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In the UK, the introduction of austerity measures for public services has intensified the thinking around inter-organizational collaboration between emergency services and other public and/or private sector organizations. Theoretically, while collaborative benefits are held up as beacons that drive organizations to participate in inter-organizational arrangements, a high number of such arrangements fail. In this paper, we explored the factors that influenced the collaboration process in the context of developing 'collaborative information infrastructures', from an organizational and collaboration level perspective, via a multiple case study approach. Our findings offer insights into how policymakers and public managers could improve their practices by considering their approach towards, and impact of, these factors when implementing collaborative projects in information technology and information systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effects of New Public Management reforms on the information infrastructure underpinning the work of public service professionals. Focussing on the case of the British National Health Service (NHS), the paper argues that hospital accounting reforms played a significant role in the emergence of standardised models of clinical practice. The paper moreover argues that, under the label 'care pathways', such standardised models of clinical practice became embedded in the information infrastructure of the NHS and concludes by discussing their implications for the work of doctors and hospital accountants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to show how the British Library (BL) is responding to the changing world of publishing through the Digital Library Programme. Design/methodology/approach - The paper is a descriptive review of the factors that led to the BL establishing the Digital Library Programme. The paper describes the goals of the programme, the priorities for the programme, the mechanisms for providing access to digital material acquired by the Library and gives an overview of the approach to ensuring that material stored in the Digital Library System remains permanently accessible. It also gives a brief overview of some of the main challenges that the Programme faces. Findings - The unique position of the BL within the research environment means that there is great benefit to be had in building a digital library to store significant amounts of material even where it is already available elsewhere. The reason for this is the ability of the Library to sustain storage and access over a much longer period than can be achieved by commercial companies. The Library has also built up significant expertise and a world leadership in the field of digital preservation. The use of a programme and project structure to manage the development of the infrastructure, processes and procedures has already shown that it can deliver significant benefit in the changing landscape of digital dissemination of information. The use of an iterative and incremental approach both for the programme as a whole and for projects within the programme has shown significant benefits in allowing the BL to make progress where the end goal is very ambitious and there is no obvious off-the-shelf solution. Practical implications - This may have broad applications for similar complex projects. Originality/value - The BL Digital Library Programme is providing a solution to the acquisition and dissemination of digital material on a larger scale than is common within the library and archiving community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leading industrialized nations are now involved in the full implementation of national information superhighways. Their efforts will depend largely on the roles and levels of involvement of public institutions and how this is perceived and reacted to by the private sector. Through the evolution of eight scenarios of public institution involvement, this paper extrapolates the consequences that each brings about in the development of a national information superhighway. In particular, this paper examines the consequences of the development of an information superhighway for the UK within the context of each scenario and draws comparisons with developments in other countries. Contrary to popular belief, we show that there is no full solution for the shortcomings experienced in the development of the UK’s information superhighway; rather, each scenario offers solutions for a subset of the shortcomings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses legal issues concerning the library and information sector in Great Britain. Statutory Instruments implementing the Act that defines personal data; Changes in the latest version of the Act from its 1984 version; Special provision for data referring to ethnic origin, political opinions and religious beliefs; Major transitional provisions that apply in the second half of 1999.

Discusses legal issues of concern to the library and information sector. European Directive on Data Protection; US White Paper on Intellectual Property and the National Information Infrastructure.

Highway asset management requires capturing the highway's status. However, the onsite survey of the highway is very costly and time-consuming. This paper presents a novel approach for creating the digital twin of a highway using map data. The digital twin consists of primary highway components, including horizontal alignment, vertical alignment, cross-section, lanes and central reserves. It follows the engineering representation of a highway, which has excellent potential for further application in the field. The proposed approach was tested in a section of the A1(M) motorway in the UK. It requires minimum human input and has very high accuracy. Despite many outliers in the collected map data, the average vertical deviation per square metre between the surface of the generated digital twin and the actual data was at the centimetre level. • A systematic approach is proposed for making the digital twin of a highway based on map data and engineering expertise. • Spatial data for creating the digital twin can be extracted from low-resolution online map data using the proposed method. • An algorithm is developed to fit the horizontal and vertical alignment of a highway. • Outliers in the spatial data of a highway can be identified and removed using the proposed method. • Cross-sections and the overall digital twin of a highway are generated considering various types of highway components. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an overview of a study on legislation relevant to electronic commerce activities within the small and medium enterprises in Great Britain. Method used; Legal issues association with Internet domain name ownership; payment system used in electronic commerce; Advertising controls governing electronic commerce transactions.

