Performance Modeling and Analysis of Surgery Patient Identification Using RFID

This paper proposes a workflow and performance model for surgery patient identification using RFID (Radio Frequency Identification). Certain types of mistakes may be prevented by automatically identifying the patient before surgery. The proposed workflow is designed to ensure that both the correct site and patient are engaged in the surgical process. The performance model can be used to predict patient waiting time and service duration time with RFID implementation. A proof-of-concept system is developed to understand the information flow and to use information in RFID-based patient identification. Performance model indicates the response time to patients can be reduced to 38% after four hours using the proposed RFID based workflow.

Information Technology Service Management and Opportunities for Information Systems Curricula

Historically, information systems (IS) programs have taught two of the three areas of information technology (IT) management: strategy and management, and applications development. Academic programs have ignored the third area, IT operations. IT operations management is becoming increasingly important as it is recognized as consuming as much as 90% of the IT budget and as acquisition of software becomes more prevalent than development of custom applications. Along with the shift of management focus to IT operations, standards such as the IT infrastructure library (ITIL) have been adopted by businesses to guide the development of processes for IT operations that facilitate evolution to IT service management. This shift to servitizing IT management, creates an opportunity for IS programs to align with business practices by innovating in the teaching of IT service management. Several methods of incorporating ITSM material into educational programs are explored.

Staying Competitive in the Political Unrest and Global Financial Crisis

Global competition today is a complex dimension to add in the success of a healthcare organization. Providing state of the art technology along with the manpower and management skills to bridge boundaries and cultures, confronts today’s healthcare organizations with challenges that, while on the surface may appear simple, may also prove to be a bigger challenge to their success and survival than the medical care they are actually providing. This study is a follow up to an earlier study conducted on a major healthcare organization in Thailand posing the question of how the current political unrest in Thailand and the global financial crisis has affected their global competitiveness. An inductive approach was utilized for a method of determining competitiveness. The resulting qualitative analysis of that data addresses issues of threats to maintaining global competitiveness, providing superior quality care with competitive and reasonable pricing of sub-specialty and high acuity services and work effectively through strategic alliances. In the case of the healthcare organization in this study, their global competitiveness is threatened potentially by the global recession and most recently, the political instability in Thailand. Reputation and the ability to provide comfort and hospitality at the same time as providing excellent medical care and facilities give them both economy of scale to provide reasonable pricing and a uniqueness in the medical care provided. This uniqueness and quality in service attracts strategic alliances and allows for retention of competitiveness in global markets.

Modeling and Governance of Procurement as a Service Responsive to Business Events

The procurement as business discipline and function of equipping process has started the process of transformation from an administrative competence and necessity to a strategic capability (Kyte, 2006). To be efficient its processes have to be interoperable in the processing, semantic and technological way with other functions and processes of the business system; end-to-end process integration of the business system should be obtained. It is important to fully understand and document user requirements before development of the procurement (business) process. This results in the need for the development of a defined, articulated, communicated and managed model of procurement process. On the level of conceptual system modeling (business process owner’s perspective) (ZIFA, 2010) this article shapes a new procurement model, in form of business service with appertaining processes, activities and other services necessary forits accomplishment. At logical and physical modeling level (designer’s and builder’s perspective) (ZIFA, 2010) service oriented perspective (SOA) has been considered, as well as Web services as technological concept for the implementation of the shaped procurement service model at the conceptual level of the system. Application of the shaped model requires organizational, process and system changes of the business system, that is, procurement function must develop the culture of service provider, avoiding the role of corporate purchasing controller. Event-Driven Business Process Management (EDBPM) is nowadays an enhancement of BPM by new concepts e.g. Event Driven Architecture (EDA). In this paper The position and the role of business service modeling within entire business process management (BPM) discipline has been established as well.

Customer Perceived Value of Travel and Tourism Web Sites

The continuing development and growth of the Internet imply that business and customers perceive that the Internet provides them with some kind of value. The Internet has also seen an increasing importance of user-generated content and utilisation of the Internet as a social medium often referred to as the Web 2.0. In this study the concept of customer value, based on the typology of consumer value (Holbrook, 1994; 1999) and the value hierarchy model (Woodruff & Gardial, 1996; Woodruff, 1997), is used to identify dimensions and expressions of what customer-perceived value is in travel and tourism web sites and how it is created. Moderately structured in-depth interviews are used to collect data. In the analysis connections between different types of value are presented and the lack of certain types of value is discussed.

