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May 2005 - Vol. 48 No. 5

May 2005 issue cover image

Features

Opinion Editorial pointers May 1 2005

Editorial Pointers

IT has truly been the technological savior of the mundane. Over the decades we have handed over countless routine tasks to systems and services at home and at work without complaint or delay. But, of course, our living and working environments are anything but a series of perpetual habits and fixed practices. And building architectures […]
Computing Applications
News News track May 1 2005

News Track

Harvard Business School rejected 119 applicants who accessed a portion of a Web site to learn whether they were accepted to the elite school before official notifications were sent out. USA Today reports the applicants were able to view files at AppyYourself (www.apply-yourself.com), a company that manages Web pages used by students to apply to […]
Computing Applications
Opinion Forum May 1 2005

Forum

The public’s disregard for privacy seals will lead them to a more accurate understanding of the privacy of their data than they could get from the careful study that Trevor Moores’s article "Do Consumers Understand the Role of Privacy Seals in E-Commerce?" (Mar. 2005) presumes they should make. Even the strictest privacy policy is of […]
Computing Applications
Opinion Hot links May 1 2005

Top 10 Downloads from Acm’s Digital Library

Communications of the ACM Volume 48, Number 5 (2005), Pages 21-22 Hot links: Top 10 downloads from ACM’s digital library Diane Crawford Table of Contents Tables Back to Top Tables Table. The Top 10 Most Popular Papers from ACM’s Refereed Journals and Conference Proceedings Downloaded in February 2005 Table. The 10 Most Popular Courses and […]
Computing Applications
Research and Advances Adaptive complex enterprises May 1 2005

Introduction

It is common knowledge that individuals, the communities in which we live, and the organizations we create adapt over time and changing conditions. It is also generally understood that organizations, communities, and individuals are all complex entities. To state that organizations are adaptive complex enterprises (ACE) is neither novel nor new: What is new, however, is that we now have a language and a set of constructs that allow us to formally conceptualize and discuss these concepts. (See the sidebar for a brief discussion of the terms adaptive complex enterprises and complex adaptive systems.)
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Research and Advances Adaptive complex enterprises May 1 2005

Health Care and Services Delivery Systems as Complex Adaptive Systems

Alan Turing and John von Neumann pioneered the study of complex systems. In analyzing feedback processes, they were interested in how complex interacting systems can respond to new information. Among other things, they found that some systems with many interactions among highly differentiated parts can produce surprisingly simple, predictable behavior (such as a programmable mechanical routine or process), while others generate behavior that may be impossible to predict, even though these systems feature simple laws and few actors or agents (such as an evolving living organism).
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Computing Applications
Research and Advances Adaptive complex enterprises May 1 2005

Test Beds For Complex Systems

Global competition requires major manufacturers to increase productivity, quality, and responsiveness while simultaneously decreasing costs and time to market. To achieve these seemingly conflicting requirements, many manufacturers have expanded the outsourcing trends that began in the late 1980s. Now, design, engineering, logistics, as well as production, are outsourced to companies located all over the world.
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Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Research and Advances Adaptive complex enterprises May 1 2005

Fractal Architecture For the Adaptive Complex Enterprise

Today's businesses must continuously adapt to external conditions in accelerated time frames. This requires businesses to shift from strategies that eliminate variation to those that embrace variation and changing conditions. Industrial-age Make-Sell businesses accomplished objectives by steadily eliminating variation. In contrast, today's sense-and-respond (S-R) businesses must often execute by embracing variation and learn to perform given widely varying circumstances [4]. Specifically, the S-R business must adapt to external conditions by managing along the chain: "Sense changing opportunities→Request variation→Product variation→Response process variation→Resource variation and Information variation→Efficient delivery and feedback→Business growth and survival." (Here, the implication symbol "→" reflects cause and effect.) Recognizing that IT holds the promise of enabling the S-R enterprise, transformation is often accompanied by enterprise integration projects but with limited success. Project experiences spanning the past 10 years suggest that IT must first meet key challenges.
Computing Applications
Research and Advances Adaptive complex enterprises May 1 2005

