Issues in IT service-oriented requirements engineering

Corporate information technology (IT) management is increasingly service-oriented, offering continuous evaluation and improvement of application, communication, delivery and support services to internal and external customers. Service-oriented requirements engineering (SoRE) plays a significant role in identifying and specifying service requirements, formally defined through service-level agreements (SLAs). However, the new frameworks and approaches emerging to guide these developments have not yet addressed how requirements for such services can be effectively developed, nor identified the diverse issues involved. We report a case study of a web services team development of requirements for an internal Service Desk service. The study revealed five main issues of concern when developing service provider requirements: service roles, responsibilities and accountability; service performance metrics; resolution of conflicting stakeholder service requirements; customer acceptance of service change; and service provider team structure. This study suggests that in the new IT services era, new techniques and approaches are needed for eliciting and determining provider and customer requirements that involve key stakeholder groups equitably and more closely negotiate the sometimes-conflicting provider and customer needs.

The road to internet banking: understanding emerging customer issues

This paper presents findings from an empirical study of banking customer experiences with the adoption of Internet banking. Using a qualitative, interpretive grounded theory approach and single and group interviews, the study explores customer perceptions and experiences and provides an understanding of how and why specific factors affect their decision whether or not to bank on the Internet in the current era. The findings are used to develop a theoretical framework which conceptualizes and links consumer issues influencing the adoption of this application, and we also provide a set of recommendations for banks. Specifically, the findings suggest that convenience – in particular, time savings – is the major motivator to bank on the Internet, while there are a range of other influential factors which could be modulated by banks. The results also highlight increasing online risk acceptance by customers and the growing importance of deep levels of customer support for online services. Key gender differences in attitudes to Internet banking are highlighted. This study suggests that organizations will improve their management of customer attitudes to new Internet service applications by understanding the need to proactively address customer fears and misconceptions about the technologies involved.

Service failure and recovery in the presence of service guarantees

This paper presents a conceptual model and propositions outlining how, in a service recovery encounter, service guarantees (unconditional and specific) operate in conjunction with other organisational recovery variables (guarantee facilitation and service provider concern), to influence customers’ justice perceptions and subsequent satisfaction evaluations.

Understanding the impact of organisational downsizing on knowledge sharing

Careful consideration by managers of the potential impact of the popular strategy of economic restructuring (downsizing) on organisational structure and culture could improve the quality of organisational knowledge sharing, however this influence has not yet been addressed in the knowledge management literature. This paper explores how a strategy of downsizing may reshape organisational structure and culture and inhibit organisational knowledge sharing, drawing on an interpretive case study of knowledge sharing in an information technology services function at a large Australian education service provider. Key findings indicate that when specialised teams are downsized, subcultures may develop where teams become mistrustful and insular, and knowledge sharing is constrained across teams. Further, when a hierarchical structure is present and downsizing occurs, managers may become more cautious about sharing knowledge with subordinates. The study also suggests that Internet technologies may play a key role in helping to compensate for the shortfall in knowledge stock resulting from downsizing. In conclusion, this paper highlights an important need for companies to consider the potential negative influences of downsizing on organisationalknowledge sharing.

A construct of sequential service quality in service encounter chains

Studies of the construct of service quality have traditionally been undertaken from the perspective of the service receiver. More recently, research has focused on both the service provider's perspective and the service receiver's perspective. In addition, there have also been some triadic network approaches to the study of service quality. However, there has been very little research into sequential service quality in service-encounter chains (that is, consecutive service performances in a series of service encounters). The incorporation of connected service encounters in services management can improve understanding of sequential service quality in service-encounter chains. This paper provides a customized construct of sequential service quality and  highlights the importance of time, context, and performance threshold in service-encounter chains. Furthermore, the paper presents a customized six-dimensional construct of sequential service quality.

Do organizational service recovery actions impact on hotel guests future intentions and does speed of recovery matter?

This paper investigates hotel guests’ responses to organizational actions dealing with service failure. Eight service failure scenarios were used to identify guests’ intentions towards future visits. Guests’ intentions to switch hotels, revisit the property and remain loyal to the chain were found to vary based on the recovery efforts undertaken. This research found that empowering employees contribute to positive consumer intentions toward the service provider. Compensation was also found effective if offered through empowered employees. Speed of response to service failure was also identified as important action to improve consumer future intentions. Based on these findings, implications for future research are highlighted. Recommendations to the practitioners of hospitality and tourism sector were made for the management of failed service encounter.

