Freedom of Expression and the Right to Privacy and Ethics in Dialectic of Human Rights in This Complex and Turbulent Society

The article is about human rights freedom of expression, the right to privacy, and ethics. Technological development (internet and social networks) emphasizes the issue of dialectics and poses many challenges. It makes the theoretical review, the history of human rights through and reference documents, an analysis of the concepts of freedom, privacy, and ethics. The internet and social networks pose many problems: digital data, people's tracks, the surveillance of citizens, the social engineering of power, online social networks, e-commerce, spaces of trust, and conflict.

Analyzing Enterprise Attribute-Dependent KPIs/KGIs by Bayesian Network-Leveraging LDA

In product development, key performance indicators (KPIs) and key goal indicators (KGIs) have complex influences on each other. To understand the structure among them, Bayesian network analysis is one of effective methods. However, relationships among KPIs/KGIs often differ in attributes of enterprises, such as business type and annual sales. In this study, the authors incorporate topics obtained via latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) into Bayesian network as nodes. With this “Bayesian network with topic nodes,” how KPIs affect the results of KGIs can be probabilistically inferenced and graphically observed according to attributes of enterprises. Furthermore, by configuring cultural or national differences as topic nodes, the proposed methods are expected to contribute overcoming barriers caused by these differences and accelerating improvement of product development in the global society.

Impact of Project Management on Project Success at Engineering Firms in Kuwait

The aim of the study is to assess the relationship between project management (PM) practices and project success (PS) criteria in engineering firms in Kuwait. As a first step, a comprehensive literature review followed by interviews with CEOs from 10 selected firms and consultations with three experts were conducted to design the research framework. As a result, a research model that consists of PM practices measured by six dimensions (leadership, IT, teamwork, planning, governance, and communication) and PS criteria measured by three dimensions (impact on customers, impact on project team, and business success) were instilled. Based on statistical analysis on the survey responses, it was found that communication and teamwork are the strongest predictors for PS criteria, and other PM dimensions were perceived to be less important. This result is encouraging and comforting as it shows that the team-oriented factors are perceived to be important in the success of projects and implies that having a cohesive team is crucial for managing successful projects.

Competencies Required of Engineering Students Conducting International Projects

Given the importance of students working in international environments, this study identifies the important competencies that engineering students need so that they could work effectively. The list of competencies was identified using a realist synthesis methodology. The context of the research was thirty-seven U.S. students who worked on twenty-two international projects with companies and research centers in India. The outcome was development of multi-media case studies based on the projects. The students spent a semester preparing for the project, eight weeks working on the project, and a semester developing the case studies. Each project was evaluated and students interviewed to identify the competencies that were utilized by the students. Analysis of these evaluations showed that successful projects trained the students to be competent in the technology domain of the project and encouraged them to communicate well with their counterparts.

The Contribution of the Knowledge Areas to Project Success

An increasing number of organizations operate through projects to achieve their strategic objectives. The main objective of this study is to analyse the degree of dissemination of the project management (PM) practices and their contribution to projects success. A survey performed to project managers aims to identify the extent to which the different knowledge areas and their respective PM practices are implemented and linked to projects success. The results achieved underlines that the practices related with cost, time, and scope management are the most well stablished. Furthermore, the study highlighted that other knowledge areas had an effect on projects success. Moreover, the project managers pointed out other less immediately reachable criteria for project success like end-customers and project team satisfaction or fulfilment of organizational objectives. The use of a multidimensional analytical approach to PM makes an important contribution in the analyses of the practices and factors that most contributed to project success.

Best Laptop Model Selection by Applying Integrated AHP-TOPSIS Methodology

The main objective of this research article is to select the best laptop model among six models available in the market. For this analysis, six laptop models are selected from different online shopping websites having different specifications after seeing the customer ratings. After doing some research, it is found that these laptop models are presently in demand and mostly preferred by the customers. So, an initiative is taken to propose the best laptop among these six models by implementing multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methodology. The selection process is done based on seven criteria (i.e., processor, hard disk capacity, operating system, RAM, screen size, brand, color). For this purpose, analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is adopted for calculating the weightages of the criteria, and TOPSIS is used for selecting the best model. A preference ranking order of the six models is also proposed at the end indicating the best model to the worst. From the whole analysis, it is found that Model 4 came out to be the best model followed by Model 5 and Model 3.

Risk Management in Information Systems Projects

Information technologies (IT) and information systems (IS) are the backbone of any developed business, and organizations without them cannot compete. In recent decades, many best practices standards, and guides have been made available to project managers and organizations aimed to improve project management. Unfortunately, IS projects continue to show a poor track record, and problems related to project management performance persists. Risk management has a vital role in this context since it can increase the likelihood and impact of positive events, and decrease the likelihood and impact of adverse events in the project. This article presents the results of an international web-based survey, studying if risk management processes are being implemented consistently in IS project management. The obtained results show low levels of risk management processes implementation and reinforce the idea that “it can be risky not to do risk management,” demanding more research in this area.

From Manufacture to Cognofacture

This paper aims to contribute to developing a new approach related to the viability concept. This paper also demonstrates the relevance of change from the 'object' concept to the concept of 'relation' for organizational design. A system, or a viable unit in a relational sense, cannot be separated from its circumstances: what surrounds it must remain with it. What is referred to as external is not an entity apart from the unit, and, for that reason, the definitions of 'medium' and 'environment' that are being used do not correspond to these criteria. In the present context, the value generation process is mainly located in the strategic role of intangibles; as noted earlier, value propagation necessarily implies the understanding that this process is distanced from traditional physical rules whenever there emerges a relational field that allows its implementation. Emergent design or warp network is fundamentally a relational process developed from co-autonomy upon a heterarchical operational structure.

An Analysis of the Key Success Factors for Multi-Owned Residential Developments in Gaborone

The purpose of this study was to identify, analyze, and interpret key success factors for multi-owned residential developments in Gaborone, Botswana. This was undertaken in order to recognize the specific factors that hinder the success of multi-residential projects and to subsequently develop a model to help developers succeed in these type of development projects. The findings revealed that seven factors were accepted as key to the success of multi-owned residential developments. These key factors are project manager's commitment to meet quality, cost and time, design team experience, contractor's experience, compliance with government laws and regulations, selecting suitable site, health and environmental safety, evaluating and determining the priority to the requirements of the project during procurement. The findings also revealed that the significance of these factors change during each phase of the development process. This paper extends the project success factors literature by identifying the KSFs for a chosen specific project being multi-owned residential developments.

Software Estimation Framework for Packaged Products

Packaged products play a major role in successful implementation of various software projects. Many of the software solutions are built around packaged products. In this paper, the authors propose a novel “software packaged product estimation framework” for an end to end estimation framework for estimating effort for packaged products. The software packaged product estimation framework provides end to end estimation coverage for various project lifecycle stages and supporting activities. The software packaged product estimation framework was used to predict the effort for two projects with MMRE of 0.261 and pred(0.3) of 66.67%.