CIRAS News, Winter 2016, Vol. 51, no. 2

CIRAS is to enhance the performance of Iowa industry, and associated entities, through education and technology-based services. This newsletter holds information regarding these services.

Managed Care Ombudsman Program

In Iowa, the Managed Care Ombudsman Program was established to advocate for the rights and wishes of IA Health Link members who live or receive care in a health care facility, assisted living program or elder group home, as well as members enrolled in one of the seven home and community-based services (HCBS) waiver programs: AIDS/HIV, Brain Injury, Children’s Mental Health, Elderly, Health and Disability, Intellectual &/or Physical Disability. All services provided by the Managed Care Ombudsman Program are confidential and free of charge.

Access to Recovery Iowa: Provider Manual, October 2014

Access to Recovery - Iowa (ATR) is a three year grant awarded to the Iowa Department of Public Health (IDPH) by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (SAMHSA) in October 2014. ATR provides funding to individuals to purchase services and supports linked to their recovery from substance abuse. ATR emphasizes client choice and increases the array of available community-based services, supports, and providers.

MANAGING STRATEGIC CHANGE:New Business Models Applying Wireless Technology as a Source of Competitive Edge

The diffusion of mobile telephony began in 1971 in Finland, when the first car phones, called ARP1 were taken to use. Technologies changed from ARP to NMT and later to GSM. The main application of the technology, however, was voice transfer. The birth of the Internet created an open public data network and easy access to other types of computer-based services over networks. Telephones had been used as modems, but the development of the cellular technologies enabled automatic access from mobile phones to Internet. Also other wireless technologies, for instance Wireless LANs, were also introduced. Telephony had developed from analog to digital in fixed networks and allowed easy integration of fixed and mobile networks. This development opened a completely new functionality to computers and mobile phones. It also initiated the merger of the information technology (IT) and telecommunication (TC) industries. Despite the arising opportunity for firms' new competition the applications based on the new functionality were rare. Furthermore, technology development combined with innovation can be disruptive to industries. This research focuses on the new technology's impact on competition in the ICT industry through understanding the strategic needs and alternative futures of the industry's customers. The change speed inthe ICT industry is high and therefore it was valuable to integrate the DynamicCapability view of the firm in this research. Dynamic capabilities are an application of the Resource-Based View (RBV) of the firm. As is stated in the literature, strategic positioning complements RBV. This theoretical framework leads theresearch to focus on three areas: customer strategic innovation and business model development, external future analysis, and process development combining these two. The theoretical contribution of the research is in the development of methodology integrating theories of the RBV, dynamic capabilities and strategic positioning. The research approach has been constructive due to the actual managerial problems initiating the study. The requirement for iterative and innovative progress in the research supported the chosen research approach. The study applies known methods in product development, for instance, innovation process in theGroup Decision Support Systems (GDSS) laboratory and Quality Function Deployment (QFD), and combines them with known strategy analysis tools like industry analysis and scenario method. As the main result, the thesis presents the strategic innovation process, where new business concepts are used to describe the alternative resource configurations and scenarios as alternative competitive environments, which can be a new way for firms to achieve competitive advantage in high-velocity markets. In addition to the strategic innovation process as a result, thestudy has also resulted in approximately 250 new innovations for the participating firms, reduced technology uncertainty and helped strategic infrastructural decisions in the firms, and produced a knowledge-bank including data from 43 ICT and 19 paper industry firms between the years 1999 - 2004. The methods presentedin this research are also applicable to other industries.

Service Management in IP Networks

IP-verkoissa tarjottavat palvelut ovat lisääntyneet, on tullut uusia kanavia, jotka tarjoavat IP-pohjaisia palveluja. Internet-palvelujen tarjonta on tullut mukaan kaapelitelevisio- ja matkapuhelinverkkoihin. Lisääntynyt palvelujen tarjonta ja kysyntä ovat lisänneet palvelujen hallinnan merkitystä. IP-verkoissa on ilmennyt turvallisuuteen, skaalattavuuteen ja palvelun laatuun liittyviä ongelmia. Palvelun laadun tärkeys painottuu reaaliaikaisuutta ja suurta kapasiteettia vaativissa sovelluksissa. Tulevaisuudessa IP-liikenteen on ennustettu kasvavan yli satakertaiseksi nykyisestä tasosta kolmen vuoden kuluessa. Tämän vuoksi on kehitetty uusi verkon ja palvelun hallintamenetelmiä, joista tässä työssä on tutkittu sääntöpohjaista verkon hallintaa.

