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In this paper, a Web portal is presented for multicast communication management, providing fully automatic service management with integrated provisioning of hardware equipment. The portal is based on an open and configurable object‐oriented framework, that allows self‐provisioning by the user and the seamless integration with all types of multicast application software. As its topological structure is ideally suited for multicasting, and it allows the accurate control of the transmission bandwidth, the portal focuses currently on satellite as a delivery medium. The software architecture, the implementation, and the application usage of the Web portal for multicast delivery are described.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the technological risks in the context of open source software (OSS) and suggest an integrative OSS risk taxonomy.

The authors conducted an extensive literature review followed by expert interviews and applied the method for taxonomy development.

This research has identified an integrative OSS risk taxonomy composed of 8 categories with 51 risk items.

This taxonomy is a very useful tool for practitioners during the decision-making process when evaluating, assessing and calculating risks related to OSS adoption. Moreover, researchers can use it as a starting point for future studies to better understand the OSS phenomenon.

The purpose of this paper is to verify the moderating effects of school category based on the self-determination theory (SDT) in cloud-based virtual learning environment (VLE) acceptance.

Two phases of national surveys were conducted using a random sampling technique. The research model was tested empirically using 608 samples of primary and secondary school teachers.

The full model supports significant effects of autonomy, competence, and relatedness on trust, knowledge sharing attitude and behavioral intention except the autonomy-attitude and relatedness-behavioral intention relationships. In primary school, 61, 24.1, 52.1, and 41.1 percent of variances whereas, in secondary school, 57.4, 31.5, 48.6, and 37.5 percent of variances in instructional effectiveness, behavioral intention, knowledge sharing attitude, and trust in VLE website were explained. There are significant moderating effects of category of school in all causal relationships except the autonomy-knowledge sharing attitude relationship.

There are several useful theoretical and practical implications for scholars and practitioners including Ministry of Education, FrogAsia, etc.

The findings may enhance education quality for societal change.

Unlike most studies which focused on TAM, UTAUT, etc., this study investigated the effects of SDT on attitude in sharing knowledge, trust in website and instructional effectiveness. Instead of studying gender differences, this study examined the school category differences.

The purpose of this paper is to present the effect of the introduction of cross-functional team (CFT)-based organization, rather than, on planning and performance of OR teams.

In total, two surgical departments of the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center (RUNMC) in the Netherlands were selected to illustrate the effect on performance. Data were available for a total of seven consecutive years from 2005 until 2012 and consisted of 4,046 OR days for surgical Department A and 1,154 OR days for surgical Department B on which, respectively 8,419 and 5,295 surgical cases were performed. The performance indicator “raw utilization” of the two surgical Departments was presented as box-and-whisker plots per year (2005-2011). The relationship between raw utilization (y) and years (x) was analyzed with linear regression analysis, to observe if performance changed over time.

Based on the linear regression analysis, raw utilization of surgical Department A showed a statistically significant increase since 2006. The variation in raw utilization reduced from IQR 33 percent in 2005 to IQR 8 percent in 2011. Surgical Department B showed that raw utilization increased since 2005. The variation in raw utilization reduced from IQR 21 percent in 2005 to IQR 8 percent in 2011.

Hospitals need to improve their productivity and efficiency in response to higher societal demands and rapidly escalating costs. The RUNMC increased their OR performance significantly by introduction of CFT-based organization in the operative process and abandoning the so called functional silos.

The stepwise reduction of variation – a decrease of IQR during the years – indicates an organizational learning effect. This study demonstrates that introducing CFTs improve OR performance by working together as a team.

Our knowledge of why organizations continue to use open source software (OSS) infrastructure technologies is relatively limited, and existing models appear inadequate to explain this continuance phenomenon given that they are set at the individual level and also do not take into account the unique characteristics of OSS. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Using an institutional perspective, this paper posits that coercive (business value of IT) and normative (open source ideology (IDEO)) factors may be credited with sustaining the continued use of OSS technologies. The study argues that organizations that subscribe to IDEO are more likely to continue using OSS technologies. Survey data are collected from organizations that have implemented an OSS infrastructure technology and a moderated multiple regression analysis is performed to test the proposed hypotheses.

In addition to the business value provided by OSS technologies, adherence to IDEO also impacts decisions to continue using those technologies. The results suggest that once an OSS is implemented in an organization, IDEO can enhance organizations’ intentions to continue using such technologies, directly, as well as indirectly, by amplifying the impact of the perceived business value of the technology.

Much of extant literature on continued use focuses on end-user technologies. This paper is one of the first to focus on infrastructure technologies and examine organizations’ intentions to continue using those technologies by developing a parsimonious theory-driven model for examining organizations’ continued use intentions toward infrastructure IT. Additionally, much of open source research to date has been inwardly focused, and this paper is one of few empirical studies to focus on the demand or consumption side of OSS technologies.

As libraries face budget cuts, open source integrated library systems are an attractive alternative to proprietary choices. Even though open source software is free to acquire, administrators must consider factors other than initial purchase price. This study aims to provide direction and context for libraries considering migration to an open source integrated library system.

The comparison is qualitative and uses case studies, license agreements and copyright law, and user manuals and brochures. These comparisons divide into four areas: functions, adoption and technical support, usability, and economics.

