International outsourcing of information technology services : review and future directions

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to review the development of the empirical literature on international outsourcing of information technology services (ITS) over the 1992-2007 period and to identify future research areas.

Design/methodology/approach – A sample of 78 empirical academic publications on international outsourcing of ITS conducted between 1992 and 2007 across 46 scholarly journals constitutes the main data for analytical purposes. The sample is compiled following extensive electronic searches of the main academic databases. After clustering the studies in the sample according to their main research areas, a narrative approach is used to review developments in each cluster and to identify emerging research areas.

Findings – Four main areas of research are identified, namely outsourcing decision, outsourcing management (OSM), outsourcing outcome and the role of offshore service providers (OSPs). The review suggests that research efforts to date have been predominantly on outsourcing decision and OSM, mostly from the perspective of clients. Future research opportunities exist in the areas of outsourcing strategy and performance, the behaviour and performance of OSPs particularly within the context of firms from less-developed countries competing globally, and the nature of competition among OSPs both within and among countries.

Originality/value – This is the first review which focuses on empirical studies of outsourcing for ITS. This paper identifies several gaps in the literature and points to the need for more research on outsourcing from the perspective of OSPs.

The role of external influences in high involvement purchase behaviour

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to discover the consumer decision-making style clusters within the context of automobile purchases in Australia. It also examines the differences between consumer decision-making styles in terms of the importance given to external influences, such as importance of dealers, importance of friends/family members, number of cars test driven, time spent researching final decision and importance of information sources (e.g. internet, magazines, TV ads, word of mouth, etc.), prior to making their final purchase decision.

Design/methodology/approach
Data were collected from 209 respondents using self-administered questionnaires. Cluster analysis and ANOVA were employed to identify and analyse the differences between consumer decision-making style clusters. Consumer Styles Inventory (CSI; Sproles and Kendall, 1986) was used to measure respondents’ consumer decision-making styles in relation to automobile purchases.

Findings
Three clusters were identified from the analysis, namely “innovative informed”, “rational confused”, and “traditional habitual”. Significant differences were found between the clusters in terms of the average time they spent with each car dealer, the time they spent on researching final decision and the importance of consulting with family members prior to making their final purchase decision.

Practical implications
The paper found that some consumers rely heavily on friends/families and dealers as the most important sources of information. Other sources of information consumers use include television advertisements, newspapers, billboards and magazines. Based on the findings, marketers should focus on providing similar types of information/messages by using these above-mentioned sources when communicating with this type of consumers. Dealers could be trained to spend time explaining product features and benefits in full with these consumers and their friends and family members whom they are likely to bring along before making the final purchase decision.

Originality/value
The findings of this study have extended the knowledge by determining the impact of external influences on consumer decision-making styles using the CSI in context of specific product which is yet to be known in relation to Australian automobile consumers.

Evaluating Australian social media policies in relation to the issue of information disclosure

Information disclosure is a key concern for many organisations especially in the era of social media. Social media allows for information disclosure to occur easily due to the ubiquitous usage of technology such as mobile devices. Acceptable social media policies can be used by organisations and their employees to improve their decision making behaviours as well as being used as a controlling mechanism to mitigate the issue of information disclosure. Through a review of related research literature along with a content analysis of publicly available Australian social media policies, this paper identifies a perceived gap pertaining to the issue of information disclosure in current Australian social media use policies. To fill this gap, we have highlighted the key components when developing an organisational social media policy. An evaluation criteria is also proposed by the paper that organisations can use to assist in mitigating the information disclosure.

The use of a nursing informatics system as an exemplar to investigate business value of IT in healthcare

Researchers and decision makers in healthcare are taking great interest in clinical practices where there is a high potential to improve healthcare outcomes and reduce costs by incorporating a myriad of technology solutions. However, to date very few, if any of these IS/IT (information systems/information technology) solutions have realised the expected improvements to quality care with the expected cost reductions. This makes the need to evaluate the impact of IT on overall performance of clinical practices i.e. business value of IT a key strategic imperative in healthcare. To address this key need, we propose a comprehensive framework that conceptualises business value of IT in healthcare in different layers. To illustrate the proposed framework, a case study is used, which serves to examine the proposed conceptual model. The exemplar case study is an Australian-made nursing documentation system; an enterprise system that caters for multiple clinical users in acute healthcare contexts and hence provides appropriate richness to validate the proposed model.

Essays on decision sciences: exploring cognition, information processing, and complexity

This thesis provides three original contributions to the field of Decision Sciences. The first contribution explores the field of heuristics and biases. New variations of the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT--a test to measure "the ability or disposition to resist reporting the response that first comes to mind"), are provided. The original CRT (S. Frederick [2005] Journal of Economic Perspectives, v. 19:4, pp.24-42) has items in which the response is immediate--and erroneous. It is shown that by merely varying the numerical parameters of the problems, large deviations in response are found. Not only the final results are affected by the proposed variations, but so is processing fluency. It seems that numbers' magnitudes serve as a cue to activate system-2 type reasoning. The second contribution explores Managerial Algorithmics Theory (M. Moldoveanu [2009] Strategic Management Journal, v. 30, pp. 737-763); an ambitious research program that states that managers display cognitive choices with a "preference towards solving problems of low computational complexity". An empirical test of this hypothesis is conducted, with results showing that this premise is not supported. A number of problems are designed with the intent of testing the predictions from managerial algorithmics against the predictions of cognitive psychology. The results demonstrate (once again) that framing effects profoundly affect choice, and (an original insight) that managers are unable to distinguish computational complexity problem classes. The third contribution explores a new approach to a computationally complex problem in marketing: the shelf space allocation problem (M-H Yang [2001] European Journal of Operational Research, v. 131, pp.107--118). A new representation for a genetic algorithm is developed, and computational experiments demonstrate its feasibility as a practical solution method. These studies lie at the interface of psychology and economics (with bounded rationality and the heuristics and biases programme), psychology, strategy, and computational complexity, and heuristics for computationally hard problems in management science.