Online Services Delivered by NTO Portals

This study compares the online services currently delivered by the official National Tourism Organizations (NTO) portals of the 25 European Union states, to assess their capability in evolving into powerful marketing communication tools. A conceptual framework that identifies 129 online service quality attributes is developed based on the 2QCV3Q model (Mich et al., 2003) and on four different perspectives: marketing, customer, technical and information for the destination (So and Morrison, 2004). The 25 portals are compared by means of content analysis. Our rankings provide a first time assessment of the NTO online offerings and indicate high variability in their performance. Surprisingly, Greece and Italy, two of the most popular tourism destinations, underperformed with respect to all four perspectives examined. We provide out-of-sample evidence that affluence levels explain the variation in the observed scores, while e-readiness, popularity of tourism destination and cultural richness are not statistically significant.

Access Control Method with XML Databases

XML documents usually contain private information that cannot be shared by every user communities. It is widely used in web environment. XML database is becoming increasingly important since it consists of XML documents. Several applications for supporting selective access to data are available over the web. Usage control has been considered as the next generation access control model with distinguishing properties of decision continuity. It has been proven efficient to improve security administration with flexible authorization management. Object-oriented database systems represent complex data structure and XML databases may be stored in the objects-oriented database system. Therefore authorization models for XML databases could be used the same the models as object-oriented databases. In this paper, we propose usage control models to access XML databases and compare with an authorization model designed for object-oriented databases. We have analysed the characteristics of various access authorizations and presented detailed models for different kinds of authorizations. Finally, comparisons with related works are analysed.

Service Science, Management, Engineering, and Design (SSMED)

The growth of the global service economy has led to a dramatic increase in our daily interactions with highly specialized service systems. Service (or value-cocreation) interactions are both frequent and diverse, and may include retail, financial, healthcare, education, on-line, communications, technical support, entertainment, transportation, legal, professional, government, or many other types of specialized interactions. And yet surprisingly few students graduating from universities have studied anything about service or service systems. Service Science, Management, Engineering, and Design (SSMED), or service science for short, is an emerging discipline aimed at understanding service and innovating service systems. This article sketches an outline and provides an extensive, yet preliminary, set of references to provoke discussions about the interdisciplinary nature of SSMED. One difficult challenge remaining is to integrate multiple disciplines to create a new and unique service science.

A Survey of Development Methods for Semantic Web Service Systems

Semantic web services (SWS) hold the promise of enabling dynamic discovery of candidate web services fitting a particular specified need. One interesting question is what impact this will have on software and systems engineering methods – will mainstream methods like RUP still be suitable, or will new or adapted methods be needed? This article surveys the state-of-the-art in methods specifically tailored for the engineering of SWS systems, looking at development methods trying to cover the entire lifecycle as well as methods covering only one or two phases. Some of the surveyed methods are specifically meant to deal with semantics, others are for the engineering of service-oriented systems in general. The survey reveals that there are many proposals being made in this area, some extensions of mainstream methods like RUP, others more experimental

A Value-Satisfaction Taxonomy of IS Effectiveness (VSTISE)

Information Systems (IS) effectiveness has been studied over the past three decades, with user satisfaction utilized as a key measure. However, very little attention has been given to the role of user-perceived cognitive value of IS in measuring the effectiveness of such systems. Therefore, this article defines and articulates user-perceived value of IS as an important construct for IS research, not from the financial or ‘net benefit’ perspective to the organization, rather from the cognitive perspective. Following literature review, a new taxonomy of IS effectiveness, Value-Satisfaction Taxonomy of IS Effectiveness (VSTISE), is presented. The VSTISE posits four quadrants to indicate level of user-perceived IS effectiveness: improvement, effective, misleading, and ineffective. A case study using the proposed VSTISE is discussed. Results based on the 192 responses identify several problematic system characteristics that warrant additional investigation for their limited IS effectiveness. Finally, recommendations for research and practice are provided.