IS/IT resources and business value: Operationalization of an information oriented framework

Several studies have highlighted the importance of information and information quality in organisations and thus information is regarded as key determinant for the success and organisational performance. In this paper, we review selected contributions and introduce a model that shows how IS/IT resources and capabilities could be interlinked with IS/IT utilization, organizational performance and business value. Complementing other models and frameworks, we explicitly consider information from a management maturity, quality and risk perspective and show how the new framework can be operationalized with existing assessment approaches by using empirical data from four industrial case studies. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.

Managing water resources and their connection to land and energy

Effective management is a key to ensuring the current and future sustainability of land, water and energy resources. Identifying the complexities of such management is not an easy task, especially since past studies have focussed on studying these resources in isolation from one another. However, with rapid population growth and an increase in the awareness of a potential change in climatic conditions that may affect the demand for and supply of food, water and energy, there has been a growing need to integrate the planning decisions relating to these three resources. The paper shows the visualisation of linked resources by drawing a set of interconnected Sankey diagrams for energy, water and land. These track the changes from basic resource (e.g. coal, surface water, groundwater and cropland) through transformations (e.g. fuel refining and desalination) to final services (e.g. sustenance, hygiene and transportation). The focus here is on the water analysis aspects of the tool, which uses California as a detailed case study. The movement of water in California is traced from its source to its services by mapping the different transformations of water from when it becomes available, through its use, to further treatment, to final sinks (including recycling and reuse of that resource). The connections that water has with energy and land resources for the state of California are highlighted. This includes the amount of energy used to pump and treat water, and the amount of water used for energy production and the land resources which create a water demand to produce crops for food. By mapping water in this way, policy-makers and resource managers can more easily understand the competing uses of water (environment, agriculture and urban use) through the identification of the services it delivers (e.g. sanitation, agriculture, landscaping), the potential opportunities for improving the management of the resource (e.g. building new desalination plants, reducing the demand for services), and the connections with other resources which are often overlooked in a traditional sector-based management strategy.

An information oriented framework for relating IS/IT resources and business value

Several studies have highlighted the importance of information and information quality in organisations and thus information is regarded as key determinant for the success and organisational performance. At the same time, there are numerous studies, frameworks and case studies examining the impact of information technology and systems to business value. Recently, several studies have proposed maturity models for information management capabilities in the literature, which claim that a higher maturity results in a higher organizational performance. Although these studies provide valuable information about the underlying relations, most are limited in specifying the relationship in more detail. Furthermore, most prominent approaches do not or at least not explicitly consider information as important influencing factor for organisational performance. In this paper, we aim to review selected contributions and introduce a model that shows how IS/IT resources and capabilties could be interlinked with IS/IT utilization, organizational performance and business value. Complementing other models and frameworks, we explicitly consider information from a management maturity, quality and risk perspective. Moreover, the paper discusses how each part of the model can be assessed in order to validate the model in future studies.

UK-NEES - Distributed hybrid testing between Bristol, Cambridge and Oxford Universities: Connecting structural dynamics labs to a geotechnical centrifuge

Distributed hybrid testing is a natural extension to and builds upon the local hybrid testing technique. Taking advantage of the hybrid nature of the test, it allows a sharing of resources and expertise between researchers from different disciplines by connecting multiple geographically distributed sites for joint testing. As part of the UK-NEES project, a successful series of three-site distributed hybrid tests have been carried out between Bristol, Cambridge and Oxford Universities. The first known multi-site distributed hybrid tests in the UK, they connected via a dedicated fibre network, using custom software, the geotechnical centrifuge at Cambridge to structural components at Bristol and Oxford. These experiments were to prove the connection and useful insights were gained into the issues involved with this distributed environment. A wider aim is towards providing a flexible testing framework to facilitate multi-disciplinary experiments such as the accurate investigation of the influence of foundations on structural systems under seismic and other loading. Time scaling incompatibilities mean true seismic soil structure interaction using a centrifuge at g is not possible, though it is clear that distributed centrifuge testing can be valuable in other problems. Development is continuing to overcome the issues encountered, in order to improve future distributed tests in the UK and beyond.