The value of ISE : main studies and investor perspective

This study has been prepared with the aim of bringing together the main research lines that seek to identify and convey the value of participating in initiatives like the ISE. This document is structured on three major fronts. On the first front, we conducted a survey to collect the main data on SRI trends in the two largest market niches: Europe and the United States, besides results from an MIT research study conducted among executives on the value of sustainability in the current market. Next, we carried out a non-exhaustive survey on academic studies that seek to identify the intangible and tangible gains achieved by companies through their participation in the ISE or related initiatives. Finally, we present the results of a survey done with major Brazilian pension funds aimed at investigating the knowledge of the ISE and how it could be used in their analysis and decision-making process.

FLOWS OF INFORMATION AND LANGUAGE IN ORGANIZATIONAL SETTINGS

Information flows are formed naturally or formally induced in organizational settings, passing from the strategic level to operational level, reflecting, and impacting in the processes that make up the organization, including the decision-making process and therefore the action strategies of organization. The management of organizational environments based on information requires careful attention to various kinds of languages used for communication between sectors and employees of the organization, whose goal is to share, disseminate and socialize the information produced in this environment.

Networks of Information Exchange Under Uncertainty: The Case of Unconventional Gas Development in the United Kingdom

Modern policy-making is increasingly influenced by different types of uncertainty. Political actors are supposed to behave differently under the context of uncertainty then in “usual” decision-making processes. Actors exchange information in order to convince other actors and decision-makers, to coordinate their lobbying activities and form coalitions, and to get information and learn on the substantive issue. The literature suggests that preference similarity, social trust, perceived power and functional interdependence are particularly important drivers of information exchange. We assume that social trust as well as being connected to scientific actors is more important under uncertainty than in a setting with less uncertainty. To investigate information exchange under uncertainty analyze the case of unconventional shale gas development in the UK from 2008 till 2014. Our study will rely on statistical analyses of survey data on a diverse set of actors dealing with shale gas development and regulation in the UK.

Using Bayes' rule to define the value of evidence from syndromic surveillance

In this work we propose the adoption of a statistical framework used in the evaluation of forensic evidence as a tool for evaluating and presenting circumstantial "evidence" of a disease outbreak from syndromic surveillance. The basic idea is to exploit the predicted distributions of reported cases to calculate the ratio of the likelihood of observing n cases given an ongoing outbreak over the likelihood of observing n cases given no outbreak. The likelihood ratio defines the Value of Evidence (V). Using Bayes' rule, the prior odds for an ongoing outbreak are multiplied by V to obtain the posterior odds. This approach was applied to time series on the number of horses showing clinical respiratory symptoms or neurological symptoms. The separation between prior beliefs about the probability of an outbreak and the strength of evidence from syndromic surveillance offers a transparent reasoning process suitable for supporting decision makers. The value of evidence can be translated into a verbal statement, as often done in forensics or used for the production of risk maps. Furthermore, a Bayesian approach offers seamless integration of data from syndromic surveillance with results from predictive modeling and with information from other sources such as disease introduction risk assessments.

Legal Change and the Social Value of Lawsuits

This paper integrates the literatures on the social value of lawsuits, the evolution of the law, and judicial preferences to evaluate the hypothesis that the law evolves toward efficiency. The setting is a simple accident model with costly litigation where the efficient law minimizes the sum of accident plus litigation costs. In the steady state equilibrium, the distribution of legal rules is not necessarily efficient but instead depends on a combination of selective litigation, judicial bias, and precedent.

Using secondary knowledge to support decision tree classification of retrospective clinical data

Retrospective clinical data presents many challenges for data mining and machine learning. The transcription of patient records from paper charts and subsequent manipulation of data often results in high volumes of noise as well as a loss of other important information. In addition, such datasets often fail to represent expert medical knowledge and reasoning in any explicit manner. In this research we describe applying data mining methods to retrospective clinical data to build a prediction model for asthma exacerbation severity for pediatric patients in the emergency department. Difficulties in building such a model forced us to investigate alternative strategies for analyzing and processing retrospective data. This paper describes this process together with an approach to mining retrospective clinical data by incorporating formalized external expert knowledge (secondary knowledge sources) into the classification task. This knowledge is used to partition the data into a number of coherent sets, where each set is explicitly described in terms of the secondary knowledge source. Instances from each set are then classified in a manner appropriate for the characteristics of the particular set. We present our methodology and outline a set of experiential results that demonstrate some advantages and some limitations of our approach. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

The value of indirect ties in citation networks:SNA analysis with OWA operator weights

This paper seeks to advance the theory and practice of the dynamics of complex networks in relation to direct and indirect citations. It applies social network analysis (SNA) and the ordered weighted averaging operator (OWA) to study a patent citations network. So far the SNA studies investigating long chains of patents citations have rarely been undertaken and the importance of a node in a network has been associated mostly with its number of direct ties. In this research OWA is used to analyse complex networks, assess the role of indirect ties, and provide guidance to reduce complexity for decision makers and analysts. An empirical example of a set of European patents published in 2000 in the renewable energy industry is provided to show the usefulness of the proposed approach for the preference ranking of patent citations.

Competition in the management of information through the use of ICT

This article presents a literature review on current issues in the field of library science, related to competence in the management and use of information, information technology and communication, information society and knowledge among others. It further seeks to highlight the importance of users to acquire these skills so they can deal effectively with decision-making, problem solving, conducting investigations and their own training. This is possible if the information and documentation systems as dynamic agents engaged to distribute scientific and technical knowledge.