that the SPA benefits the entire supply chain by reducing the bullwhip effects and forecasting errors in a dynamic environment.Supply Chain Performance Enhancement; Bullwhip Effects; Simulated Agents; Physical Agents; Dynamic Customer Demand Pattern Discovery

POST-MERGER IT INTEGRATION: AN IT CULTURE CONFLICT PERSPECTIVE

This paper analyzes the culture conflicts between two merged IT departments from two banks and how they resolve them. The integration of divergent cultures is crucial to maintain the performance of merged organizations. This paper examines post-merger IT integration of a Taiwan\u27s financial holding company which merged a government owned bank with its banking business, and argues that the understanding of IT culture conflict between two merged departments can contribute to effective post-merger IT integration. This paper identifies three types of IT culture conflict occurring in IT integration, and then discusses how to resolve IT culture conflict in post-merger IT integration. We assert that IT department can resume the productivity once IT culture conflict can be identified and resolved even IT infrastructure and processes of merging organizations are incompatible

Visualized Cognitive Knowledge Map Integration for P2P Networks

In the knowledge management field, knowledge map created under the client-server architecture has been widely used to direct the knowledge sharing process. Peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture has been practicable for file sharing, distributed computing, instant messaging, etc. by virtue of the increases of Internet bandwidth and personal computer capability. P2P architecture attracts researchers and practitioners to study knowledge sharing issues in its autonomy and self-organization characters. It calls for academic efforts to design knowledge management supporting system as that for client-server architecture may not be applicable. This study proposes a visualized cognitive knowledge map integration system to facilitate knowledge management on P2P networks. By using the SOM (Self-Organized Map)-like model, called Egocentric SOM (ESOM), the prototyping system can merge the external knowledge under a focal peer’s knowledge structure and present the cognitive knowledge map visually. In evaluating the proposed integration method, this study allocates abstracts of industrial research reports from an industrial technology research institute according to their corresponding author peers and generates individual cognitive knowledge maps. The results from the evaluation experiments reveal that ESOM is capable to retain individual peer’s knowledge structure while articulating with that of other peers in the cognitive knowledge network

What Drives Workers to Learn Online during COVID 19 Pandemics?

One of the common practices during the COVID-19 pandemic is to work or study from home. This study aims to reexamine the factors affecting individual continuance intention of e-learning. During the pandemic, via a survey conducted in 2022, we assessed workers’ continuance intention of e-learning from different sectors in Taiwan. This research brought motivations as mediators in continuance intention to e-learning. Through the statistical analysis, we identified the mediation effect of motivations based on the self-determination theory. The results show that autonomous motivation facilitates the learners’ computer self-efficacy, the quality of the system and content toward continuance intention; controlled motivation could mediate the monetary award in influencing the continuance intention. The internalization of motivation is also an effective mediator. The obtained results not only add new knowledge of what affected the continuance intention of e-learning during the pandemic but also provide guidance for employers to allocate resources to boost e-learning after the pandemic

Topic Retrospection with Storyline-based Summarization on News Reports

The electronics newspaper becomes a main source for online news readers. When facing the numerous stories of a series of events, news readers need some supports in order to review a topic in an efficient way. Besides identifying events and presenting the search results with news titles and keywords the TDT (Topic Detection and Tracking) is used to do, a summarized text to present event evolution is necessary for general news readers to review events under a news topic. This paper proposes a topic retrospection process and implements the SToRe system that identifies various events under a news topic, and composes a summary that news readers can get the sketch of event evolution in the topic. It consists of three main functions: event identification, main storyline construction and storyline-based summarization. The constructed main storyline can remove the irrelevant events and present a main theme. The summarization extracts the representative sentences and takes the main theme as the template to compose summary. The summarization not only provides enough information to comprehend the development of a topic, but also serves as an index to help readers to find more detailed information. A lab experiment is conducted to evaluate the SToRe system in the question-and-answer (Q&A) setting. The experimental results show that the SToRe system enables news readers to effectively and efficiently capture the evolution of a news topic

Assessing Social Capital Accumulation in Service System Development with Service-Dominant Logic View

Under the global trend of urbanization, a city ecosystem could be viewed as an integration of various service systems with the Service-Dominant Logic (S-DL) view. To study the composition of the service systems, social capital accumulation could be used to assess the resource distribution in the system development under the value-oriented perspectives of S-DL. Prior researches on related topics usually focused on the performance of social capital. This paper aims to assess social capital by studying the resource integration process, and to answer how social capital was accumulated along with the service system development. Grounded on the S-DL, this research studies the service system development of a traditional market revitalization project by actor-network analysis using the field data from a 30-month ethnographical work. A conceptual framework integrating social capital theory and S-DL perspective was developed. We demonstrate the process of evaluating the social capital generation and integration during value creation, which approaches its accumulation process. We anticipate the framework of accessing the social capital accumulation can reveal the structural holes of service systems by analyzing the accumulated conditions, facilitating the involved actors’ decision making, and communicating the value propositions with the public