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The case deals with a chain of hospitals, that has grown vary fast in last few years as a result of various acquisitions and new developments. The hospital chain is lagging behind in use of technology. The IT department is inward looking and the focus is more on provide support services rather than strategic orientation. A new CIO takes charge of the IT department and decides to transform IT from playing a support to strategic role. He identifies cloud computing as a tool to take the leap. The case provides an opportunity to discuss the type of service and deployment models of benefits of cloud technology. A rough data to do financial evaluation of cloud technology is presented. Evaluation parameters that may be used to decide on cloud versus in-house technology are also discussed.

Aim of the present monograph is the economic analysis of the role of MNEs regarding globalisation and digital economy and in parallel there is a reference and examination of some legal aspects concerning MNEs, cyberspace and e‐commerce as the means of expression of the digital economy. The whole effort of the author is focused on the examination of various aspects of MNEs and their impact upon globalisation and vice versa and how and if we are moving towards a global digital economy.

Information agility, or informational efficiency, represents the major prerequisite for agile management and means eliminating inefficiencies in accessing, exchanging and disseminating all kinds of information. Presents a framework for implementation of Web technology in enhancing information access for agile management. Web‐to‐host access tools as a specific subset of Web technology are used to improve and ease access to several types of information such as legacy data, messaging system, electronic documents, and business intelligence.

By reviewing different information visualization techniques for securing web information systems, this paper aims to provide a foundation for further studies of the same topic. Another purpose of the paper is to discover directions in which there is a lack of extensive research, thereby encouraging more investigations.

The related techniques are classified first by their locations in the web information systems architecture: client side, server side, and application side. Then the techniques in each category are further classified based on attributes specific to that category.

Although there is much research on information visualization for securing web browser user interface and server side systems, there are very few studies about the same techniques on web application side.

This paper is the first published paper reviewing extensively information visualization techniques for securing web information systems. The classification used here offers a framework for further studies as well as in‐depth investigations.

A general framework for mobile Web services ‐ which are Web services with the ability to migrate from one host to another ‐ is proposed. In this framework, a mobile Web service is composed of a combination of a BPEL process description, service components to be carried, and migration behavior descriptions using simple but expressive rules. The semantics of the descriptions are defined using Mobile Ambients, namely, a formal model of concurrent mobile processes. With this framework, it is thus possible to add or change migration behaviors without having to modify the BPEL process.

Effective management and utilisation of plant history data can considerably improve plant and equipment performance. This rationale underpins statistical and mathematical models for exploiting plant management data more efficiently, but industry has been slow to adopt these models. Reasons proffered for this include: a perception of models being too complex and time consuming; and an inability of their being able to account for dynamism inherent within data sets. To help address this situation, this research developed and tested a web‐based data capture and information management system. Specifically, the system represents integration of a web‐enabled relational database management system (RDBMS) with a model base management system (MBMS). The RDBMS captures historical data from geographically dispersed plant sites, while the MBMS hosts a set of (Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average – ARIMA) time series models to predict plant breakdown. Using a sample of plant history file data, the system and ARIMA predictive capacity were tested. As a measure of model error, the Mean Absolute Deviation (MAD) ranged between 5.34 and 11.07 per cent for the plant items used in the test. The Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) values also showed similar trends, with the prediction model yielding the highest value of 29.79 per cent. The paper concludes with direction for future work, which includes refining the Graphical User Interface (GUI) and developing a Knowledge Based Management System (KBMS) to interface with the RDBMS.

This paper presents a state‐of‐the‐art review of the Web privacy and anonymity enhancing security mechanisms, tools, applications and services, with respect to their architecture, operational principles and vulnerabilities. Furthermore, to facilitate a detailed comparative analysis, the appropriate parameters have been selected and grouped in classes of comparison criteria, in the form of an integrated comparison framework. The main concern during the design of this framework was to cover the confronted security threats, applied technological issues and users' demands satisfaction. GNUnet's Anonymity Protocol (GAP), Freedom, Hordes, Crowds, Onion Routing, Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P), TRUSTe, Lucent Personalized Web Assistant (LPWA), and Anonymizer have been reviewed and compared. The comparative review has clearly highlighted that the pros and cons of each system do not coincide, mainly due to the fact that each one exhibits different design goals and thus adopts dissimilar techniques for protecting privacy and anonymity.

