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Many information systems functions have made the transition from primarily providing their customer with information products to also providing their customers with information services. This change has implications for the way Management Information Systems (MIS)should be organized to best serve their customers. Rather than invent an entirely new approach to service design and management, MIS professionals can learn from the field of Service Management. Studying the techniques and concepts reported in Service Management, MIS professionals will find a wealth of information about improving customer service and satisfaction. This paper presents a framework for the management of information services. The framework adapts the Service Process Matrix and the Service Triad to form a basis for developing MIS architecture in support of service provision. Examples of how these concepts can be applied to MIS are provided throughout the discussion.

Three decades of academic and professional discourse on HR technologies (HRTs) have produced continued disagreement over construct definitions and research streams that are highly fragmented. These realities suggest that greater consistency in meanings is sorely needed if we are to integrate and upgrade knowledge in this area. This chapter draws on the findings of a systematic research review to properly define the content domains of human resource information systems (HRIS), virtual human resources (virtual HR), electronic human resource management (e-HRM), and business-to-employee (B2E) systems. An integrative synthesis was performed on 242 system-level writings that appeared in the literature from 1983 to 2017. The weight of the evidence strongly supports treating HRIS, virtual HR, e-HRM, and B2E systems as independent, complimentary constructs. While the first three comprise a firm’s HRT system, the fourth construct is more appropriately positioned in the business-collaborative system. The sample was further evaluated with an analytic framework to detect patterns of practice in research designs. This revealed that much more attention has been focused on system actions and outcomes than on attitudes and system characteristics. Different units of analysis were well represented aside from trans-organizational studies. Finally, a case is made for better contextualizing HRT research by recognizing differences in assimilation stage, functional penetration, and collective proficiency. These factors are rarely mentioned, let alone studied, raising additional concerns about measurement error. Detailed suggestions are offered on ways to incorporate them. Together, these materials should promote more sophisticated and generalizable assessments of technology, improving our ability to understand its impacts.

The purpose of this study is to describe and interpret the interpersonal and intragroup conflict experiences of staff-level employees and leaders in the medical imaging technology field, working in US tertiary care centers to extract mitigation and management strategies.

A total of 13 medical imaging technologists, who were employed in leadership and staff positions throughout the USA, offered their in-depth accounts of workplace conflict in this interpretive phenomenological investigation.

Conflict avoidance was a predominant conflict management style. This style did little to effectively manage workplace conflict. In some cases, it led to deleterious effects on individuals and organizations and created conflict perpetuation. With proper conflict mitigation and management, the conflict perpetuation cycle can be broken.

Generalization beyond the group being studied is not applicable, as it is not the intent of phenomenological research. Four leaders participated in the research study. To examine this population more completely, a greater sample size is required. This recommendation also applies to the staff technologist roles. Another limitation involved the leader/staff-level representation inequality, as well as the male–female representation. These imbalances made it difficult to effectively make comparisons of the experiences of leaders with staff-level technologists, and males with females.

Offering the medical imaging workforce emotional intelligence training, health-care administrators can invest in their leaders and staff technologists. Medical imaging schools can incorporate emotional intelligence training into their curricula. Clear policies may decrease the ill effects of change when unforeseeable occurrences result in schedule modifications. Making technologists fully aware of who is responsible for shift coverage when these events occur may reduce negative impact. Trainings in organizational change, collaboration or positivity may be warranted, depending on findings of cultural assessments. Team-building events and opportunities for employees to intermingle may also be used to improve a departmental or organizational culture.

Mitigating and managing health-care workplace conflict more effectively may prevent patient harm, thus improving the health of members of society.

According to recent studies, conflict, and the incivility that often accompanies it, has been on the increase in US organizations overall, and in health care specifically. Conflict that perpetuates can adversely affect health-care organizations and its employees. This paper offers mitigation and management strategies to prevent such consequences.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the use of co‐browse in live chat, customers' question types, referral to subject experts, and patrons' usage patterns as experienced in the virtual reference (VR) chat reference services at Texas A&M University Libraries.

Chat transcripts from 2005 to 2007 were sampled and analyzed by peer reviewers. Statistical data in that period were also examined. A set of methods and a pilot study were created to define the measurement components such as question types, expert handling, and co‐browsing.

Co‐browsing is used in 38 percent of the sampled chat sessions. The Texas A&M University live chat service group considers co‐browsing a useful feature. Of questions received on VR, 84 percent are reference questions. Only 8.7 percent of the total questions or 10 percent of the reference questions need to be answered by subject experts. The use of VR increases dramatically in the past two years at the Texas A&M University. The findings also reveal users' logon patterns over weekdays and weekends.

The study contributes and advances understanding in the role VR plays in a large academic library and the role co‐browsing plays in VR services. The study also provides a comprehensive method for transcript and usage data analysis. It is believed that a similar methodology may be replicated elsewhere by other institutions engaging similar services or evaluation.

Tax education, a subset of accounting education formed in the early 1900s, was largely ignored as a discipline until the 1970s. Over time, tax became a more prevalent part of accounting practice and the CPA examination. In 1996, the AICPA developed the Model Tax Curriculum (MTC) to give a practitioner’s perspective on how taxation should be taught in higher education. This chapter provides a history of tax education and the responses of tax educators to the MTC Task Force’s recommendations in 1996 and the revisions in 2007 and 2014. The authors surveyed tax educators five times over 23 years to get a sense of the MTC’s adoption, both in the past and future terms. The authors found that tax educators largely ignored the MTC Task Force’s recommendations. This chapter discusses reasons given by respondents for not following the MTC and offers various strategies the MTC Task Force and others might consider when recommending future tax education reforms.

In this chapter a typology is presented that typically describes strategic patent management practices in four development categories. The underlying framework integrates patent functions with strategic planning attitudes. Policy makers can apply it to survey the actual use of patents in order to identify the potential for improvement in SME-owned patent exploitation. Managers of these organisations can use it to evaluate the current patent management practice for taking the next step towards a more active use of patents. Operationalisation of the framework into a questionnaire is grounded in a pilot study of three biotechnology firms, differing in size and age. The result has consequently been applied in a case study consisting of 16 small-sized biopharmaceutical companies in the Netherlands. After presenting results from this sample of patent management practices, we present our findings and discuss the validity and use of the typology for the above-mentioned purposes.

If confession is good for the soul, this is Crawford's personal revival meeting. Yes, the hardcore text maven and trailing‐edge devotee has gone GUI: most of his home computing now uses a true graphical user interface. The author says that the taste of crow has passed and that the new environment works very well, albeit not without a few frustrations. This article discusses the author's move to Windows and some of the good and bad points of that interface. The author includes some tips on Windows, as seems inevitable for any article on that topic. The author also provides some additional notes related to previous columns, on clip‐art collections and the actual construction of TrueType typefaces. As usual, the article concludes with notes on the recent PC literature.

The purpose of this article is to present an overview of the history and development of transaction log analysis (TLA) in library and information science research. Organizing a literature review of the first twenty‐five years of TLA poses some challenges and requires some decisions. The primary organizing principle could be a strict chronology of the published research, the research questions addressed, the automated information retrieval (IR) systems that generated the data, the results gained, or even the researchers themselves. The group of active transaction log analyzers remains fairly small in number, and researchers who use transaction logs tend to use this method more than once, so tracing the development and refinement of individuals' uses of the methodology could provide insight into the progress of the method as a whole. For example, if we examine how researchers like W. David Penniman, John Tolle, Christine Borgman, Ray Larson, and Micheline Hancock‐Beaulieu have modified their own understandings and applications of the method over time, we may get an accurate sense of the development of all applications.