Agent-based hybrid framework for decision making on complex problems

Electronic commerce and the Internet have created demand for automated systems that can make complex decisions utilizing information from multiple sources. Because the information is uncertain, dynamic, distributed, and heterogeneous in nature, these systems require a great diversity of intelligent techniques including expert systems, fuzzy logic, neural networks, and genetic algorithms. However, in complex decision making, many different components or sub-tasks are involved, each of which requires different types of processing. Thus multiple such techniques are required resulting in systems called hybrid intelligent systems. That is, hybrid solutions are crucial for complex problem solving and decision making. There is a growing demand for these systems in many areas including financial investment planning, engineering design, medical diagnosis, and cognitive simulation. However, the design and development of these systems is difficult because they have a large number of parts or components that have many interactions. From a multi-agent perspective, agents in multi-agent systems (MAS) are autonomous and can engage in flexible, high-level interactions. MASs are good at complex, dynamic interactions. Thus a multi-agent perspective is suitable for modeling, design, and construction of hybrid intelligent systems. The aim of this thesis is to develop an agent-based framework for constructing hybrid intelligent systems which are mainly used for complex problem solving and decision making. Existing software development techniques (typically, object-oriented) are inadequate for modeling agent-based hybrid intelligent systems. There is a fundamental mismatch between the concepts used by object-oriented developers and the agent-oriented view. Although there are some agent-oriented methodologies such as the Gaia methodology, there is still no specifically tailored methodology available for analyzing and designing agent-based hybrid intelligent systems. To this end, a methodology is proposed, which is specifically tailored to the analysis and design of agent-based hybrid intelligent systems. The methodology consists of six models - role model, interaction model, agent model, skill model, knowledge model, and organizational model. This methodology differs from other agent-oriented methodologies in its skill and knowledge models. As good decisions and problem solutions are mainly based on adequate information, rich knowledge, and appropriate skills to use knowledge and information, these two models are of paramount importance in modeling complex problem solving and decision making. Follow the methodology, an agent-based framework for hybrid intelligent system construction used in complex problem solving and decision making was developed. The framework has several crucial characteristics that differentiate this research from others. Four important issues relating to the framework are also investigated. These cover the building of an ontology for financial investment, matchmaking in middle agents, reasoning in problem solving and decision making, and decision aggregation in MASs. The thesis demonstrates how to build a domain-specific ontology and how to access it in a MAS by building a financial ontology. It is argued that the practical performance of service provider agents has a significant impact on the matchmaking outcomes of middle agents. It is proposed to consider service provider agents' track records in matchmaking. A way to provide initial values for the track records of service provider agents is also suggested. The concept of ‘reasoning with multimedia information’ is introduced, and reasoning with still image information using symbolic projection theory is proposed. How to choose suitable aggregation operations is demonstrated through financial investment application and three approaches are proposed - the stationary agent approach, the token-passing approach, and the mobile agent approach to implementing decision aggregation in MASs. Based on the framework, a prototype was built and applied to financial investment planning. This prototype consists of one serving agent, one interface agent, one decision aggregation agent, one planning agent, four decision making agents, and five service provider agents. Experiments were conducted on the prototype. The experimental results show the framework is flexible, robust, and fully workable. All agents derived from the methodology exhibit their behaviors correctly as specified.

An accessible survey method: increasing the participation of people with a disability in large sample social research

The 1 in 4 Poll project seeks to increase understanding of the views and needs of people with a disability by developing an accessible survey method. It is being conducted by Deakin University in partnership with the Victorian disability service provider, Scope. To address this goal, the 1 in 4 Poll method has focused on three key strategies: an accessible Internet-based survey; use of an assisted and proxy report; and a ‘standard’ and Easy English version of the survey. A bespoke online survey design seeks to overcome the limitations in accessibility of available online survey tools. Positive evaluative comments, from respondents across a wide-range of disabilities, suggests that the combination of the three major strategies used in the 1 in 4 Poll has resulted in a valuable and accessible method of large scale surveying of people with a disability.

