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

Data Quality Problems and Proactiv Data Quality Management in Data-Warehouse-Systems

Information quality (IQ) has become a critical concern in today’s organisations. Although recent studies of information systems indicate an increasing importance of IQ, foremost research is still limited. Indeed, little is known about the impact of various design decisions on IQ. Recent research shows that security measures are increasingly important for any information system; however security measures are often introduced without considering the effect on IQ. At the same time, literature provides us with indications that trade-offs between various IQ dimensions exist. In this article we aim to investigate how security measures impact on different IQ dimensions. We carried out an experiment, which indicates that security measures have a significant effect on timeliness, whereas other dimensions are not particularly influenced. This observation led us to the proposal of costbenefit considerations, an important aspect for IQ management. The study is valuable for both research and practitioners. Further research studies can build on our observations and extend the research. Practitioners are provided with arguments for considering IQ trade-offs in relation to security measures.

Analysing the effect of security on information quality dimensions

In Design Science Research (DSR), evaluation of research outputs in form of design artifacts has been discussed in numerous publications. Many researchers have emphasised the criteria of utility for design artifacts, whereas recent approaches have extended this view to other criteria such as efficiency, consistency, accuracy, performance and reliability to mention a few. In this paper we revisit the evaluation discussion in design science and describe a practical oriented evaluation framework. In order to incorporate the evaluation along ongoing de-sign cycles, we propose to build on work related to semiotic and information quality. We ar-gue that design science research is usually complex and requires a more detailed evaluation approach. We review literature and follow a semiotic framework for managing knowledge in complex environments. Together with well established information quality criteria we demonstrate that the proposed framework can help to provide a practical evaluation approach within a complex design environment. The framework was developed within the context of a novel IT Management model. We describe its development during the creation of the maturity model for Sustainable Information and Communication Technology (ICT) called the SICT-Capability Maturity Framework (SICT-CMF). The context was selected as it is particular interesting with design artifacts created within an open and complex innovation community. The research acknowledges the importance of the utility criteria, but also includes other criteria such as artifact quality, consistency and accuracy in form of a more differentiated view of design science evaluation.

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The case for design science utility and quality - Evaluation of design science artifact within the sustainable ICT capability maturity framework

In an age dominated by information, information quality (IQ) is one of the most important factors to consider for obtaining competitive advantages The general approach to the study of IQ has offered numerous management approaches, IQ frameworks and list of IQ criteria There are many IQ measures proposed for several application domains; however organizations still are challenged to apply IQ frameworks and measurement approaches within a specific context An analysis of related literature reveals that most approaches are context dependent, although the contextual dimension is usually not represented in IQ frameworks With this paper we aim to address this limitation and extend current work on IQ frameworks We base our research on the theoretical concept of semiotics with emphasizes on pragmatics Subsequently we propose a context-aware IQ framework that can be applied in various contexts Our framework is applied in an experimental setting that shows that context is an important consideration for IQ assessment Our result can be used in further research studies or can assist practitioners to develop suitable IQ measures Based on these results we aim to develop a context-aware IQ measurement tool

A Context Aware Information Quality Framework

There is a significant challenge in smart cities implementations One challenge is to align smart city strategies with the impact on quality of life Stakeholders’ concerns are multiple and diverse, and there is a high interdependency and heterogeneity of technologies and solutions To tackle this challenge, researchers have suggested to view cities as enterprises and apply an Enterprise Architecture (EA) approach This approach specifies core requirements on business, information, and technology domains, which are essential to model architecture components and to establish relations between these domains Existing smart cities frameworks describe different components and domains However, the main domain requirements and the relations between them are still missing This paper identifies essential requirements of enterprise architecture in smart cities These requirements will be used to review and compare current smart city frameworks

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Markus Helfert

Papers

Data Quality Problems and Proactiv Data Quality Management in Data-Warehouse-Systems

Analysing the effect of security on information quality dimensions

The case for design science utility and quality - Evaluation of design science artifact within the sustainable ICT capability maturity framework

A Context Aware Information Quality Framework

Cities as Enterprises: A Comparison of Smart City Frameworks Based on Enterprise Architecture Requirements