Business

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 1469
  • (2009) Hull, Daryll; Cecez-Kecmanovic, Dubravka; Kennan, Mary-Anne; Nagm, Fouad
    Report
    This report describes a pilot project commissioned by the New South Wales (NSW) Minister for Youth (The Hon Graham West MP) and the NSW Department of Community services (DoCS) to explore and test the use of online social networking technologies for the purpose of engaging young people in civic affairs. The project team consisted of members from DoCs, The Office of the Minister, The national Transport and Logistics Centre (TALC), the University of New South Wales (UNSW), the NSW Commission for Children and Young People (CCYP), the NSW Youth Advisory Council and Small World: Social Media Experts (a social networking and new media company). Stakeholders’ consist of the commissioning bodies, the project team and the young people in the regions identified. The aims of the pilot project were to: Explore how online social networking technologies can be used to engage young people aged 9-18 to better inform NSW government decision making Use the NSW Better Futures programme framework in the Central Coast and North Coast NSW regions of DoCS as the focus for the pilot project to see if and how young people would engage in making decisions about expenditure in their local areas under the framework Propose a list of projects selected by young people in Central Cost and North Coast NSW for funding by the program. The pilot involved a field study in the two regions which took place from mid January to the end of April 2009. It was conducted in both electronic and physical spaces in six phases, beginning with face-to-face interviews with young people to gain insight into potential areas in which the proposal money could be used and to learn about their online behaviour patterns. From this information a short list of proposals was developed. The short list comprised of five areas young people viewed as important: 1) environmental issues such as awareness-raising and activities such as planting more trees, 2) provision of spaces for young people to hang out, 3) provision of skate, surf and BMX competitions and workshops, 4) access to sporting equipment and 5) under 18 music events with local bands and artists. An interactive online game was designed to encourage young people to express their preferences on the proposals in the short list. A “viral” campaign was then developed and implemented to attract young people in the regions to the game and to encourage them to vote. By experimenting with different engagement strategies – that integrated the use of a website, digital media, social media sites such as MySpace, Bebo, and YouTube, blog and forums, local radio, TV and school newsletters announcements – the pilot project attracted and motivated young people to express their preferences about youth projects to be funded by DoCS in the “Better Futures” program (for 9-18 years old) in the two targeted regions. In two months (mid February until mid April 2009) 8,200 “friends” were created; there were approximately 70 visitors per day to the website and 2,026 young people voted for the nominated projects. Learning from the project included: - That young people will engage with NSW government decision making through social networking sites - That overall all young people in both regions voted for music events as their first preference. - That only the MySpace poll was able to identify the regional affiliation of voters. IP addresses and other geographic screening mechanisms were not as effective as anticipated. The MySpace poll indicated that there were regional differences with the second and third choices in the North Coast being places for young people to hang out and expenditure on environmental issues and the second and third preferences from the Central Coast were sporting competitions and equipment. - As participation and voting occurred largely in response to activity generated in the targeted areas by the campaign it is likely that voting or any other participation from young people outside the areas targeted is extremely low. - That further development of voting instruments and other participatory tools is required to enable deeper analysis of the ranking of votes and the geographic location of participants. The pilot project was deemed to be very successful by the majority of project team as much was learned which will inform the development of future youth online participation projects. Young people were attracted participate through their social networking sites and engaged in decision making via interviews, online comments and various voting tools. The trial was able to indicate that music events were the most popular of the projects proposed and the MySpace tool was able to identify regional differences for second and third preferences. Young people responded positively by voting and in comments.

  • (2005) Zhu, Liming; Aurum, Aybuke; Jeffery, David; Gorton, Ian
    Journal Article
    Software architecture evaluation involves evaluating different architecture design alternatives against multiple quality-attributes. These attributes typically have intrinsic conflicts and must be considered simultaneously in order to reach a final design decision. AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process), an important decision making technique, has been leveraged to resolve such conflicts. AHP can help provide an overall ranking of design alternatives. However it lacks the capability to explicitly identify the exact tradeoffs being made and the relative size of these tradeoffs. Moreover, the ranking produced can be sensitive such that the smallest change in intermediate priority weights can alter the final order of design alternatives. In this paper, we propose several in-depth analysis techniques applicable to AHP to identify critical tradeoffs and sensitive points in the decision process. We apply our method to an example of a real-world distributed architecture presented in the literature. The results are promising in that they make important decision consequences explicit in terms of key design tradeoffs and the architecture`s capability to handle future quality attribute changes. These expose critical decisions which are otherwise too subtle to be detected in standard AHP results.

  • (2003) Aurum, Aybuke; Demirbilek, Oya
    Conference Paper

  • (2008) Luthria, Haresh; Rabhi, Fethi
    Conference Paper
    The paradigm of service-oriented computing (SOC) has emerged as an approach to provide flexibility and agility, not just in systems development but also in business process management. This modular approach to defining business flows as technology independent services has gained unanimous popularity among end-users and technology vendors alike. Although there is a significant amount of research ongoing on the technology implementations of service oriented architectures (SOAs), there is a paucity of research literature on the factors affecting the adoption of service-oriented computing and the realization of business value in practice. This paper empirically examines the adoption of SOC as an enterprise strategy across fifteen firms, and discusses the organizational constraints that influence the enterprise adoption and implementation of SOA. In doing so, this paper fills a crucial gap in the academic literature about the practical use of SOA as an enterprise strategy for agility, and lays the groundwork for future work on SOA alignment with organizational strategy. The paper also provides practitioners with guidelines for the successful implementation of SOA to achieve business value.

