Building the single market with information technology - lessons from a transnational IT implementation

The subject company operates in a vigorously growing sector of the packaging market, with plants in most European countries. But could this disparate business function as a single company in a single (European) market? This article sets out some lessons learned from a pilot transnational implementation of a strategic management information system, designed to counter entrenched national business thinking in one European company and its subsidiaries.

The Impact of Contract Type on Service Provider Information Requirements

This paper is concerned with the role of information in the servitization of manufacturing which has led to “the innovation of an organisation’s capabilities and processes as equipment manufacturers seek to offer services around their products” (Neely 2009, Baines et al 2009). This evolution has resulted in an information requirement (IR) shift as companies move from discrete provision of equipment and spare parts to long-term service contracts guaranteeing prescribed performance levels. Organisations providing such services depend on a very high level of availability and quality of information throughout the service life-cycle (Menor et al 2002). This work focuses on whether, for a proposed contract based around complex equipment, the Information System is capable of providing information at an acceptable quality and requires the IRs to be examined in a formal manner. We apply a service information framework (Cuthbert et al 2008, McFarlane & Cuthbert 2012) to methodically assess IRs for different contract types to understand the information gap between them. Results from case examples indicate that this gap includes information required for the different contract types and a set of contract-specific IRs. Furthermore, the control, ownership and use of information differs across contract types as the boundary of operation and responsibility changes.

A matter of life and death: sociomateriality, information systems and critical care

Sociomateriality has been attracting growing attention in the Organization Studies and Information Systems literatures since 2007, with more than 140 journal articles now referring to the concept. Over 80 percent of these articles have been published since January 2011 and almost all cite the work of Orlikowski (2007, 2010; Orlikowski and Scott 2008) as the source of the concept. Only a few, however, address all of the notions that Orlikowski suggests are entailed in sociomateriality, namely materiality, inseparability, relationality, performativity, and practices, with many employing the concept quite selectively. The contribution of sociomateriality to these literatures is, therefore, still unclear. Drawing on evidence from an ongoing study of the adoption of a computer-based clinical information system in a hospital critical care unit, this paper explores whether the notions, individually and collectively, offer a distinctive and coherent account of the relationship between the social and the material that may be useful in Information Systems research. It is argued that if sociomateriality is to be more than simply a label for research employing a number of loosely related existing theoretical approaches, then studies employing the concept need to pay greater attention to the notions entailed in it and to differences in their interpretation.

Design, construction and evaluation of systems to predict risk in obstetrics.

We present a systematic, practical approach to developing risk prediction systems, suitable for use with large databases of medical information. An important part of this approach is a novel feature selection algorithm which uses the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve to measure the expected discriminative power of different sets of predictor variables. We describe this algorithm and use it to select variables to predict risk of a specific adverse pregnancy outcome: failure to progress in labour. Neural network, logistic regression and hierarchical Bayesian risk prediction models are constructed, all of which achieve close to the limit of performance attainable on this prediction task. We show that better prediction performance requires more discriminative clinical information rather than improved modelling techniques. It is also shown that better diagnostic criteria in clinical records would greatly assist the development of systems to predict risk in pregnancy.

Spoken Dialog Challenge 2010: Comparison of live and control test results

The Spoken Dialog Challenge 2010 was an exercise to investigate how different spoken dialog systems perform on the same task. The existing Let's Go Pittsburgh Bus Information System was used as a task and four teams provided systems that were first tested in controlled conditions with speech researchers as users. The three most stable systems were then deployed to real callers. This paper presents the results of the live tests, and compares them with the control test results. Results show considerable variation both between systems and between the control and live tests. Interestingly, relatively high task completion for controlled tests did not always predict relatively high task completion for live tests. Moreover, even though the systems were quite different in their designs, we saw very similar correlations between word error rate and task completion for all the systems. The dialog data collected is available to the research community. © 2011 Association for Computational Linguistics.