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Current networks are providing plenty of services that users can access and use. These services are more and more pervasive and deployed in different networks distributed across an environment. This raises the problem of managing such environments in order to grant access to services from anywhere and to adapt the environment’s networks to dynamic changes. Also, there is a need of an autonomous behavior to reduce human intervention and assure environment’s consistency. This autonomous and distributed behavior leads to the definition and integration of existing and new technologies to enable autonomous distributed management. This is fulfilled by providing paradigms that bring awareness about the surroundings and enabled tools to manage and adapt the environment’s resources. The main problem is to dynamically provide auto‐configuration of networks to deal with the frequent changes which results from users’ roaming, changing services constraints, and changing services themselves, and adding, upgrading or removing policies. The outcome of these issues is a dynamic system with complex management. Hence, this paper proposes the integration of different techniques to provide an autonomous, distributed, and secure management including auto‐configuration, adaptation, and auto‐protection of pervasive environments. Then, policies control the behavior of the environment, devices configuration and the enforcement of security mechanisms to protect sensitive data. Also, mobile agents are employed to distribute management tasks across the distributed environment. In order to provide auto‐protection capabilities, the autonomous behavior of the environment have to be secured. Actually, this security issue is addressed by defining an agent‐based Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) with X.509 certificates. The agent ensures then that the security functions are applied across all the distributed networks, where specific agents are responsible for conveying necessary information and certificates to local environments. Finally, the paper proposes a semantic‐based privacy management approach using ontologies to decide how privacy information is handled in the environment.

Distributed performance arrangements are increasingly used by organizations to structure dyadic and team interactions. Unfortunately, distributed teams are no panacea. This chapter reviews some of the advantages and disadvantages associated with the geographical and temporal distribution of team members. An extended discussion of the implications of distributed team performance for individual, team, and organizational decision making is provided, with particular attention paid to selected cultural factors. Best practices and key points are advanced for those stakeholders charged with offsetting the performance decrements in decision making that can result from distribution and culture.

Sustainable Accommodation for the New Economy (SANE) is a two‐year EC‐funded research programme considering the combined impact of the new economy on people, process, place and technology to identify new ways of accommodating work. Its focus is on the creation of sustainable, collaborative workplaces for knowledge workers across Europe, encompassing both virtual and physical spaces. The key operational goal of the project is to develop a unified framework for the design of sustainable workplaces in Europe. This multidisciplinary framework will generate designs that will allow distributed organisations to take full advantage of coming advances in location‐independent computing and ubiquitous networking SANE will broaden the range of workplace design parameters to include consideration of degrees of privacy and relations between physical and virtual spaces. By embracing considerations of public and private space, the workspace environment model developed will locate the office environment in the wider context of the sustainable urban development and the regeneration of European cities. This paper describes the work currently being undertaken by the SANE project’s Space Environment Modelling work package, which is led by DEGW. This work package focuses on the architectural aspects of the human environment in organisational settings. Other key theoretical packages are Human Environment Modelling, which examines communications and interaction in physical and virtual environments, and Processes and Tools, which will examine current and likely future technology tools and processes to support the distributed workplace.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the new distributed leadership patterns is an important driver for innovating business model. By synthesizing insights from the dynamic capabilities perspective, it also explores how and when distributed leadership enhances the business model innovation (BMI) by involving strategic flexibility as a mediator and environmental dynamism as important contingency.

A survey via questionnaire was conducted with 262 CEOs and 262 senior managers from Chinese high-tech companies that provided the research data. Structural equation modeling and linear regression analyses were used to test the time-lagged data, and then the main research questions were responded to.

The analysis reveals that distributed leadership has a significant direct influence on BMI, and that distributed leadership also indirectly affects BMI by enhancing strategic flexibility. Environmental dynamism strengthens the positive effect of distributed leadership on BMI under strategic flexibility.

This paper advances and enriches the emerging stream of BMI research. It presents an innovative conceptual analysis of the antecedents of BMI, and it shows a possible solution for BMI that complements extant research that considers which and how the leadership style of the organizations affects the business model change.

To utilize the idle computational resources in a network to collectively solve middle to large problems, this paper aims to propose an integrated distributed computing platform, Java distributed code generating and computing (JDGC).

The proposed JDGC is fully decentralized in that every participating host is identical in function. It allows standard, single machine‐oriented Java programs to be transparently executed in a distributed system. The code generator reduces the communication overhead between runtime objects based on a detailed analysis of the communication affinities between them.

The experimental results show that JDGC can efficiently reduce the execution time of applications by utilizing the networked computational resources.

JDGC releases the developers from any special programming considerations for distributed environment, and solves the portability problem of using system‐specific programming methods.

To report on the work of the SPEIR project and indicate its relevance beyond the Scottish information environment. SPEIR was funded by the Scottish Library and Information Council to identify, research, and develop the elements of an internationally interoperable Scottish Common Information Environment (SCIE) for Library, Museum and Archive domain information services, and to determine the best path for future progress. A key focus was to determine the distributed information infrastructure requirements of a pilot Scottish Cultural Portal being developed in parallel with the SPEIR work, building on existing pilot initiatives such as the CAIRNS distributed catalogue and landscaper, the SCONE collections database, the SCAMP staff portal and an embryonic organisational infrastructure based on the Confederation of Scottish Mini‐cooperatives (CoSMiC).

A series of practical pilots was undertaken. These were underpinned by relevant desk and field research and conducted within an overarching holistic approach to developing the distributed environment.

Key outcomes included the creation of a single upgraded integrated service incorporating an extended distributed catalogue, collections database, and landscaper, the creation of a pilot distributed digital library, the development of open‐URL‐based facilities to permit portals to incorporate “canned searches” of the catalogue, the collections database, the SDDL, and other compatible services, an illustrative pilot Scottish terminology mapping service, and various organisational infrastructure and professional support improvements.

The embryonic technical and organisational infrastructure reported may provide a model for other small countries (or regions within larger countries) seeking a coherent approach to the development of an interoperable information environment.

Pervasive environments are mostly based on the ad hoc networking paradigm and are characterized by ubiquity in both users and devices and artifacts. In these inherently unstable conditions and bearing in mind the resource’s limitations that are attributed to participating devices, the deployment of Knowledge Management techniques is considered complicated due to the particular requirements. Security considerations are also very important since the distribution of knowledge information to multiple locations over a network, poses inherent problems and calls for advanced methods in order to mitigate node misbehaviour and in order to enforce authorized and authenticated access to this information. This paper addresses the issue of secure and distributed knowledge management applications in pervasive environments. We present a prototype implementation after having discussed detailed design principles as far as the communications and the application itself is regarded. Robustness and lightweight implementation are the cornerstones of the proposed solution. The approach we have undertaken makes use of overlay networks to achieve efficiency and performance optimization, exploiting ontologies. The work presented in this paper extends our initial work to tackle this problem, as this was described in (28).

Discusses the change in business continuity planning when centralized mainframe computing environments are replaced by decentralized server/workstation/minicomputer environments. Telecommunications emerges as both the “soft spot” and the major challenge to strategy planners.