IPLR: An online resource for Greek word-level and sublexical information

We present a new online psycholinguistic resource for Greek based on analyses of written corpora combined with text processing technologies developed at the Institute for Language & Speech Processing (ILSP), Greece. The "ILSP PsychoLinguistic Resource" (IPLR) is a freely accessible service via a dedicated web page, at http://speech.ilsp.gr/iplr. IPLR provides analyses of user-submitted letter strings (words and nonwords) as well as frequency tables for important units and conditions such as syllables, bigrams, and neighbors, calculated over two word lists based on printed text corpora and their phonetic transcription. Online tools allow retrieval of words matching user-specified orthographic or phonetic patterns. All results and processing code (in the Python programming language) are freely available for noncommercial educational or research use. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

Enhancing and developing the practical optimisation capabilities and intelligence of automatic design software

In the modern engineering design cycle the use of computational tools becomes a neces- sity. The complexity of the engineering systems under consideration for design increases dramatically as the demands for advanced and innovative design concepts and engineering products is expanding. At the same time the advancements in the available technology in terms of computational resources and power, as well as the intelligence of the design software, accommodate these demands and make them a viable approach towards the chal- lenge of real-world engineering problems. This class of design optimisation problems is by nature multi-disciplinary. In the present work we establish enhanced optimisation capabil- ities within the Nimrod/O tool for massively distributed execution of computational tasks through cluster and computational grid resources, and develop the potential to combine and benefit from all the possible available technological advancements, both software and hardware. We develop the interface between a Free Form Deformation geometry manage- ment in-house code with the 2D airfoil aerodynamic efficiency evaluation tool XFoil, and the well established multi-objective heuristic optimisation algorithm NSGA-II. A simple airfoil design problem has been defined to demonstrate the functionality of the design sys- tem, but also to accommodate a framework for future developments and testing with other state-of-the-art optimisation algorithms such as the Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm (MOGA) and the Multi-Objective Tabu Search (MOTS) techniques. Ultimately, heav- ily computationally expensive industrial design cases can be realised within the presented framework that could not be investigated before. © 2012 by the authors. Published by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc.

Enhancing and developing the practical optimisation capabilities and intelligence of automatic design software

In the modern engineering design cycle the use of computational tools becomes a necessity. The complexity of the engineering systems under consideration for design increases dramatically as the demands for advanced and innovative design concepts and engineering products is expanding. At the same time the advancements in the available technology in terms of computational resources and power, as well as the intelligence of the design software, accommodate these demands and make them a viable approach towards the challenge of real-world engineering problems. This class of design optimisation problems is by nature multi-disciplinary. In the present work we establish enhanced optimisation capabilities within the Nimrod/O tool for massively distributed execution of computational tasks through cluster and computational grid resources, and develop the potential to combine and benefit from all the possible available technological advancements, both software and hardware. We develop the interface between a Free Form Deformation geometry management in-house code with the 2D airfoil aerodynamic efficiency evaluation tool XFoil, and the well established multi-objective heuristic optimisation algorithm NSGA-II. A simple airfoil design problem has been defined to demonstrate the functionality of the design system, but also to accommodate a framework for future developments and testing with other state-of-the-art optimisation algorithms such as the Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm (MOGA) and the Multi-Objective Tabu Search (MOTS) techniques. Ultimately, heavily computationally expensive industrial design cases can be realised within the presented framework that could not be investigated before. ©2012 AIAA.

An integrated representation of the services provided by global water resources

Water is essential not only to maintain the livelihoods of human beings but also to sustain ecosystems. Over the last few decades several global assessments have reviewed current and future uses of water, and have offered potential solutions to a possible water crisis. However, these have tended to focus on water supply rather than on the range of demands for all water services (including those of ecosystems). In this paper, a holistic global view of water resources and the services they provide is presented, using Sankey diagrams as a visualisation tool. These diagrams provide a valuable addition to the spatial maps of other global assessments, as they track the sources, uses, services and sinks of water resources. They facilitate comparison of different water services, and highlight trade-offs amongst them. For example, they reveal how increasing the supply of water resources to one service (crop production) can generate a reduction in provision of other water services (e.g., to ecosystem maintenance). The potential impacts of efficiency improvements in the use of water are also highlighted; for example, reduction in soil evaporation from crop production through better farming practices, or the results of improved treatment and re-use of return flows leading to reduction of delivery to final sinks. This paper also outlines the measures needed to ensure sustainable water resource use and supply for multiple competing services in the future, and emphasises that integrated management of land and water resources is essential to achieve this goal. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd.

System combination and score normalization for spoken term detection

Spoken content in languages of emerging importance needs to be searchable to provide access to the underlying information. In this paper, we investigate the problem of extending data fusion methodologies from Information Retrieval for Spoken Term Detection on low-resource languages in the framework of the IARPA Babel program. We describe a number of alternative methods improving keyword search performance. We apply these methods to Cantonese, a language that presents some new issues in terms of reduced resources and shorter query lengths. First, we show score normalization methodology that improves in average by 20% keyword search performance. Second, we show that properly combining the outputs of diverse ASR systems performs 14% better than the best normalized ASR system. © 2013 IEEE.