Paikkatiedon hyödyntäminen Jabber-pikaviestintäohjelmistossa

Työn teoriaosuudessa tutustutaan ensin paikkatiedon käsitteeseen ja paikkatietoa hyödyntäviin palveluihin. Lisäksi perehdytään paikannukseen langattomissa lähiverkoissa ja erityisesti paikannukseen tämän diplomityön osalta käytettävässä verkossa. Työn teoriaosuudessa tutustutaan myös paikkatietoa hyödyntävien palveluiden hyöty- sekä haittanäkökulmiin. Teoriaosuudessa käydään myös läpi tällä hetkellä yleisimmät pikaviestintäarkkitehtuurit ja tutustutaan tarkemmin Jabber–pikaviestintäohjelmiston käyttämään protokollaan. Lopuksi tarkastellaan paikkatiedon hyödyntämiseen liittyviä lakiteknisiä seikkoja ja henkilön yksityisyyden suojaa. Diplomityön käytännön osuudessa tutustutaan paikkatietoa hyödyntävän palvelinkomponentin toteutukseen Jabber–arkkitehtuuria hyväksikäyttäen. Jabber-palvelinohjelmisto ja tehty komponentti toimivat langattomassa lähiverkossa (WLPR.NET), jota ylläpitää Lappeenrannan teknillisen yliopiston tietoliikennetekniikan laitos. Verkon käyttäjät voivat rekisteröityä palvelun käyttäjiksi, jonka jälkeen palvelinkomponentti pitää kirjaa rekisteröityneiden käyttäjien paikkatiedosta ja sen muutoksista. Lisäksi käyttäjät voivat hakea muiden käyttäjien paikkatietoa asiakasohjelmistossa toimivan hakutoiminnon avulla. Käyttäjien paikkatieto saadaan käyttämällä jo olemassa olevaa tekniikkaa.

Building distributed high availability system

Today’s commercial web sites are under heavy user load and they are expected to be operational and available at all times. Distributed system architectures have been developed to provide a scalable and failure tolerant high availability platform for these web based services. The focus on this thesis was to specify and implement resilient and scalable locally distributed high availability system architecture for a web based service. Theory part concentrates on the fundamental characteristics of distributed systems and presents common scalable high availability server architectures that are used in web based services. In the practical part of the thesis the implemented new system architecture is explained. Practical part also includes two different test cases that were done to test the system's performance capacity.

Practices of place-making through locative media artworks

Peer-reviewed

Knowledge sharing in intrafirm networks in organization

The objective of this study was research the shared knowledge and the means of sharing with the help of social network analysis. The purpose of this study was to give descriptive information to case-organization about its situational network status in different units. The premise of the study is the success of organizational competences and networks, especially when it comes to the sharing of knowledge. The research was accomplished in a TEKES –projects, Developing Network-Based Services – The Role of Competences and Networks COMNET –projects case-organization. Lappeenranta School of Business and the case-organization started the project in co-operation. The baseline for the study was organizational competencies and organizational networks as success factors, especially from the knowledge sharing’s point of view. The research was based on triangulation, which included pre-interviews, network analyses accomplished by Webropol –e-mail survey and qualitative interviews. The results indicated that regular unit meetings were experienced to be the most important method of knowledge sharing along with e-mailing, intranet and weekly bulletins. The co-operation between units was also experienced to be important when evaluating knowledge sharing and communication. The intrafirm network was experienced tight. Dispersed units and partly unclear means of information sharing were the biggest obstacles for information communication. Knowledge sharing, communication with others and trainings were seen important in the case-organization.

