Search results

This article seeks to look at the need for a library request system that can provide improved relationship management and personalized services, and meets public expectations about advances in technology and self‐service applications. In this case, a homegrown solution fills a need in an efficient, cost‐effective and gratifying manner.

After investigating established reserves systems and finding them lacking in relationship and process management features, the libraries got to the point where library staff started looking for internal solutions to request tracking and workflow issues when a homegrown automated solution was discovered; Library Systems, the libraries' internal technical support unit, had developed a very versatile “Helpdesk” system that tracked the status of computer work and problem requests. This system had been adapted by other libraries and organizations around the country for a similar purpose and provided a simple yet versatile interface that would lend itself well to developing a system for reserve request tracking and process management.

After making use of this system over three terms including a busy Fall 2006, ResDesk has made a huge positive impact on workflow and communication. Instructors can, and do, check the status of their requests at their own discretion resulting in fewer visits from stressed out instructors. The system itself has been phenomenal in managing the request, allowing reserves processing, even though there are more requests than ever, to be more efficient than ever. For comparison, even though the number of requests has steadily increased, the amount of processing time, with the implementation of ResDesk, has steadily decreased.

While there have been many articles published on customer‐relationship management systems, they are firmly entrenched in the business sector and there has been little discussion in library literature about a system that would automate all communications and workflows surrounding interaction with patrons, from request to completion.

The management of autonomous, heterogeneous network resources and services provides new challenges which libraries are now addressing. This paper outlines an approach based on the construction of broker services which mediate access to resources. It outlines a framework – the MODELS Information Architecture – for thinking about the components of broker services and their logical arrangement. It describes several development projects and services which show how brokers are developing. It uses examples drawn from the serials environment to describe some of the issues. Technologists understand that they must build more stable and unobtrusive media. They must establish more coherent contexts into which the technology may disappear.

The purpose of this paper is to implement an activity support system for volunteer fire corps using Web-GIS technology.

In this study, the authors implemented a volunteer fire corps activity support system comprising a dispatch request system, a water sources geographic information system, a fire-vehicle location confirmation system, a route history system and an integrated management system. They implemented this system as a Web application in consideration of responsive design assuming that it is used on mobile terminals.

To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed system, the authors conducted a survey of 18 fire corps volunteers who were asked to evaluate the system for operability, relevance, functionality, usability and effectiveness.

In this research work, the authors implemented the volunteer fire corps activity support system using Web-GIS technology. The authors conducted a questionnaire survey of the volunteer fire corps activity support system, asking 18 fire corps volunteers to evaluate the system for operability, relevance, functionality, usability and effectiveness. The results of the survey indicate an overwhelming positive response to the volunteer fire corps activity support system for all five measures.

Pertinent information sharing across various government agencies, as well as non‐governmental and private organizations, is essential to assess the incident situation, identify the needed resources for emergency response and generate response plans. However, each agency may have incident management systems of its choice with valuable information in its own format, posing difficulty in effective information sharing. Application‐to‐application sharing cross agency boundaries will significantly reduce human efforts and delay in emergency response. Information sharing from disparate systems and organizations, however, requires solving of the interoperability issue. The purpose of this paper is to present the UICDS™‐based resource sharing framework as a step toward addressing the afore‐mentioned challenges.

A prototype middleware system is developed using a standards‐based information sharing infrastructure called UICDS™ (Unified Incident Command and Decision Support™), an initiative led by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology division. This standards‐based middleware, resource management plug‐in utilizes the ontology of organizational structure, workflow activities and resources, and the inference rules to discover and share resource information and interoperability from different incident management applications.

The middleware prototype implementation shows that the UICDS™‐based interoperability between heterogeneous incident management applications is feasible. Specifically, the paper shows that the resource data stored in the Resource Directory Database (RDDB) of the NJ Office of Emergency Management (NJOEM), Hippocrates of the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services (NJDHSS) can be discovered and shared with other incident management systems using the ontology and inference rules.

This study illustrates the possible solutions to the application to application interoperability problem using the DHS initiated interoperability platform called UICDS™.

The resource discovery and emergency response planning can be automated using the incident domain ontology and inference rules to dynamically generate the location‐based incident response workflows.

There are two purposes of this study. First, it aims to discuss some measures managers would take on the basis of an empirical case study – Dell's pricing mistakes on the web site – and find out the underlying motivation regarding consumers' attitude toward Dell. Second, there appears to be a fruitful opportunity to explore whether consumers' requests or different degrees of compensation will have any impact on organizational reputation (intangible assets).

The survey investigates consumers' attitude toward the Dell crisis case, including how and why it affected the reputation of the company. The main questionnaire survey was conducted after the Dell pricing mistakes. In total, 433 samples were found valid and kept for further examination. The study tests the proposed hypotheses by structural equation modeling (SEM).

By taking Dell's pricing mistake on the web site as an example, the study finds that managers sometimes opt for solutions unfavorable to the whole organization, in order to ensure self interest, including over quota coupons to reimburse consumers, which would be harmful to other stakeholders. Managers face not only consumers' interests but also other stakeholders' as well as corporate intangible assets. Also, consumers have different backgrounds and these characteristics will exercise influence on perceived crisis management.

