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The author discusses his thoughts about the benefits of utilizing management science (MS) into high performance computing (HPC) research systems. The article define MS, examines the potential for HPC in solving MS problems, and gives examples including services developed by Bertelsmann Arvato Financial Solutions, the cloud-based software PathWise from Aon, and matching up algorithms in operations research.

The article discusses the use of process mining research to improve business process management (BPM) through event data analysis. According to the article, event logs can be used to identify processes, enhance process models, and check conformance. Topics include the growth of event data through storage capacity technology, location-based services, and cloud computing. The Process Mining Manifesto from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEE) Task Force on Process Mining is mentioned.

The article presents information on a research study which focused on assessing the non-technical job-related skills of information technology (IT) professionals. Defined as soft skills, or practical intelligence, these abilities are generally acquired through on-the-job experience rather than formal instruction. A test for measuring this skill set, called SoftSkills for IT (SSIT) was administered to over 120 IT professionals and undergraduate students. The structure of the test is described, and its results are analyzed.

An analysis of information systems (IS) as an applied discipline is presented. The author reviews how IS has been conceived as growing from other foundational fields. such as computer science, management science, and organization science. A description and analysis of the six major IS journals is presented. According to the author, the article presents the results of research using citation analysis to examine how frequently articles published in IS journals are cited by publications in other disciplines.

The article focuses on the management science of business processes. A description and analysis of the language-action perspective (LAP)-based DEMO methodology is presented. It is the author's view that one of the benefits of having the essential model of an organization at your disposal is that it shows in a very concise form some interesting things about the construction and operation of the organization.

This article focuses on software development by analyzing the ways software developers organize. By taking this social perspective, the article highlights how software production methods, techniques and tools are enmeshed in and enacted through the structures and interactions of the professionals who work together to build software. A social perspective considers the team as the unit of analysis, seeing it as more than the aggregate of individual software developers' attributes and actions. A social perspective contrasts with production-focused views of software development; social action becomes the focal activity, not the by-product of a method's prescription. More common perspectives on software development, such as the Software Engineering Institute's Capability Maturity Model (CMM), focus on the means of production — a techno-social approach. The People-Capability Maturity Model (P-CMM) complements this by explaining how people can best change their behavior to fit the CMM approach. Together, the CMM and PCMM reflect the traditional production first, people second, approach. INSET: Conceptual Bases of the Three Archetypes.

The objective of this study is to find the relationship between personality composition of teams and the team performance in small software project teams. Software projects are plagued with cost and schedule overruns, costing billions of dollars to corporations and governments. One of the main factors contributing to such poor performance is software project team composition. Some of the team-related factors that can affect project performance are the personality composition of members, team leadership, and intrateam communication and coordination. It appears the human aspects of software development are more important than the technological aspects for better performance. In this study, the heterogeneity between the team leader and team members was analyzed. This was done by computing heterogeneity as the absolute difference between the score of the team leader and the average score of the other team members. Two of the personality dimensions- involving social interaction and information gathering were significantly related to team performance.

The article reports that conflicts arise in organizations for a variety of reasons, including scarce resources, interdependent work, differentiated work, competitive reward systems, perceptions of inequity and asymmetrical distribution of power. While conflict does not always produce negative results and can even enrich organizational outcomes, it can certainly disrupt work processes and contribute to poor performance. Software development, like any other work activity, involves many possible sources of conflict that can undermine efficiency. The potential for conflict among software developers and users has been identified. Similarly, conflict can occur within the software development group itself, particularly during the inherently adversarial software testing process. Because conflict often has the potential to interfere with work performance and product quality it is important for both scholars and practitioners to identify its sources in software testing, and to understand its affect on work processes and outcomes.

The article reports that corporate executives are realizing that not only is managing software important, but it is also the essence of their work. For this reason the author conducted an experimental three-day program to teach executives about software. The target audience was executives and senior managers of companies going through a transition from their core businesses to software. There were financial executives, marketing types, hardware and manufacturing people, an occasional techie, and even corporate counsel. The subject of the symposium was this is what you need to know if you are an executive and you find your company is going software. The day program was lecture oriented. The issues discussed were organizational and process issues such as capability models, life cycles, methodologies, software taxonomies, architectures, and so forth. The day was dotted with exercises in thinking and problem solving designed to illustrate the kind of logical reasoning needed to apply to develop and maintain software.