Microsoftin pilvipalvelut pk-yrityksen päätelaite- ja tiedonhallinnassa

Diplomityössä tutkittiin Microsoftin pilvipalveluiden käyttöä pk-yrityksen päätelaitteiden hallinnassa sekä yrityksen tiedonhallinnassa. Kohdeyrityksenä oli pk-yritys, jolla on ollut Microsoftin pilvipalveluita käytössä jo useamman vuoden ajan. Pilvipalveluiden nopean päivitystahdin myötä uusimpien ominaisuuksien hyödyntäminen on suurelta osin jäänyt tekemättä. Tutkimus päädyttiin rajaamaan kohdeyrityksessä tehdyn vaatimusmäärittelyn mukaisiin tapauksiin, joihin pyrittiin etsimään vastauksia Microsoftin pilvipalveluiden tämän hetken ominaisuuksien avulla. Tutkimus toteutettiin tutustumalla kirjallisuuden avulla pilvitoimintamallin perusteisiin ja Microsoftin tarjoamiin pilvipalveluihin. Työn käytännön osuus toteutettiin useilla eri päätelaitteilla Office 365:den ja Windows Intunen muodostamassa testiympäristössä, jota laajennettiin Microsoft Azuren mahdollistamilla lisäominaisuuksilla. Pilvitoimintamallin yritykset taistelevat jatkuvasti käyttäjien luottamuksesta ja NSA:n vakoilutapauksen jälkeen palveluissa on tapahtunut paljon parannuksia. Tutkimuksessa todettiin erityisesti tiedon suojaamiskäytäntöjen ja hallintaominaisuuksien kehittyneen viime vuosina pilvitoimintamallin yritysten keskinäisen kilpailun myötä. Microsoftin pilvipalvelujen uudet ominaisuudet tarjoavat pk-yritysten käyttöön tehokkaita päätelaite- ja tiedonhallintaratkaisuja, joita on tähän asti ollut saatavilla vain suuryritysympäristöissä.

Asiakasarvopohjaisten palveluiden kehittäminen kiinteistöpalvelualan yrityksessä

Tämän työn tavoitteena oli tutkia asiakasarvopohjaisten palveluiden kehittämistä ja luoda kiinteistöpalvelualan yritykselle kehitysprosessimalli, jonka avulla yritys voisi optimoida toimintojaan tulevaisuudessa. Tutkimuksen päätavoitteina oli tutkia asiakasarvoa kiinteistöpalveluissa, kartoittaa potentiaalisten uusien asiakkaiden palveluiden nykytila ja toiveet sekä tarkastella kohdeyrityksen palveluiden kehitysprosessia. Työn teoreettisessa osiossa tarkasteltiin palveluliiketoimintaa yleisellä tasolla, yrityksen palveluprosessin kehittämistä, asiakasarvon muodostumista sekä SERVQUAL- ja QFD-työkalujen avulla palvelun laatua ja asiakastarpeita. Työn teoriaosuuden kautta saatiin myös selville, että asiakasarvon hallinta on palveluiden kehitysprosessin ydin. Tutkimuksen empiirinen aineisto kerättiin syvähaastatteluiden avulla avainasiakkailta eri asiakassegmentteihin liittyen. Haastattelujen analysoinnissa hyödynnettiin laadullista sisällönanalyysiä. Työn tuloksissa määriteltiin asiakasarvo ja tärkeimmät asiakastarpeet kiinteistöpalveluissa, kartoitettiin asiakkaiden odotusten ja nykytilan väliset kuilut sekä luotiin yritykselle palveluiden kehitysprosessimalli, jota yritys voi toiminnoissaan tapauskohtaisesti hyödyntää tulevaisuudessa.