  • (2007) Luthria, Haresh; Rabhi, Fethi; Briers, Michael
    Conference Paper
    The paradigm of service-oriented computing (SOC) has emerged as an architectural approach to flexibility and agility, not just in systems development but also in business process management. There is, however, a paucity of critical research assessing the strategic impact of SOA on the competitiveness of organizations. Some research literature in strategic management indicates that firms may gain a competitive advantage in rapidly changing market environments by concentrating on their dynamic capabilities – i.e., product flexibility and agility in organizational transformation in response to rapidly changing market conditions and customer requirements. The intent of this paper is to analyze the conduits through which service-oriented architectures (SOAs) may exert influence on dynamic capabilities within firms. The results could potentially assist in evaluating if and how the adoption of service-oriented architecture may help achieve key dynamic capabilities, giving the enterprise a competitive edge.

  • (2008) Luthria, Haresh; Aurum, Aybuke; Low, Graham; Rabhi, Fethi
    Conference Paper
    Value based requirements engineering plays a critical role in software development because it seeks to align requirements with the organizational strate-gy that drives business value. This paper discusses the value proposition of ser-vice-oriented architectures and proposes a value-based decision mechanism for requirements engineering for service oriented systems. In doing so, it lays the groundwork for future research into the important but relatively unexplored area of service oriented requirements engineering.

  • (2008) Luthria, Haresh; Rabhi, Fethi
    Conference Paper
    Financial service institutions are pursuing organizational agility in the face of an increasingly competitive marketplace, and are consequently looking infrastructure technologies that enable process and infrastructure agility. Service-oriented computing (SOC) appears to provide flexibility and agility, not just in systems development but also in business process management. This paper empirically examines the decision to adopt SOC as an enterprise strategy across fifteen firms, and investigates the business drivers that influence the enterprise adoption of SOA. In doing so, this paper adds crucial empirical evidence to the formal academic literature about the business case for SOA as an enterprise strategy, and lays the groundwork for future work on SOA alignment with business strategy.

  • (2008) Kennan, Mary Anne; Cole, Fletcher T.H.
    Conference Paper
    This paper reviews how Open Access policies (OA) and Institutional Repositories (IR) might be portrayed as agents of change within the realm of scholarly publishing. Using commentary on academic publishing as background, commentary that sees OA and IR as optimal and inevitable, and beneficially disruptive of the existing system, two theoretical approaches are presented as ways of providing a more detailed and explicit analysis of OA/IR dynamics. Both theories to varying degrees derive their inspiration from an exploration of the nature of change. The first “disruptive technology/disruptive innovation” approach (Christensen) specifies change in market theory terms, a re-structuring "driven" by innovation within, and possibly disruptive of, existing market arrangements. The second approach views change as a process of "reassembling" and reconfiguring of relationships between elements of a network (Actor-Network Theory). The application of both approaches to OA/IR is explored, including reference to a case study on a university institutional repository implementation. While "disruption" and similar terms might be in common and casual use, the basic idea gains greater clarity in these theories, and in doing so promotes greater awareness of the assumptions being made, and the aspirations being pursued.

  • (2008) March, Roger St George; Wilkinson, Ian
    Journal Article
    Network and stakeholder analyses in tourism studies typically offer schema, typologies, and frameworks that contribute to the conceptual development of the subject area. What has been lacking is the managerial application of network research in tourism. This paper offers a method for investigating and conceptualising network relationships in a regional tourism district. The field work was undertaken in the Australian wine region of the Hunter Valley. The findings from are analysed using four different approaches to the conceptualisation and classification of inter-organisational relationships in a tourism region: (1) the application of a value net to the region’s stakeholders, (2) the generation of a partnership-activities matrix, (3) an ecological approach using Budowski’s (1976) typology and (4) identifying the competition for scarce resources among tourism stakeholders. Managerial implications for each approach are described.

  • (2011) Bednall, Timothy; Bove, Liliana
    Journal Article
    Although research into blood donor motivation abounds, most studies have typically focused on small sets of variables, used different terminology to label equivalent constructs, and have not attempted to generalize findings beyond their individual settings. The current study sought to synthesize past findings into a unified taxonomy of blood donation drivers and deterrents, and estimate the prevalence of each factor across the worldwide population of donors and eligible non-donors. Primary studies were collected and cross-validated categories of donation motivators and deterrents were developed. Proportions of first-time, repeat, lapsed, apheresis and eligible non-donors endorsing each category were calculated. In terms of motivators, first-time and repeat donors most frequently cited convenience, prosocial motivation and personal values; apheresis donors similarly cited the latter two motivators. Conversely, lapsed donors more often cited collection agency reputation, perceived need for donation, marketing communication and incentives as motivators. In terms of deterrents, both donors and non-donors most frequently referred to low self-efficacy to donate, low involvement, inconvenience, absence of marketing communication, ineffective incentives, lack of knowledge about donating, negative service experiences, and fear. The integration of past findings has yielded a comprehensive taxonomy of factors influencing blood donation, and has provided insight into the prevalence of each factor across multiple stages of donors’ careers. Implications for collection agencies are discussed.