Abstract: Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become a
new trend of business governance. Few research studies on CSR
published in Taiwanese academia, especially for medical settings, we
were interested in probing the relationship of CSR and financial
performance in medical settings in Taiwan. The results illustrate that:
(1) a time delay effect exists with a lag between CSR effort and its
performance in the hospital foundation, (2) input into the internal
domains of CSR will be helpful to improve employee productivity in
the hospital foundation, and (3) input into the external domains of CSR
will be helpful in improving financial performance in the hospital
foundation. This study overviews CSR in the medical industry in
Taiwan and the relationship of CSR and financial performance.
Discussions of possible implications from the study results are applied
to consult the CSR concept that will be transferred into a business
strategy for the organization manager.
Abstract: This interdisciplinary study is an investigation to evaluate user-interfaces in business administration. The study is going to be implemented on two computerized business administration systems with two distinctive user-interfaces, so that differences between the two systems can be determined. Both systems, a commercial and a prototype developed for the purpose of this study, deal with ordering of supplies, tendering procedures, issuing purchase orders, controlling the movement of the stocks against their actual balances on the shelves and editing them on their tabulations. In the second suggested system, modern computer graphics and multimedia issues were taken into consideration to cover the drawbacks of the first system. To highlight differences between the two investigated systems regarding some chosen standard quality criteria, the study employs various statistical techniques and methods to evaluate the users- interaction with both systems. The study variables are divided into two divisions: independent representing the interfaces of the two systems, and dependent embracing efficiency, effectiveness, satisfaction, error rate etc.
Abstract: Modernizing legacy applications is the key issue facing IT managers today because there's enormous pressure on organizations to change the way they run their business to meet the new requirements. The importance of software maintenance and reengineering is forever increasing. Understanding the architecture of existing legacy applications is the most critical issue for maintenance and reengineering. The artifacts recovery can be facilitated with different recovery approaches, methods and tools. The existing methods provide static and dynamic set of techniques for extracting architectural information, but are not suitable for all users in different domains. This paper presents a simple and lightweight pattern extraction technique to extract different artifacts from legacy systems using regular expression pattern specifications with multiple language support. We used our custom-built tool DRT to recover artifacts from existing system at different levels of abstractions. In order to evaluate our approach a case study is conducted.
Abstract: The world is moving rapidly toward the deployment
of information and communication systems. Nowadays, computing
systems with their fast growth are found everywhere and one of the main challenges for these systems is increasing attacks and security threats against them. Thus, capturing, analyzing and verifying security requirements becomes a very important activity in
development process of computing systems, specially in developing
systems such as banking, military and e-business systems. For
developing every system, a process model which includes a process,
methods and tools is chosen. The Rational Unified Process (RUP) is
one of the most popular and complete process models which is used
by developers in recent years. This process model should be extended to be used in developing secure software systems. In this
paper, the Requirement Discipline of RUP is extended to improve RUP for developing secure software systems. These proposed extensions are adding and integrating a number of Activities, Roles,
and Artifacts to RUP in order to capture, document and model threats
and security requirements of system. These extensions introduce a
group of clear and stepwise activities to developers. By following these activities, developers assure that security requirements are
captured and modeled. These models are used in design, implementation and test activitie
Abstract: Knowledge capabilities are increasingly important for
the innovative technology enterprises to enhance the business
performance in terms of product competitiveness, innovation and
sales. Recognition of the company capability by auditing allows them
to further pursue advancement, strategic planning and hence gain
competitive advantages. This paper attempts to develop an
Organizations- Knowledge Capabilities Assessment (OKCA) method
to assess the knowledge capabilities of technology companies. The
OKCA is a questionnaire-based assessment tool which has been
developed to uncover the impact of various knowledge capabilities on
different organizational performance. The collected data is then
analyzed to find out the crucial elements for different technological
companies. Based on the results, innovative technology enterprises are
able to recognize the direction for further improvement on business
performance and future development plan. External environmental
factors affecting organization performance can be found through the
further analysis of some selected reference companies.
Abstract: We present an implementation of an Online Exhibition System (OES) web service(s) that reflects our experiences with using web service development packages and software process models. The system provides major functionality that exists in similar packages. While developing such a complex web service, we gained insightful experience (i) in the traditional software development processes: waterfall model and evolutionary development and their fitness to web services development, (ii) in the fitness and effectiveness of a major web services development kit.
Abstract: Nowadays predicting political risk level of country
has become a critical issue for investors who intend to achieve
accurate information concerning stability of the business
environments. Since, most of the times investors are layman and
nonprofessional IT personnel; this paper aims to propose a
framework named GECR in order to help nonexpert persons to
discover political risk stability across time based on the political
news and events.
To achieve this goal, the Bayesian Networks approach was
utilized for 186 political news of Pakistan as sample dataset.
Bayesian Networks as an artificial intelligence approach has been
employed in presented framework, since this is a powerful technique
that can be applied to model uncertain domains. The results showed
that our framework along with Bayesian Networks as decision
support tool, predicted the political risk level with a high degree of
accuracy.