CIOs manage the intensely competitive requests originating from throughout their organizations for increasingly constrained system development resources. At the strategic level, an organization needs new systems that create competitive advantage by adding value to products, reducing costs, or opening new marketing channels. At the tactical and operational levels, it faces steady demand for system change and enhancement to adapt its processes to new environments, products and markets, as well as for improved quality, service and productivity. There is no shortage of new IS project ideas; technology news, maintenance needs, and competitor behavior make that a certainty. Attentive managers find far more potential IS investments, many worthwhile, than can possibly be implemented. Some especially important projects are, however, likely to be hidden in this project idea deluge. Identifying and selecting those with the greatest potential contribution to achieving organizational goals is, consequently, a seemingly intractable task.

It is shown that time-sharing systems may have asymptotic response times whose dependence on the number of active users is not exclusively a function of 'think time' and maximal throughput under heavy load conditions. Two such cases (when there are multiple bottlenecks and when the time-sharing system shares the computer with batch jobs) are examined in detail. These results reduce the estimate of how many terminals may be supported by a given computer system without excessive queueing for resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The independent block structure of regenerative processes and the known convergence rates of the means of ratio estimators are exploited to produce bias-reduced regression-adjusted estimates (rare's) for regenerative simulations. Formal and graphical assessments of the evolution of the distributions of the estimates to normality and symmetry are given. Other graphs show the evolution of the bias in the estimates as well as the bias reduction achieved by the rare estimate. A protocol for guiding the analyst in the interactive and sequential use of the methodology is described. Sample graphs for the output of congested M/G/1 queueing simulations are displayed illustrating the application of the protocol. Empirical sampling tests on the statistical properties of the rare's are also reported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of the mean-squared-error of the sample mean as a criterion for simulation experiments has been suggested in the literature. Interest in this criterion has led to the development of a proposed systematic methodology for obtaining a near optimal mean-squared-error estimator for the mean of a discrete, random event, autocorrelated process which has experienced a transient start-up condition. Application of the methodology to a pilot simulation process provides an experimenter with specific guidance in terms of the number of warm-up observations to delete and the number of simulation replications to conduct. Investigations with simple autoregressive and queueing processes have indicated that the methodology may be applicable to other simulation processes. The methodology may offer a possible alternative to the widely used rules-of-thumb employed by simulation practitioners for specifying simulation model operating conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the progress, obstacles, and opportunities in software engineering economics. There are a number of research topics related to information system and economics including effective use of information technology, and efficient provision of IT resources. Software engineering economics (SEE) spans both these topics. While the economics of computer hardware have been relatively ignored in the management research literature, software has been an entirely different matter. Software costs continue to be significant, and industry's understanding of how to reduce them has improved only very slowly in contrast to hardware. The SEE research commonly has a significant technological component to it, much of the research is focused on evaluating promising new technologies or approaches to software development. Practitioners are most concerned about understanding what aspects of software engineering innovations have worked best and whether they are applicable to their particular situation.

As a tool for self-examination in social context, particularly those at work, virtual organizing requires participants to share in the management of those context. The dynamics of virtual organizing are closely related to self-organizing, in making sense of one's action through elucidation of the experience of the actors themselves-who are best situated for doing so. This way of making sense is akin to the Bayesian approach to decision making in that it relies on the actor's own subjective estimates of probabilities when actuaries are not available to determine them "objectively." Contrary to the built-in myopia characteristic of speculative- and exploitive-minded action geared to relatively short-term benefits, a virtually minded strategy seeks to construct coevolving and lasting relationships over a longer-term horizon. The very logic of virtual organizing drives toward the longer term and toward more responsible relations with the environment. Solidarity with the wider system to which one belongs makes sense right from the start of the process of elaborating action.