Changing Role of Academic Libraries in the E-learning Environment: Issues and Challenges

The development of computer and network technology is changing the education scenario and transforming the teaching and learning process from the traditional physical environment to the digital environment. It is now possible to access vast amount of information online and enable one to one communication without the confines of place or time. While E-learning and teaching is unlikely to replace face-to-face training and education it is becoming an additional delivery method, providing new learning opportunities to many users. It is also causing an impact on library services as the increased use of ICT and web based learning technologies have paved the way for providing new ICT based services and resources to the users. Online learning has a crucial role in user education, information literacy programmes and in training the library professionals. It can help students become active learners, and libraries will have to play a greater role in this process of transformation. The significance of libraries within an institution has improved due to the fact that academic libraries and information services are now responsible for e-learning within their organization.

Capturing Emergent Semantics from Social Annotation Systems

The ongoing growth of the World Wide Web, catalyzed by the increasing possibility of ubiquitous access via a variety of devices, continues to strengthen its role as our prevalent information and commmunication medium. However, although tools like search engines facilitate retrieval, the task of finally making sense of Web content is still often left to human interpretation. The vision of supporting both humans and machines in such knowledge-based activities led to the development of different systems which allow to structure Web resources by metadata annotations. Interestingly, two major approaches which gained a considerable amount of attention are addressing the problem from nearly opposite directions: On the one hand, the idea of the Semantic Web suggests to formalize the knowledge within a particular domain by means of the "top-down" approach of defining ontologies. On the other hand, Social Annotation Systems as part of the so-called Web 2.0 movement implement a "bottom-up" style of categorization using arbitrary keywords. Experience as well as research in the characteristics of both systems has shown that their strengths and weaknesses seem to be inverse: While Social Annotation suffers from problems like, e. g., ambiguity or lack or precision, ontologies were especially designed to eliminate those. On the contrary, the latter suffer from a knowledge acquisition bottleneck, which is successfully overcome by the large user populations of Social Annotation Systems. Instead of being regarded as competing paradigms, the obvious potential synergies from a combination of both motivated approaches to "bridge the gap" between them. These were fostered by the evidence of emergent semantics, i. e., the self-organized evolution of implicit conceptual structures, within Social Annotation data. While several techniques to exploit the emergent patterns were proposed, a systematic analysis - especially regarding paradigms from the field of ontology learning - is still largely missing. This also includes a deeper understanding of the circumstances which affect the evolution processes. This work aims to address this gap by providing an in-depth study of methods and influencing factors to capture emergent semantics from Social Annotation Systems. We focus hereby on the acquisition of lexical semantics from the underlying networks of keywords, users and resources. Structured along different ontology learning tasks, we use a methodology of semantic grounding to characterize and evaluate the semantic relations captured by different methods. In all cases, our studies are based on datasets from several Social Annotation Systems. Specifically, we first analyze semantic relatedness among keywords, and identify measures which detect different notions of relatedness. These constitute the input of concept learning algorithms, which focus then on the discovery of synonymous and ambiguous keywords. Hereby, we assess the usefulness of various clustering techniques. As a prerequisite to induce hierarchical relationships, our next step is to study measures which quantify the level of generality of a particular keyword. We find that comparatively simple measures can approximate the generality information encoded in reference taxonomies. These insights are used to inform the final task, namely the creation of concept hierarchies. For this purpose, generality-based algorithms exhibit advantages compared to clustering approaches. In order to complement the identification of suitable methods to capture semantic structures, we analyze as a next step several factors which influence their emergence. Empirical evidence is provided that the amount of available data plays a crucial role for determining keyword meanings. From a different perspective, we examine pragmatic aspects by considering different annotation patterns among users. Based on a broad distinction between "categorizers" and "describers", we find that the latter produce more accurate results. This suggests a causal link between pragmatic and semantic aspects of keyword annotation. As a special kind of usage pattern, we then have a look at system abuse and spam. While observing a mixed picture, we suggest that an individual decision should be taken instead of disregarding spammers as a matter of principle. Finally, we discuss a set of applications which operationalize the results of our studies for enhancing both Social Annotation and semantic systems. These comprise on the one hand tools which foster the emergence of semantics, and on the one hand applications which exploit the socially induced relations to improve, e. g., searching, browsing, or user profiling facilities. In summary, the contributions of this work highlight viable methods and crucial aspects for designing enhanced knowledge-based services of a Social Semantic Web.