It-Enabled Sense-and-Respond Strategies in Complex Public Organizations

City governments face difficult challenges in serving their increasingly Net-connected constituencies in an environment of change, uncertain demand, and reduced budgets. These conditions require their IT departments to enable governments to adapt to citizen requests in a sense-and-respond (S-R) manner. In this article, the application of S-R concepts is demonstrated by the approaches used in developing an IT strategic plan for Columbus, Ohio. The fractal-based, request-focused strategy used here creates a unified organizational and IT context for connecting the Department of Technology and city government departments to their customers by utilizing an incremental, lean portfolio-management-based action plan and architecture.
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Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Research and Advances May 1 2005

Designing Sticky Knowledge Networks

Much of any organization's experience and expertise remains underused and underexploited simply because it resides not in databases, repositories, or manuals but in the minds of its employees. Attempting to harness such distributed expertise, organizations have begun implementing collaborative knowledge networks---peer-to-peer digital networks connecting individuals with relevant expertise to their peers who need it [10, 11]. Unfortunately, however, successful knowledge networks represent the occasional island dotting a sea of failures. While many organizations are eager adopters of knowledge network systems, individual users frequently abandon them, leaving a trail of million- dollar paperweights. To be self-sustaining, knowledge networks must be sticky, though stickiness is an elusive design objective.
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Architecture and Hardware
Research and Advances May 1 2005

Challenges of Migrating to Agile Methodologies

Software development methodologies are constantly evolving due to changing technologies and new demands from users. Today's dynamic business environment has given rise to emergent organizations that continuously adapt their structures, strategies, and policies to suit the new environment [12]. Such organizations need information systems that constantly evolve to meet their changing requirements---but the traditional, plan-driven software development methodologies lack the flexibility to dynamically adjust the development process.
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Computing Applications
Research and Advances May 1 2005

Business Types, E-Strategies, and Performance

Of the multitude of dot-coms in existence in the 1990s, only a fraction survived the crash of the e-commerce (EC) market in the summer of 2000. These companies must now rediscover the principles that governed businesses prior to the EC era. Dot-coms must be rebuilt and transformed to face the new economy: not only must they devise innovative e-strategies [1], but they must also restructure around new business models. After such reengineering efforts, some dot-coms have steadily recuperated from the debacle, but many more are still struggling.Little research has compared the performance of companies with different business types, including B2B, B2C, and non-EC, and explored their endeavors to continue after the EC crash. In this article we report the results of our investigation of EC companies in the aftermath of the crash, with particular emphasis on their performance as compared to their counterpart non-EC companies, and in light of their EC operations experience. We also identify e-strategies introduced by different companies and evaluated their effectiveness by correlating them with company performance, and examine whether this strategy-performance relationship is contingent upon business type.Our study adopted a three-stage data collection method. The first stage involved an analysis of the annual reports of 103 companies listed in the Growth Enterprise Market (GEM), which was established by the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong in November 1999. In addition, 16 EC companies with similar histories, reputations, and backgrounds were included. Although GEM imposes no restrictions on the nature of an applicant's business, many of its listed companies come from IT or EC-related fields. Classification of EC and non-EC companies was based on the Dow Jones Internet Index, which classifies firms as EC companies if they derive more than 50% of revenue from EC activities. The latest reports of these 119 companies were thoroughly analyzed to derive financial indices of performance.
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Computing Applications
Research and Advances May 1 2005

A Covenant with Transparency: Opening the Black Box of Models

One important ethical aspect of the use of models for decision making is the relative power of the various actors involved in decision support: the modelers, the clients, the users, and those affected by the model. Each has a different stake in the design of decision support models, and the outcome of modeling depends on both the technical attributes of the model and the relationships among the relevant actors. Increasing the transparency of the model can significantly improve these relationships. Here, we explore the importance of transparency in the design and use of decision support models.
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Computing Applications
Research and Advances May 1 2005

The Lowell Database Research Self-Assessment

Database needs are changing, driven by the Internet and increasing amounts of scientific and sensor data. In this article, the authors propose research into several important new directions for database management systems.
Computing Applications
Opinion Inside risks May 1 2005

Risks of Third-Party Data

Recent reports of personal information theft are coming in torrents. Criminals are known to have downloaded the personal credit information of over 145,000 individuals from ChoicePoint’s network. Hackers took over one of the LexisNexis databases, gaining access to personal files of 32,000 people. Bank of America Corp. lost computer data tapes that contained personal information […]
Computing Applications

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