Communications of the ACM
Communications of the ACM
In the Virtual Extension
IT Programs in High Schools: Lessons from the Cisco Networking Academy Program
Alan R. Dennis, Thomas M. Duffy, and Hasan Cakir
The authors studied 5,392 students taking a course from the Cisco Networking Academy at 764 high schools across the U.S. to understand the factors that influenced their achievement and confidence. Surprisingly, school characteristics (inner city vs. suburban, rich vs. poor) had virtually no impact. What mattered most was instruction quality and an individual student's ability, motivation, and, unfortunately, gender. This style of program, with a strong centralized curriculum, local customization, standards-based testing, and strong teacher support overcame the traditional educational barriers to enable each student to rise to his or her own level of ability and motivation.
Creating the Experience Economy in E-Commerce
Wei-Lun Chang, Soe-Tsyr Yuan, and Carol W. Hsu
The potential economic value of experience-oriented offerings has been demonstrated in the physical marketplace. This study suggests the widespread use of the Internet allows the experience economy to be extended to the virtual marketplace. The growing practice of online collaborative design demonstrates the potential for providing the experience economy via the Internet. The authors propose expanding the existing practices by incorporating the concept of collaborative pricing into the design of experience offerings, as demonstrated in their iCare platform. The article is intended to motivate further research into the development of the experience economy in e-commerce.
How Distributed Data Mining Tasks Can Thrive as Knowledge Services
Domenico Talia and Paolo Trunfio
Through a service-oriented approach we can support distributed business intelligence tasks in clouds and grids. Those services can implement all the tasks in data mining and in knowledge discovery processes such as data selection, data analysis, and knowledge representation. The authors explore architectures and services for distributed knowledge discovery such as the Knowledge Grid, the Weka4WS toolkit, and mobile data mining services. The article describes a strategy and a model based on the use of services for the design of distributed knowledge discovery applications and discusses how grid and cloud frameworks can be developed as a collection of services and how they can be used to support knowledge discovery processes using the SOA model.
ERP: Drilling for Profit in the Oil and Gas Industry
Jorge A. Romero, Nirup Menon, Rajiv D. Banker, and Mark Anderson
The article presents research that applies to a new approach toward understanding ERP implementation. Rather than looking at ordinary measures of firm performance, the authors examine strategic performance measures that can only be utilized if one delves into data that is not found on the financial statements. It is one of the first studies to show the sources of profitability after an ERP implementation and will help managers understand the strategic and managerial implications of ERP implementation.
Why Do People Tag? Motivations for Photo Tagging
Oded Nov and Chen Ye
Given the growing popularity of tags as a means of sharing and organizing large amounts of data, it is critical for developers and managers of collaborative content-sharing systems such as Flickr, YouTube, and del.icio.us to understand what motivates users to tag. The authors examine individual-level motivations using a newly developed scale as well as the social presence driver and the number of user photos. The findings suggest that both social presence and individual-level motivation affect users' tagging level.
Using ESI Discovery Teams to Manage Electronic Data Discovery
John C. Ruhnka and John W. Bagby
Many organizations face litigation threats with associated crippling costs, staff-time demands, and adverse financial impacts. "Discovery," the legal and operational process governing the evidentiary use of electronically stored information (ESI)—including email messages—plays a central role in the cost of litigation as well as in potential outcomes. Multidiscipline ESI "discovery teams" containing key IT, legal, and operational players involved in this complex process can more effectively manage the "litigation hold" process, and can better assess the potential costs of alternative strategies in collection, identification, verification, recovery, and production of relevant electronic data sought as evidence.
Application Service Providers: Market and Adoption Decisions
Yurong Yao, Edward Watson, and Beverly K. Kahn
Deciding whether, how, and with whom to outsource an organization's applications is important. Key factors influence the Application Service Provider (ASP) decision-making process and the ultimate organizational success. The authors examine the current ASP market and recommend evaluation criteria by looking at hosting by "Pure ASPs" (small companies who purely provide hosting services) and "ISVs" (independent software vendors, who develop software and host their own applications). These ASPs provide either vertical (within a single industry sector) or horizontal (across industries) applications. Several adoption cases are presented to explain the recommendations.
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