Although the academic literature has given much attention to the internet issues or crisis management, little attention seems to have been paid to the crisis potential coming from the internet. The power of consumers may hugely increase in the internet age and make the crisis graver, because the internet changes the ability of external commentators to make their opinions widely known, and hurts the reputation of corporations more deeply. A major theoretical contribution of this study is comprehension and filling the gaps in the existing literature. Agency theory and stakeholders' view provides a logical explanation of how and why these things happened.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the real estate owner (decision maker) insures being able to make informed decisions and how they differ according to organisational form.

This research is based on an interview study of nineteen firm representatives, six decision makers and thirteen management representatives, all from Swedish commercial real estate sector.

The study concludes that, regardless of organisational setting, the industry has a plan regarding handling information. The decision makers have all secured themselves access to the required/desired information. How this is done and what kind of information it is however differ, if the real estate management is in-house or outsourced. Furthermore, a clear focus on financial and contractual information is evident in both organisational settings.

The research in this paper is limited to Swedish commercial real estate sector.

The insight the paper provides regarding required information can shed light on how information systems are built and how to improve your information sharing.

It provides an insight regarding how the industry, depending on organisation setting, prioritises different information and how the decision maker secures access to it.

The paper aims to provide an overview of the RapidILL requesting system and describes its operation and the benefits derived by its users, including significant cost savings through elimination of various fees, expedited processing, maximum use of a library's own print and electronic journal holdings, and dramatic reductions in the amount of staff time required for processing interlibrary loan requests.

This paper takes the form of a general review and is written by developers with first‐hand knowledge of how the system works.

Libraries participating in RapidILL experience significant savings in both cost and staff time as a result of functionality built into the system.

Over 200 libraries currently use the RapidILL system, both in the USA and beyond its borders.

This paper provides extensive information on the functionality of the RapidILL system but also will be of interest to libraries that use other interlibrary loan systems.

This paper contributes to the literature on supply chain process management by discussing how Industry 4.0 technologies can support process re-engineering in the context of the construction industry.

The paper discusses the impact of Industry 4.0 technologies through an exploratory case study focused on the materials management process, using a coproduction of research approach where the main findings are obtained through the involvement of internal and external process actors.

The results show that the introduction of Industry 4.0 technologies could radically improve process performance, better supporting the execution of activities, increasing the effectiveness of communication between actors and favoring data collection and sharing. These technologies, characterized by the level of risk connected to their implementation, need to be introduced in combination with new organizational mechanisms, which may be beneficial for several supply chain actors.

Through the adoption of a research coproduction methodology, which is not common in the literature, this paper contributes to the ongoing discussion about how Industry 4.0 technologies contribute to process-centric supply chains, by discussing the benefits of these tools from the perspective of process actors.

This paper aims to study the symbolic categorisations management accountants produce. It examines the categories they use to describe their work and analyses the meanings they attach to such categories. This aims at explaining how management accountants can follow a common occupational orientation despite the need to adjust their practices to the specificities of their local and organisational context. The author’s argument is that management accountants build symbolic categories to create a bridge between what they do and who they are. The author further argues that symbolic categories are needed to make sense of a practice in tension between a common aspirational orientation and heterogeneous local contexts.

This paper draws on a multiple case field study conducted by observation and interviews in a range of organisations.

This paper examines the empirical diversity of management accountants’ practices and perceptions through the symbolic categories they produce. The author finds that categorisation work constitutes a central mechanism to build a shared narrative despite heterogeneous situations. The author further shows that through symbolic categorisation work, a variety of activities ranging from bookkeeping through managerial support to hierarchical surveillance and challenge in the name of the shareholder are subsumed under stable labels. This, he argues, serves to mask financial accountability, shareholder orientation and hierarchical control behind a narrative of “support” and “partnership”.

This paper contributes to literature on management accountants’ identity by showing the central role played by symbolic categorisations. It also contributes to literature in accounting more generally by showing how symbolic categorisation work blurs the lines between “operational support” and “shareholder value creation”. The same words are used to refer to activities that managers consider helpful to make operational decisions and other activities that increase shareholder control and surveillance and encourage managers to internalise the frames and objectives of shareholder value creation. Symbolic categories that include hierarchical financial accountability within a narrative of “support” and “partnership” masks “financialisation” behind a rhetoric of “business orientation”.

The aim of the research is to investigate, using a field survey, the concept of underreporting of time (URT), from both an individual and organisational perspective as a defence mechanism for coping with time budget pressure.

Big Four audit partners and seniors are interviewed regarding the factors that motivate staff auditors to engage in manipulation of time records and the consequences of the behaviour for individual auditors and audit firms.

Findings indicate that time record manipulation is not a single type of activity as suggested previously, but includes a variety of behaviours, six of which are identified in the study. Each of these constitutes a very different type of defence mechanism, motivated by different influences and resulting in different outcomes for the individual and the organisation. The firms engage in a defence mechanism characterised by a series of mixed messages to avoid dealing with inherent cost/quality conflicts and elements of this mechanism become embedded in routine activities at different levels in the firms.

The implications for audit firms vary with the type of time record manipulation and future research therefore needs to concentrate on a closer examination of the various practices that make up URT as identified in this study.

The insights provided by the research are used to explain apparently conflicting arguments in the literature and to set out implications for research and practice.