Abstract: Because of its global reach, reduction of time
restraints, and ability to reduce costs and increase sales, use of the
Internet, the World Wide Web (WWW), and related technologies
can be a competitive tool in the arsenal of small and medium-sized
enterprises (SMEs). Countries the world over are interested in the
successful adoption of the Internet by SMEs. Because a vast
majority of jobs come from that sector, greater financial success of
SMEs translates into greater job growth and, subsequently, higher
tax revenue to the government. This research investigated the level
of Internet usage for business solutions by small and medium
enterprises in Jordan. Through the survey of a random sample of
100 firms with less than 500 employees and from data obtained
from this survey that formed the basis for our study, we found that
a majority of respondents use the Internet in business activities ,
the adoption of the Internet as a business tool is limited to a
brochure where Web site which primarily provides one way. As
such, there wasn't interactive information about the company and
its products and services.
Abstract: The draft Auckland Unitary Plan outlines the future land used for new housing and businesses with Auckland population growth over the next thirty years. According to Auckland Unitary Plan, over the next 30 years, the population of Auckland is projected to increase by one million, and up to 70% of total new dwellings occur within the existing urban area. Intensification will not only increase the number of median or higher density houses such as terrace house, apartment building, etc. within the existing urban area but also change mean housing design data that can impact building thermal performance under the local climate. Based on mean energy consumption and building design data, and their relationships of a number of Auckland sample houses, this study is to estimate the future mean housing energy consumption associated with the change of mean housing design data and evaluate housing energy efficiency with the Auckland Unitary Plan.
Abstract: Today-s business has inevitably been set in the global supply chain management environment. International transportation has never played such an important role in the global supply chain network, because movement of shipments from one country to another tends to be more frequent than ever before. This paper studies international transportation problems experienced by an international transportation company. Because of the limited fleet capacity, the transportation company has to hire additional trucks from two countries in advance. However, customer-s shipment information is uncertain, and decisions have to be made before accurate information can be obtained. This paper proposes a stochastic mixed 0-1 programming model to solve the international transportation problems under uncertain demand. A series of experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed stochastic model.
Abstract: With the rapid growth in business size, today-s businesses orient Throughout thirty years local, national and international experience in medicine as a medical student, junior doctor and eventually Consultant and Professor in Anaesthesia, Intensive Care and Pain Management, I note significant generalised dissatisfaction among medical students and doctors regarding their medical education and practice. We repeatedly hear complaints from patients about the dysfunctional health care system they are dealing with and subsequently the poor medical service that they are receiving. Medical students are bombarded with lectures, tutorials, clinical rounds and various exams. Clinicians are weighed down with a never-ending array of competing duties. Patients are extremely unhappy about the long waiting lists, loss of their records and the continuous deterioration of the health care service. This problem has been reported in different countries by several authors [1,2,3]. In a trial to solve this dilemma, a genuine idea has been suggested implementing computer technology in medicine [2,3]. Computers in medicine are a medium of international communication of the revolutionary advances being made in the application of the computer to the fields of bioscience and medicine [4,5]. The awareness about using computers in medicine has recently increased all over the world. In Misr University for Science & Technology (MUST), Egypt, medical students are now given hand-held computers (Laptop) with Internet facility making their medical education accessible, convenient and up to date. However, this trial still needs to be validated. Helping the readers to catch up with the on going fast development in this interesting field, the author has decided to continue reviewing the literature, exploring the state-of-art in computer based medicine and up dating the medical professionals especially the local trainee Doctors in Egypt. In part I of this review article we will give a general background discussing the potential use of computer technology in the various aspects of the medical field including education, research, clinical practice and the health care service given to patients. Hope this will help starting changing the culture, promoting the awareness about the importance of implementing information technology (IT) in medicine, which is a field in which such help is needed. An international collaboration is recommended supporting the emerging countries achieving this target.
Abstract: This paper has as its main aim to analyse how
corporate web pages can become an essential tool in order to detect
strategic trends by firms or sectors, and even a primary source for
benchmarking. This technique has made it possible to identify the key
issues in the strategic management of the most excellent large Spanish
firms and also to describe trends in their long-range planning, a way of
working that can be generalised to any country or firm group. More
precisely, two objectives were sought. The first one consisted in showing
the way in which corporate websites make it possible to obtain direct
information about the strategic variables which can define firms. This
tool is dynamic (since web pages are constantly updated) as well as
direct and reliable, since the information comes from the firm itself, not
from comments of third parties (such as journalists, academicians,
consultants...). When this information is analysed for a group of firms,
one can observe their characteristics in terms of both managerial tasks
and business management. As for the second objective, the methodology
proposed served to describe the corporate profile of the large Spanish
enterprises included in the Ibex35 (the Ibex35 or Iberia Index is the
reference index in the Spanish Stock Exchange and gathers periodically
the 35 most outstanding Spanish firms). An attempt is therefore made to
define the long-range planning that would be characteristic of the largest
Spanish firms.