The appropriate design of computer-based systems for supporting managers, referred to there as management support systems (MSS), is of central importance in both fundamental research and real-world application. By using a unique integrative approach, the authors developed and deployed a system for supporting managers of consumer products at a large manufacturer and were able to evaluate the system in actual use. The integrative perspective for designing MSS relates the object and mode of decision support required from a MSS to dominant system design characteristics. Three different objects of decision support are emphasized in the research: outcome, process and learning. Three different modes of decision support are considered in the integrative perspective: automate, informate and stimulate. The design characteristics of MSS can be described in terms of Silver's ideas of restrictiveness, guidance and customizability of MSS. Dominant matches between the objects and modes of decision support are mapped on to Silver's characterization of MSS design characteristics in the integrative perspective. The implications of the integrative perspective presented in this research are illustrated through the design of a marketing MSS called Brandframe.

The article focuses on the myth of the 'elevator pitch' in the information technology (IT) sector, which describes short summary that details the value of a product or service. Topics include the effectiveness of elevator pitches in obtaining funding for project development, how to obtain the desired results when giving an elevator pitch, and the importance of communication skills in presenting business plans or ideas. It is noted that those engaging in elevator pitches should be prepared, authentic, specific, and passionate.

The author offers his views on practical approaches to the theoretical estimation of software projects. A model developed by Larry Putnam, Sr. called the Software Lifecycle Model is described. It involves a reciprocal exponent relationship of effort/cost to development time. The model predicts a large increase in cost and effort when a project’s development duration is compressed and, conversely, significant savings obtainable by relaxing a project’s delivery schedule.

The article discusses investments made by organizations in information and communication technology (ICT), proposing 10 design principles used to guide ICT design so that such systems have motivational affordances. A definition of motivational affordances is given which includes the idea that the properties of an object support one's motivational needs. Topics include struggles encountered by ICT development firms in attracting potential consumers, why people avoid using ICT, and an understanding of ICT use behaviors.

This article reports on the importance of information technology (IT) services and infrastructures to modern enterprises. The article explains why traditional solutions for managing and controlling the networked systems and services that sustain them appear to have reached their limits. Management systems do not scale easily, and they can become difficult to configure and use. They struggle to correlate service-level problems with problems in the underlying performance. Also, the authors questioned the ability of existing management methodologies to cope with future enterprise IT infrastructures and services.

Knowledge management has made headway in all fields in recent times and continues to emerge as a pivotal task for organizations to survive in today's competitive marketplace. The surge in interest can be attributed to the realization that organizations must not only exploit tangible resources but also focus on intangibles for effective and efficient attainment of organizational goals. Software engineering is a highly knowledge-intensive domain, in which the keys to success are related to one's experience in one or more of the following: systems design, coding, testing, and implementation. Within each of these domains, there can be many more subdomains. For example, in coding, one can categorize expertise based on the different languages such as C, C++ and Java, or platforms like Unix and Solaris, among others. Many IT and software firms have developed knowledge management systems in an effort to help programmers tap into their peers' experiences and to learn from each other. A vast majority of such systems employ the codification approach, in which a central repository holds knowledge under categories such as programming bugs, quality control reports, new developments and so forth.

This article focuses on a list of conferences related to computer systems. The ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD Conference on Principles of Database Systems is planned for March 29-31, 1982 in Los Angeles, California; The Symposium on Reliability in Distributed Software and Database Systems, to be held July 21-22, 1981, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, will have sessions on robust concurrency control in distributed database management systems; language issues for reliability in distributed systems; The Annual Conference of the Association for the Development of Computer- Based Instructional Systems is designed to provide a setting for both formal and informal sharing of CBI experience, research findings. This meeting is to be held May 10-14, 1982, in Vancouver, British Columbia. An international conference. The Impact of Computerization on Social Science Research, is scheduled for September 14-18. 1981, in Grenoble, France.

Computers in the 1980s had to be user-friendly. Now, it seem they have to positively empower their users. The image of computers empowering people is a potent and appealing one. […]

The solution of separable closed queueing networks requires the evaluation of homogeneous multinomial expressions. The number of terms in those expressions grows combinatorially with the size of the network such that a direct summation may become impractical. An algorithm is given which does not show a combinatorial operation count. The algorithm is based on a generalization of Homer's rule for polynomials. It is also shown how mean queue size and throughput can be obtained at negligible extra cost once the normalization constant is evaluated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]