eLearning im Sportstudium

In der gesamten Hochschullandschaft begleiten eLearning-Szenarien organisatorische Erneuerungsprozesse und stellen damit ein vielversprechendes Instrument zur Unterstützung und Verbesserung der klassischen Präsenzlehre dar. Davon ausgehend wurde von 2010 bis 2011 das Kasseler Sportspiel-Modell um die integrative Vermittlung der Einkontakt-Rückschlagspiele erweitert (Heyer, Albert, Scheid & Blömeke-Rumpf, 2011) und in einen modularisierten eLearning-Content, bestehend aus insgesamt 4 Modulen (17 Lernkurse, 171 Kursseiten, 73 Grafiken, 73 Videos, 38 Lernkontrollfragen), eingebunden. Dieser Content wurde im Rahmen einer Evaluationsstudie in Blended Learning Seminaren, welche die didaktischen Vorteile von Online- und Präsenzphasen zu einer Seminarform vereinen (Treumann, Ganguin & Arens, 2012), vergleichend zur klassischen Präsenzlehre im Sportstudium betrachtet. Die Studie gliedert sich in insgesamt drei Phasen: 1.) Pilotstudie am IfSS in Kassel (WS 2011/12; N=17, Lehramt), 2.) Hauptuntersuchung I am IfSS in Kassel (SS 2012; N=67, Lehramt) und 3.) Hauptuntersuchung II am IfS in Frankfurt a. M. (WS 2012/13; N=112, BA). Mittels varianzanalytischer Untersuchungsverfahren erfasst die Studie auf drei unterschiedlichen Qualitätsebenen folgende Aspekte der Lehr-Lernforschung: 1.) Ebene der Inputqualität: Bewertung der Seminarform (BS), 2.) Ebene der Prozessqualität: Motivation (SELLMO-ST), Lernstrategien (LIST) und computerbezogene Einstellung (FIDEC), 3.) Ebene der Outcomequalität: Lernleistung (Abschlusstest und Transferaufgabe). In der vergleichenden Betrachtung der beiden Hauptuntersuchungen erfolgt eine Gegenüberstellung von je einem Präsenzseminar zu zwei unterschiedlichen Varianten von Blended Learning Seminaren (BL-1, BL-2). Während der Online-Phasen bearbeiten die Sportstudierenden in BL-1 die Module in Lerngruppen. Die Teilnehmer in BL-2 führen in diesen Phasen zusätzlich persönliche Lerntagebücher. Dies soll zu einer vergleichsweise intensiveren Auseinandersetzung mit den Inhalten der Lernkurse sowie dem eigenen Lernprozess auf kognitiver und metakognitiver Ebene anregen (Hübner, Nückles & Renkl, 2007) und folglich zu besseren Ergebnissen auf den drei Qualitätsebenen führen. Die Ergebnisse der beiden Hauptuntersuchungen zeigen in der direkten, standortbezogenen Gegenüberstellung aller drei Seminarformen überwiegend keine statistisch signifikanten Unterschiede. Der erwartete positive Effekt durch die Einführung des Lerntagebuchs bleibt ebenfalls aus. Im standortübergreifenden Vergleich der Blended-Learning-Seminare ist bemerkenswert, dass die Probanden aus Frankfurt gegenüber ihrer Seminarform eine tendenziell kritischere Haltung einnehmen, was möglicherweise mit den vorherrschenden, unterschiedlichen Studiengängen – Lehramt und BA – korrespondiert. Zusammenfassend lässt sich somit für den untersuchten Bereich der Rückschlagspielvermittlung festhalten, dass Blended-Learning-Seminare eine qualitativ gleichwertige Alternative zur klassischen Präsenzlehre im Sportstudium darstellen.

d-Ruta, un sistema móvil de información turística

d-Ruta is a new location based service designed for the visualization, planning, follow-up, interaction, maintenance and distribution of information about tourist routes and their associated points of interest, in the Vall de Ribes, in the Catalan Pyrenees. (...)