Evaluation of the applicability of investment appraisal techniques for assessing the business value of IS services.

There is a consensus among academics and practitioners that ICT investments should be carefully justified, measured and controlled. This is not different for the development of a service architecture or the development of particular services as such. In practice, the traditional capital investment appraisal techniques (CIAT’s) such as payback period or net present value are by far the most used techniques for assessing the feasibility of ICT investments. Nevertheless, serious doubts about the fitness of these techniques in a service based value net environment arise. Value nets have special characteristics such as high flexibility and agility, re-use of services,… that makes the use of these techniques very difficult and the reliability of the outcome most uncertain. Efforts are made to find more appropriate techniques. In the past, CIAT’s have been adjusted so that these techniques become more reliable in an ICT environment and new justification methods and techniques have been developed. However neither these adjusted techniques nor the new techniques are frequently used. This might be explained by the fact that the outcome of these techniques is difficult to interpret and to use and the fact that some significant problems (like the estimation of hidden costs) remain unsolved. Moreover, most of the new techniques are still in the conceptual phase. In this paper we evaluate these adjusted and new techniques in the light of service oriented architectures. We will argue that non of the techniques offers a good solution for assessing the business value of IS services. Despite the existence of a wealth of literature, the IS community appears to be no nearer to a solution to many problems associated with ICT appraisal. This is potentially problematic when dealing with investments in emerging technology such as IS services or service architectures. Since all techniques presented in the article have their drawbacks, it is safe to say that reliance on a sole technique may lead to sub-optimalisation or even failure. Therefore it makes sense to use a mixture of techniques, eliminating or diminishing the weaknesses of each of the techniques used. We strongly recommend a multi-layer evaluation process, or an evaluation process derived from the balanced scorecard, for the appraisal of investments in services or service architectures.

Using Probabilistic Feature Models to Determine Success Criteria for ICT Projects

Since the 1960\u27s many authors accepted the triple constraints (time, cost, specification) as a standard measure of success and this still appears to be extremely important in evaluating the success of ICT projects. However, an ICT project cannot always be seen as a complete success or a complete failure. Moreover, the parties involved may perceive the terms “success” or “failure” differently. The authors developed a quasi-experiment (gaming) in order to determine the criteria used by the different parties involved to judge the success of an ICT project. The results of this quasi experiment were analysed using probabilistic feature models for frequency data – PMD-models. This research indicates that the impact of the triple constraints on the judgement of success is rather small. Other criteria, as there are user happiness and financial or commercial success are far more important. Furthermore, parties who’s involvement ceases after the handover tend to concentrate more on budget and satisfying the parties involved, while the other parties concentrate more on time limits, predefined specifications and long-term financial or commercial success

The removal of organic waste matter from secondary sewage effluents by chemical coagulation

The removal of organic waste matter was investigated: a) On both a maturation pond effluent and a secondary clarifier effluent, collected from the same municipal sewage-treatment plant, and b) On a maturation pond effluent collected from a different municipal sewage-treatment plant. The inorganic coagulants alum, ferric chloride and lime as well as organic polyelectrolytes were tested for their ability to remove the organic waste matter from the above effluents under various conditions of pH and coagulant concentration. The tests were on laboratory scale and were conducted under constant room temperature, mixing and stirring conditions. A standard laboratory technique was employed which approximately simulates the large scale operation. Removal was evaluated in terms of Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD) of the wastewater. It was found that, among the inorganic coagulants tested, ferric chloride was, in all cases, the most effective coagulant for COD removal. In general, the final COD achieved with ferric chloride was between 10 and 40 milligrams per litre, depending on the initial COD level of the raw effluent

Cartesian product of hypergraphs: properties and algorithms

Cartesian products of graphs have been studied extensively since the 1960s. They make it possible to decrease the algorithmic complexity of problems by using the factorization of the product. Hypergraphs were introduced as a generalization of graphs and the definition of Cartesian products extends naturally to them. In this paper, we give new properties and algorithms concerning coloring aspects of Cartesian products of hypergraphs. We also extend a classical prime factorization algorithm initially designed for graphs to connected conformal hypergraphs using 2-sections of hypergraphs

Government Regulation of Health-Care Drugs of Questionable Efficacy

Rutherford and similar cases present several interesting questions. The threshold inquiry in the federal court cases is whether a substance like laetrile falls within the scope of certain sections of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act and is therefore subject to the safety and efficacy requirements of the Act. If the Act is applicable, and the substance is not approved for interstate shipment, it is necessary to determine whether an individual has a fundamental constitutional right to obtain and use drugs of questionable efficacy for personal health care. If that right were recognized, it would become necessary for the government to show a compelling state interest and to use narrowly drawn means to justify infringement upon the right. A final question is whether distributors and physicians have standing to assert the health-care rights possessed by the user of a substance like laetrile

Energy Efficient Scheduling of MapReduce Jobs

MapReduce is emerged as a prominent programming model for data-intensive computation. In this work, we study power-aware MapReduce scheduling in the speed scaling setting first introduced by Yao et al. [FOCS 1995]. We focus on the minimization of the total weighted completion time of a set of MapReduce jobs under a given budget of energy. Using a linear programming relaxation of our problem, we derive a polynomial time constant-factor approximation algorithm. We also propose a convex programming formulation that we combine with standard list scheduling policies, and we evaluate their performance using simulations.Comment: 22 page

Can resource dependence and coercive isomorphism explain nonprofit organizations' compliance with reporting standards?

Nonprofit organizations worldwide are confronted with an increasing demand for accountability and improved financial transparency. Financial reporting by nonprofit organizations is no longer an exception, it has become a rule. The usefulness of a financial report to an organization’s stakeholders depends upon its quality. The latter is safeguarded by reporting standards as well as the commitment of the organization to fully implement these standards. Although resource dependence and coercive isomorphism have been used in earlier nonprofit organization research, no empirical research has linked these theories to compliance with financial reporting standards. Using a unique setting in which a large number of (very) large Belgian nonprofit organizations are confronted with far-reaching changes in financial reporting regulations, the effect of resource dependence and coercive isomorphism on accounting and financial reporting compliance is documented

Customer Relationship Management Systems Research: Voids in the Current Literature

The status of the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) literature is investigated for the period of 2000 to 2004 in order to provide an overview of academic writing on the subject and to identify blind spots in the present literature. The top ten MIS journals and proceedings of four international conferences were systematically screened. Selected publications were reviewed in a structured way and categorized according to the different phases in the CRM lifecycle: adoption, acquisition, implementation, use & maintenance, evolution and retirement. It appears that less attention has been paid to implementation issues and that the evolution and retirement phases have not sufficiently been explored yet. With this structured overview of the literature and the identification of the voids, this paper offers suggestions for further research in the area and hopes not only to contribute to the orientation of our own research, but also to inspire future CRM research of peer researchers in our field