There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques

According to W. Edwards Deming, American companies require nothing less than a transformation of management style and of governmental relations with industry. In Out of the Crisis, originally published in 1982, Deming offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management. Management's failure to plan for the future, he claims, brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but by innovative plans to stay in business, protect investment, ensure future dividends, and provide more jobs through improved product and service. In simple, direct language, he explains the principles of management transformation and how to apply them.

Out of the Crisis

How has Japan become a major economic power, a world leader in the automotive and electronics industries? What is the secret of their success? The consensus has been that, though the Japanese are not particularly innovative, they are exceptionally skilful at imitation, at improving products that already exist. But now two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hiro Takeuchi, turn this conventional wisdom on its head: Japanese firms are successful, they contend, precisely because they are innovative, because they create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. Examining case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, 3M, GE, and the U.S. Marines, this book reveals how Japanese companies translate tacit to explicit knowledge and use it to produce new processes, products, and services.

The knowledge-creating company : how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation

物件導向軟體之架構(Object-Oriented Software Construction)探討

A patient, nowadays, acquires health information from the Web mainly through a “human-to-machine”
communication process with a generic search engine. This, in turn, affects, positively or negatively, his/her
empowerment level and the “human-to-human” communication process that occurs between a patient and a
healthcare professional such as a doctor. A generic communication process can be modelled by considering
its syntactic-technical, semantic-meaning, and pragmatic-effectiveness levels and an efficacious
communication occurs when all the communication levels are fully addressed. In the case of retrieval of health
information from the Web, although a generic search engine is able to work at the syntactic-technical level,
the semantic and pragmatic aspects are left to the user and this can be challenging, especially for elderly
people. This work presents a custom search engine, FACILE, that works at the three communication levels
and allows to overcome the challenges confronted during the search process. A patient can specify his/her
information requirements in a simple way and FACILE will retrieve the “right” amount of Web content in a
language that he/she can easily understand. This facilitates the comprehension of the found information and
positively affects the empowerment process and communication with healthcare professionals.

/pdf/tailored-retrieval-of-health-information-from-the-web-for-6dyoj2575r.pdf

Tailored Retrieval of Health Information from the Web for Facilitating Communication and Empowerment of Elderly People.

Health Information Technology Systems (HITS) are increasingly used to improve the quality of patient care while reducing costs. These systems have been developed in response to the changing models of care to an ongoing relationship between patient and care team, supported by the use of technology due to the increased instance of chronic disease. However, the use of HITS may increase the risk to patient safety and security. While standards can be used to address and manage these risks, significant communication problems exist between experts working in different departments. These departments operate in silos often leading to communication breakdowns. For example, risk management stakeholders who are not clinicians may struggle to understand, define and manage risks associated with these systems when talking to medical professionals as they do not understand medical terminology or the associated care processes. In order to overcome this communication problem, we propose the use of the “Three Amigos” approach together with the use of the SIMPLE tool that has been developed to assist patients in understanding medical terms. This paper examines how the “Three Amigos” approach and the SIMPLE tool can be used to improve estimation of severity of risk by non-clinical risk management stakeholders and provides a practical example of their use in a ten step risk management process.

/pdf/improving-communication-in-risk-management-of-health-2o2gc201cn.pdf

Improving Communication in Risk Management of Health Information Technology Systems by means of Medical Text Simplification

The manufacture of an information product (IP) is akin to the manufacture of a physical product. Current approaches to model such information manufacturing systems (IMS), lack the ability to systematically represent the dynamic changes involved in manufacturing (or creating) an IP. They also have limitations to consistently include aspects of process and information management at an organizational level. This paper aims to address these limitations and presents a modelling approach, the IASDO model. Our work also represents a framework to evaluate the quality of the meta-models for IMS modelling which enable us to compare the IASDO model with current approaches.

/pdf/modelling-information-manufacturing-systems-1jifn4bd85.pdf

Modelling information manufacturing systems

The panel will provide an overview and an analysis of the ongoing joint ACM/AIS IS undergraduate model curriculum revision project, which is proposing significant changes to both curriculum content and structure and the process that is used to develop and maintain IS model curricula The panel members represent universities in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, and thus, the panel creates an excellent opportunity for an in-depth discussion regarding the regional differences in perspectives to curriculum development and the feasibility of a truly global IS model curriculum The panel is structured to encourage active audience participation, and one of its purposes is to solicit feedback that will used to guide the curriculum development effort

/pdf/panel-a-new-global-process-for-revising-and-maintaining-the-1yvs77otqu.pdf

Panel: A New Global Process for Revising and Maintaining the Undergraduate IS Model Curriculum

Despite the dominance of the service sector in the last decades, there is still a need for a strong foundation
on service design and innovation. Little attention has been paid on service modelling, particularly in the
collaboration context. Collaboration is considered as one of the solutions for surviving or sustaining the
business in the high competitive atmosphere. Collaborative services require various service providers
working together according to agreements between them, along with service consumers, in order to coproduce
services. In this paper, we address crucial issues in collaborative services such as collaboration
levels, sharing data and processes due to business interdependencies between service stakeholders.
Subsequently, we propose a model for Collaborative Service Modelling – the COSEMO model, which is
able to cover identified issues. We also apply our proposed model to modelling an example of Travelling
services in order to illustrate the relevance of our modelling approach to the matter in hand.

Markus Helfert

Papers

Tailored Retrieval of Health Information from the Web for Facilitating Communication and Empowerment of Elderly People.

Improving Communication in Risk Management of Health Information Technology Systems by means of Medical Text Simplification

Modelling information manufacturing systems

Panel: A New Global Process for Revising and Maintaining the Undergraduate IS Model Curriculum

MODELLING COLLABORATIVE SERVICES - The COSEMO Model