A general communication cost optimization framework for big data stream processing in geo-distributed data centers

With the explosion of big data, processing large numbers of continuous data streams, i.e., big data stream processing (BDSP), has become a crucial requirement for many scientific and industrial applications in recent years. By offering a pool of computation, communication and storage resources, public clouds, like Amazon's EC2, are undoubtedly the most efficient platforms to meet the ever-growing needs of BDSP. Public cloud service providers usually operate a number of geo-distributed datacenters across the globe. Different datacenter pairs are with different inter-datacenter network costs charged by Internet Service Providers (ISPs). While, inter-datacenter traffic in BDSP constitutes a large portion of a cloud provider's traffic demand over the Internet and incurs substantial communication cost, which may even become the dominant operational expenditure factor. As the datacenter resources are provided in a virtualized way, the virtual machines (VMs) for stream processing tasks can be freely deployed onto any datacenters, provided that the Service Level Agreement (SLA, e.g., quality-of-information) is obeyed. This raises the opportunity, but also a challenge, to explore the inter-datacenter network cost diversities to optimize both VM placement and load balancing towards network cost minimization with guaranteed SLA. In this paper, we first propose a general modeling framework that describes all representative inter-task relationship semantics in BDSP. Based on our novel framework, we then formulate the communication cost minimization problem for BDSP into a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) problem and prove it to be NP-hard. We then propose a computation-efficient solution based on MILP. The high efficiency of our proposal is validated by extensive simulation based studies.

Examining customer evaluations across different self-service technologies

Purpose – This study aims to examine the influence of different self-service technologies (SSTs) on customer satisfaction with and continued usage of SSTs. Specifically, it compares an interactive voice response (IVR) SST and an online SST from the same provider to assess how to manage these parallel SSTs.

Design/methodology/approach – A tracking study was used, beginning with a survey of n = 957 SST users to test a model pertaining to SST satisfaction across IVR and online SSTs. These SST users were then tracked over 12 months. The association between customer satisfaction with and continued usage of the SSTs was examined using behavioural data from the service provider.

Findings – While the overall model was found to be valid across both types of SSTs, perceptions of factors including ease of use, perceived control and reliability differed for IVR and online SSTs. Satisfaction with SSTs is linked with users’ continued use of SSTs, but is not a barrier to users’ adoption of newer SST forms.

Research limitations/implications – Highlighting the rapid developments in this field, a new SST was introduced by the provider to respondents during the 12-month tracking period, thus complicating the results. Further studies could include the customer purpose for using SSTs as a variable.

Practical implications – The findings offer support for organisations offering a suite of SSTs, even if they serve the same purpose. Customers evaluate SST types differently, and even satisfied SST users switch to different SSTs when they become available. Allowing customers to choose the SST that best suits them appears to be good practice.

Originality/value – This study develops a comprehensive model of customer SST satisfaction that is used to undertake a comparison of two different types of SSTs, which has been missing from prior research.

A Internet como canal de compra

A Internet, apesar de sua grande popularização, é ainda uma incógnita sob o ponto de vista de seu alcance comercial e de suas implicações no estudo do Comportamento do Consumidor. Numerosos estudos estão sendo desenvolvidos, porém dentro de um contexto teórico clássico de Marketing, isto é, posicionando-a como um instrumento “midiático”. Diferentemente, este trabalho procura vê-la como um canal de marketing, analisando-a através da resposta de 726 usuários da Companhia de Processamento de Dados do Rio Grande do Sul – PROCERGS, provedor de acesso à Internet do Rio Grande do Sul. Foi possível identificar sete dimensões características do processo de compra na rede: 1) comodidade, 2) atendimento, 3) conteúdo informacional do site, 4) apresentação e interface da home page, 5) segurança, 6) taxa e tempo de entrega e 7) oferta de produtos. O estudo mostra que a oferta de produtos e a comodidade são os fatores que influenciam a decisão de compra, enquanto que a apresentação/interface da home page, a segurança e o atendimento são os fatores mais preponderantes na decisão de NÃO compra. Também são apresentadas as diferenças percebidas pelos usuários entre a compra realizada na Internet e a efetuada nos canais tradicionais. A avaliação da Internet como canal de compra é finalizada com a identificação dos atributos determinantes da compra pela rede.