Major functions that libraries need in an integrated library system are available for open source software. There are no significant differences in usability between open source and proprietary integrated library systems. Internal IT provides a significant role in open source adoption. The relatively new type of open source software licensing may cause confusion for libraries and software developers.

This study considers initial migrations to open source integrated library systems as a key component in overall software adoption. The study qualitatively examines the migration process comparing extant case studies. In addition, the examination of licensing agreements and copyright as well as a comparative review of essential functions are provided.

Regulation is the tool preferred by policy-makers to manage the quality of residential care for older people. However, it remains unclear which form of regulation is most effective. The residential care sector for older people in Europe offers a unique opportunity to explore this issue as countries vary in how they control quality in the sector. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The study used a comparative approach, collating secondary data from various sources and conducting qualitative comparative analysis on the data.

Three regulatory approaches were in operation – many Northern European countries operate on a self-regulatory basis, and are associated with the highest quality. Many continental countries, the UK and Ireland operate a command-and-control regulatory approach, with a moderate standard of care. Mediterranean and Eastern European countries have limited regulation, with care of a lower standard. However, the type of regulation appears to be a product of the prevailing culture and philosophy of care within each country. Thus, quality outcomes are a measure of financial investment in care.

Consistent calls for command-and-control style regulation may be misguided; high-quality care requires high-public investment and a professional workforce with the freedom to focus on quality improvement mechanisms.

The paper provides a framework for analysing outcomes associated with different types of regulation. While a self-regulatory model is linked with the best outcomes, financial investment and the philosophy of care may be more important factors influencing the quality of care.

The purposes of this paper are: (1) to identify what types of business process operation controllers are discussed in literature and how can they be classified in order to establish the available body of knowledge in the literature, and then, (2) to identify which concepts are relevant for business process operation control and how are these concepts related in order to offer a reference model for assessing how well are control layers enforced in the dynamic stable nature of an enterprise' business processes operation.

One cycle of the circular framework for literature review as proposed by Vom Brocke et al. (2009) is followed. Five stages are comprised: (1) definition of review scope (Section 1 and 2), (2) conceptualization of topic (Section 3), (3) literature search (Section 4), (4) literature analysis and synthesis (Section 5), and (5) definition of a research agenda (Section 6 that also concludes the paper). Vom Brocke, J., Simons, A., Niehaves, B., Niehaves, B., Reimer, K., Plattfaut, R., and Cleven, A. (2009), “Reconstructing the giant: on the importance of rigour in documenting the literature search process”, ECIS 2009 Proceedings, Vol. 161.

Results indicate that (1) many studies exist in the literature, but no integrated knowledge is proposed, hindering the advance of knowledge in this field, (2) a knowledge gap exists between the implemented solutions and the conceptualization needed to generalize the solution to other contexts. Also, the ontology proposed provides a reference model for assessing the maturity of the business process control operation.

The contents contained in the paper needs to be further deepened to include the concepts of “business process management” and “business process mining”, as well as a semantic equivalence study between concepts can integrate better this conceptual framework and identify similarities. Then, the relationship between industries and dynamically stable business processes operation concepts have not yet been fully investigated. Thirdly, the atypical curve of interest that business processes operational control has been receiving in literature is not fully understood.

Some example applications that could benefit from this ontology are (1) security policy for business processes fine grained access control; (2) business processes enforced with decentralized policies, e.g. blockchain; (3) business process compliance and change; or (4) intelligent enterprise decision-making process, e.g. using AI trained neural network to support the human decision to choose if a control actuation is positive or negative instead of relying only on human-based decisions.

We understand that business process operation is a dynamically stable system, where steady motion is achieved with the continuous imposition of actor's actions. Therefore, all the work that contribute to the development of knowledge regarding the actor's actions in their execution environment offer the ability to optimize, and/or reengineering, business processes delivering more social value or better social conditions.

In the best of our knowledge this work is unique in the sense that integrates a set of concepts that is rarely, or never, combined. Table 3 corroborates this result.

The purpose of this paper is to explore a general set of criteria that can be used by librarians and information professionals for the evaluation of citation management tools.

Collection development practices found in the library world are combined with software selection criteria from the corporate sector and applied to the citation management environment. A discussion of these practices identifies general criteria, or best practices, that can be used in the evaluation of various types of citation management tools.

Eight criteria are discussed. Key questions are raised that can assist librarians and information professionals in the evaluation process. Additional resources that may assist with evaluation efforts are highlighted, where applicable.

Existing attempts to evaluate citation management tools have employed an approach centering on the features and functionality of a limited set of tools. While effective, these studies neglect new developments in the citation management environment, run the risk of missing other criteria that may be important to both users and libraries, and have short life‐cycles due to the mutable nature of software updates. This study explores the larger environment in which these tools operate, and develops a macro‐assessment of the field, not tied to update schedules or specific software options.

The performance management process is seen as a closed loop control system which deploys policy and strategy, and obtains feedback from various levels in order to manage the performance of the business. The performance measurement system is the information system which is at the heart of the performance management process and it is of critical importance to the effective and efficient functioning of the performance management system. Research identifies two critical elements with respect to the content and structure of the performance measurement system. These are: integrity and deployment. The viable systems model (VSM) provides a framework for assessing the integrity of the performance measurement system. The reference model developed for integrated performance measurement systems provides a framework against which performance measurement systems can be designed and audited.