Abstract: Truly successful bloggers, navigating the public to know them, often use their blogs as a way to better communicate with customers. Integrating with marketing tools, storytelling can be regarded as one of the most effective ways that businesses can follow to gain competitive edge. Even though the literature on marketing contains much discussion of traditional vehicles, the issue of business blogs applying storytelling has, as yet, received little attention. In the exploration stage, this paper identifies four storytelling disciplines and then presents a road map to business blogging. This paper also provides a two-path framework for blog storytelling and initiates an issue for further study.
Abstract: The last decade has seen an early majority of people
The last decade, the role of the of the information communication
technologies has increased in improving the social and business life
of people. Today, it is recognized that game could contribute to
enhance virtual rehabilitation by better engaging patients. Our
research study aims to develop a game based system enhancing
cognitive and physical capabilities of elderly people. To this end, the
project aims to develop a low cost hand held system based on
existing game such as Wii, PSP, or Xbox. This paper discusses the
concepts and requirements for developing such game for elderly
people. Based on the requirement elicitation, we intend to develop a
prototype related to sport and dance activities.
Abstract: Computer networks are essential part in computerbased
information systems. The performance of these networks has a
great influence on the whole information system. Measuring the
usability criteria and customers satisfaction on small computer
network is very important. In this article, an effective approach for
measuring the usability of business network in an information system
is introduced. The usability process for networking provides us with a
flexible and a cost-effective way to assess the usability of a network
and its products. In addition, the proposed approach can be used to
certify network product usability late in the development cycle.
Furthermore, it can be used to help in developing usable interfaces
very early in the cycle and to give a way to measure, track, and
improve usability. Moreover, a new approach for fast information
processing over computer networks is presented. The entire data are
collected together in a long vector and then tested as a one input
pattern. Proposed fast time delay neural networks (FTDNNs) use
cross correlation in the frequency domain between the tested data and
the input weights of neural networks. It is proved mathematically and
practically that the number of computation steps required for the
presented time delay neural networks is less than that needed by
conventional time delay neural networks (CTDNNs). Simulation
results using MATLAB confirm the theoretical computations.
Abstract: The aim of this article is to assess the existing
business models used by the banks operating in the CEE countries in
the time period from 2006 till 2011.
In order to obtain research results, the authors performed
qualitative analysis of the scientific literature on bank business
models, which have been grouped into clusters that consist of such
components as: 1) capital and reserves; 2) assets; 3) deposits, and 4)
loans.
In their turn, bank business models have been developed based on
the types of core activities of the banks, and have been divided into
four groups: Wholesale, Investment, Retail and Universal Banks.
Descriptive statistics have been used to analyse the models,
determining mean, minimal and maximal values of constituent
cluster components, as well as standard deviation. The analysis of
the data is based on such bank variable indices as Return on Assets
(ROA) and Return on Equity (ROE).
Abstract: Societal security, continuity scenarios and methodological cycling approach explained in this article. Namely societal security organizational challenges ask implementation of international standards BS 25999-2 & global ISO 22300 which is a family of standards for business continuity management system. Efficient global organization system is distinguished of high entity´s complexity, connectivity & interoperability, having not only cooperative relations in a fact. Competing business have numerous participating ´enemies´, which are in apparent or hidden opponent and antagonistic roles with prosperous organization system, resulting to a crisis scene or even to a battle theatre. Organization business continuity scenarios are necessary for such ´a play´ preparedness, planning, management & overmastering in real environments.
Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to consider the
introduction of online courses to replace the current classroom-based
staff training. The current training is practical, and must be
completed before access to the financial computer system is
authorized. The long term objective is to measure the efficacy,
effectiveness and efficiency of the training, and to establish whether
a transfer of knowledge back to the workplace has occurred. This
paper begins with an overview explaining the importance of staff
training in an evolving, competitive business environment and
defines the problem facing this particular organization. A summary
of the literature review is followed by a brief discussion of the
research methodology and objective. The implementation of the
alpha version of the online course is then described. This paper may
be of interest to those seeking insights into, or new theory regarding,
practical interventions of online learning in the real world.
Abstract: Using a methodology grounded in business process
change theory, we investigate the critical success factors that affect
ERP implementation success in United States and India.
Specifically, we examine the ERP implementation at two case study
companies, one in each country. Our findings suggest that certain
factors that affect the success of ERP implementations are not
culturally bound, whereas some critical success factors depend on the
national culture of the country in which the system is being
implemented. We believe that the understanding of these critical
success factors will deepen the understanding of ERP
implementations and will help avoid implementation mistakes,
thereby increasing the rate of success in culturally different contexts.
Implications of the findings and future research directions for both
academicians and practitioners are also discussed.
Abstract: Business process modeling has become an accepted
means for designing and describing business operations. Thereby,
consistency of business process models, i.e., the absence of modeling
faults, is of upmost importance to organizations. This paper presents
a concept and subsequent implementation for detecting faults in
business process models and for computing a measure of their
consistency. It incorporates not only syntactic consistency but also
semantic consistency, i.e., consistency regarding the meaning of
model elements from a business perspective.