Background: Star defined infrastructure as something other things "run on"; it consists mainly of "boring things." Building on her classic 1999 paper, and acknowledging contemporary developments in technologies, services, and systems, we developed a new theorization of health information infrastructure with five defining characteristics: (1) a material scaffolding, backgrounded when working and foregrounded upon breakdown; (2) embedded, relational, and emergent; (3) collectively learned, known, and practiced (through technologically-supported cooperative work and organizational routines); (4) patchworked (incrementally built and fixed) and path-dependent (influenced by technical and socio-cultural legacies); and (5) institutionally supported and sustained (eg, embodying standards negotiated and overseen by regulatory and professional bodies).Objective: Our theoretical objective was, in a health care context, to explore what information infrastructure is and how it shapes, supports, and constrains technological innovation. Our empirical objective was to examine the challenges of implementing and scaling up video consultation services.Methods: In this naturalistic case study, we collected a total of 450 hours of ethnographic observations, over 100 interviews, and about 100 local and national documents over 54 months. Sensitized by the characteristics of infrastructure, we sought examples of infrastructural challenges that had slowed implementation and scale-up. We arranged data thematically to gain familiarity before undertaking an analysis informed by strong structuration, neo-institutional, and social practice theories, together with elements taken from the actor-network theory.Results: We documented scale-up challenges at three different sites in our original case study, all of which relate to "boring things": the selection of a platform to support video-mediated consultations, the replacement of desktop computers with virtual desktop infrastructure profiles, and problems with call quality. In a fourth subcase, configuration issues with licensed video-conferencing software limited the spread of the innovation to another UK site. In all four subcases, several features of infrastructure were evident, including: (1) intricacy and lack of dependability of the installed base; (2) interdependencies of technologies, processes, and routines, such that a fix for one problem generated problems elsewhere in the system; (3) the inertia of established routines; (4) the constraining (and, occasionally, enabling) effect of legacy systems; and (5) delays and conflicts relating to clinical quality and safety standards.Conclusions: Innovators and change agents who wish to introduce new technologies in health services and systems should: (1) attend to materiality (eg, expect bugs and breakdowns, and prioritize basic dependability over advanced functionality); (2) take a systemic and relational view of technologies (versus as an isolated tool or function); (3) remember that technology-supported work is cooperative and embedded in organizational routines, which are further embedded in other routines; (4) innovate incrementally, taking account of technological and socio-cultural legacies; (5) consider standards but also where these standards come from and what priorities and interests they represent; and (6) seek to create leeway for these standards to be adapted to different local conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new breed of editors has emerged with the development of web journalism. Tom Whitwell, communities editor of Times Online, is one of them and here describes life in the fast lane of the information super highway. He writes: "Traditional [media] power structures are unlikely to last for very much longer. I've never been a staff newspaper journalist, but I've always understood it to be a hierarchical, politically charged operation, where questions of right and wrong are answered by seniority. The online world is still as political as any office, but there's an elephant in the room that can't be ignored for long: In print, you often have no real idea what sells your newspaper. Online, you know exactly what's selling your site, live, 24 hours a day. So the editor can certainly pay his old school chum to write a jolly column about nothing much in particular. But it will be immediately obvious if nobody much in particular is reading it. Similarly, a youngster toiling in an unfashionable backwater who works hard and promotes his or her stuff online can find an audience. It doesn't matter that it's never promoted on the homepage, because traffic can be found elsewhere - from blogs or news aggregators or Google searches." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the usage of human resource management in electronic commerce firms in Great Britain. The e-commerce approach to people management is popularly believed to be radically new and an innovative way of changing the rules of employment. An exploratory survey data based on a sample of 30 small-medium British e-commerce firms reports the use of employee involvement in decision-making, internal communication, and performance evaluation.

The article discusses the attempts of the British government in developing new, technologically-enabled ways of managing and communicating information through the use of information and communications technologies (ICTs). The author said that most government forms around the world became interested in the potentials of ICTs since the early 1990's to create a modernized system of government. A discussion about the electronic service delivery in Great Britain under the leadership of prime minister Tony Blair is also presented.

Usually, the design of an Autonomous Vehicle (AV) does not take into account traffic rules and so the adoption of these rules can bring some challenges, e.g., how to come up with a Digital Highway Code which captures the proper behaviour of an AV against the traffic rules and at the same time minimises changes to the existing Highway Code? Here, we formally model and implement three Road Junction rules (from the UK Highway Code). We use timed automata to model the system and the MCAPL (Model Checking Agent Programming Language) framework to implement an agent and its environment. We also assess the behaviour of our agent according to the Road Junction rules using a double-level Model Checking technique, i.e., UPPAAL at the design level and AJPF (Agent Java PathFinder) at the development level. We have formally verified 30 properties (18 with UPPAAL and 12 with AJPF), where these properties describe the agent's behaviour against the three Road Junction rules using a simulated traffic scenario, including artefacts like traffic signs and road users. In addition, our approach aims to extract the best from the double-level verification, i.e., using time constraints in UPPAAL timed automata to determine thresholds for the AVs actions and tracing the agent's behaviour by using MCAPL, in a way that one can tell when and how a given Road Junction rule was selected by the agent. This work provides a proof-of-concept for the formal verification of AV behaviour with respect to traffic rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on community learning empowerment and resources, a project led by the City of Bath College in Great Britain. It focuses on the exploitation of advances in information and communications technology (ICT) to improve quality, scale, diversity and economy of access to education and training. It also discusses problems for project management of a telematic world. The aforesaid project is running as a global consortium of interested groups in Austria, Finland, Hong Kong, Ireland, Japan, Romania, Thailand, and the United States. involved. It forms 9 community learning utilities which exploit new ICT to create widespread, affordable access to education and training resources using virtual educational mobility for all who wish to learn, including those whose access is presently disadvantaged by their condition. The article addresses the problems for project management of a telematic world of unavoidably very short time horizons.