The influence of the tag-along rights in the value of companies: an event study of the effects on the market and service companies

The aim of this work is to check the effect of granting tag-along rights to stockholders by analyzing the behavior of the return of the stock. To do so we carried out event studies for a group of 21 company stocks, divided into service provider companies and others, who granted this right to their stockholders after Law 10,303 was passed in October, 2001. In the test we used two models for estimating abnormal returns: adjusted to the market and adjusted to the risk and market. The results of the tests we carried out based on these models did not capture abnormal returns (surpluses), telling us that the tag-along rights did not affect the pattern of daily returns of the stocks of companies traded on BOVESPA (The Sao Paulo Stock Exchange). We did not expect this result because of the new corporate governance practices adopted by companies in Brazil.

Aplicação do método de análise hierárquica na tomada de decisão para adoção de computação em nuvem: um estudo de caso na federação das indústrias do RN

The progresses of the Internet and telecommunications have been changing the concepts of Information Technology IT, especially with regard to outsourcing services, where organizations seek cost-cutting and a better focus on the business. Along with the development of that outsourcing, a new model named Cloud Computing (CC) evolved. It proposes to migrate to the Internet both data processing and information storing. Among the key points of Cloud Computing are included cost-cutting, benefits, risks and the IT paradigms changes. Nonetheless, the adoption of that model brings forth some difficulties to decision-making, by IT managers, mainly with regard to which solutions may go to the cloud, and which service providers are more appropriate to the Organization s reality. The research has as its overall aim to apply the AHP Method (Analytic Hierarchic Process) to decision-making in Cloud Computing. There to, the utilized methodology was the exploratory kind and a study of case applied to a nationwide organization (Federation of Industries of RN). The data collection was performed through two structured questionnaires answered electronically by IT technicians, and the company s Board of Directors. The analysis of the data was carried out in a qualitative and comparative way, and we utilized the software to AHP method called Web-Hipre. The results we obtained found the importance of applying the AHP method in decision-making towards the adoption of Cloud Computing, mainly because on the occasion the research was carried out the studied company already showed interest and necessity in adopting CC, considering the internal problems with infrastructure and availability of information that the company faces nowadays. The organization sought to adopt CC, however, it had doubt regarding the cloud model and which service provider would better meet their real necessities. The application of the AHP, then, worked as a guiding tool to the choice of the best alternative, which points out the Hybrid Cloud as the ideal choice to start off in Cloud Computing. Considering the following aspects: the layer of Infrastructure as a Service IaaS (Processing and Storage) must stay partly on the Public Cloud and partly in the Private Cloud; the layer of Platform as a Service PaaS (Software Developing and Testing) had preference for the Private Cloud, and the layer of Software as a Service - SaaS (Emails/Applications) divided into emails to the Public Cloud and applications to the Private Cloud. The research also identified the important factors to hiring a Cloud Computing provider

Internet Intermediaries and the Law Applicable to Intellectual Property Infringements

The coordination between territoriality restricted intellectual property rights and the potential global reach of Internet activities has been the focus of significant attention in recent years. The liability of Internet intermediaries offering potentially global services that may facilitate infringements of intellectual property rights by others in multiple countries poses a particular challenge in that regard. At a substantive law level, significant differences remain between jurisdictions regarding secondary liability for intellectual property rights infringements and safe harbor provisions for Internet intermediaries. The present article discusses the conflict of laws aspects of the liability of Internet intermediaries in light of the recent international efforts to adopt soft law provisions on intellectual property and private international law.

Evaluation of the Role of Access Providers Discussion of Dutch Pirate Bay Case Law and Introducing Principles on Directness, Effectiveness, Costs, Relevance, and Time

Internet service providers (ISPs) play a pivotal role in contemporary society because they provide access to the Internet. The primary task of ISPs – to blindly transfer information across the network – has recently come under pressure, as has their status as neutral third parties. Both the public and the private sector have started to require ISPs to interfere with the content placed and transferred on the Internet as well as access to it for a variety of purposes, including the fight against cybercrime, digital piracy, child pornography, etc. This expanding list necessitates a critical assessment of the role of ISPs. This paper analyses the role of the access provider. Particular attention is paid to Dutch case law, in which access providers were forced to block The Pirate Bay. After analysing the position of ISPs, we will define principles that can guide the decisions of ISPs whether to take action after a request to block access based on directness, effectiveness, costs, relevance and time.