Today, eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is fast emerging as the dominant standard for storing, describing, representing and interchanging data among various enterprises systems and databases in the context of complex web enterprises information systems (EIS). Conversely, for web EIS (such as ecommerce and portals) to be successful, it is important to apply a high level, model driven solutions and meta‐data vocabularies to design and implementation techniques that are capable of handling heterogonous schemas and documents. For this, we need a methodology that provides a higher level of abstraction of the domain in question with rigorously defined standards that are to be more widely understood by all stakeholders of the system. To‐date, UML has proven itself as the language of choice for modeling EIS using OO techniques. With the introduction of XML Schema, which provides rich facilities for constraining and defining enterprise XML content, the combination of UML and XML technologies provide a good platform (and the flexibility) for modeling, designing and representing complex enterprise contents for building successful EIS. In this paper, we show how a layered view model coupled with a proven user interface analysis framework (WUiAM) is utilized in providing architectural construct and abstract website model (called eXtensible Web, xWeb), to model, design and implement simple, usercentred, collaborative websites at varying levels of abstraction. The uniqueness xWeb is that the model data (web user interface definitions, website data descriptions and constraints) and the web content are captured and represented at the conceptual level using views (one model) and can be deployed (multiple platform specific models) using one or more implementation models.

Web hosted project spaces offer dedicated collaboration and information sharing functions to dispersed members of design, engineering and manufacturing teams. During the recent dot.com boom these so‐called ‘e‐Project’ services became increasingly popular in the A/E/C (Architecture, Engineering and Construction) industry. This industry has started to refer to these products as ‘project web sites’. Their basic service component is a web enabled ‘information space’ for building teams offered through an Application Service Provider (ASP) business model, and accessible via an Extranet requiring only a standard web browser. An expanding set of web hosted applications is meanwhile included in most products, e.g. for messaging and calendaring, data and document management, design reviews and project management. This paper shows how the functionality of project web sites can be enriched by adding advanced task coordination features. Such features are especially relevant for design management. In particular, the paper deals with the need to support the formation and coordination of spontaneous short‐lived sub‐teams in the course of a project. A crucial element of these ‘self‐appointed’ teams is the need to establish rapid agreement on a shared coordination template for the execution of the task at hand. It will be demonstrated how task templates for that purpose can be defined and managed. The chosen solution serves as a task sensitive filter to the overwhelming amount of documents stored typically on a project web site. The approach will be demonstrated on a daily exercise in academic environments: the abstract and paper review process in the preparation of a conference.

Web services are going mobile. A mobile enterprise can be established in a cellular network by participating mobile hosts, which act as web service providers, and their clients. Mobile hosts enable seamless integration of user‐specific services to the enterprise, by following web service standards, also on the radio link and via resource constrained smart phones. However, establishing such a mobile enterprise poses several technical challenges, such as the quality of service (QoS), discovery aspects and proper integration solutions, for the network as well as for the mobile phone users. The purpose of this paper is to summarize the challenges and research associated with this domain and with establishing the mobile enterprise.

The paper summarizes the challenges and research in the mobile web services domain, along with a detailed discussion of the developed mobile web service mediation framework (MWSMF). MWSMF is realized based on the enterprise service bus (ESB) technology, as an intermediary between mobile hosts and web service clients. Moreover, to scale the mobile enterprise to the loads possible in cellular networks, some of the components of MWSMF are shifted to the new utility computing paradigm, cloud computing.

From the study it was found that ESB provides a good integration solution for the mobile enterprise research challenges. The detailed analysis of the MWSMF concludes that the mediation framework and its components are horizontally scalable, thus allowing to utilize elasticity of cloud platform to meet load requirements of mobile enterprise in an easy and quick manner.

The study addresses the research with providing services from smart phones and establishing mobile enterprise. The QoS challenges are addressed and the study introduces an integration framework using ESB technology. The porting of MWSMF onto the cloud is also addressed. As an added value, the research serves as a case study for porting enterprise applications to the cloud.