With software projects are becoming increasingly complicated, soft skills such as collaboration, effective communication, rhetoric, socio-cultural, accountabilities and collision resolution in real-life software projects, as well as computer programming are badly required for team members to...

Service systems are often characterized by large components of human work and the need to make decisions based on human performance. Human cognitive limitations and the abilities of computers to compensate led to decision support systems (DSS). While a computerized DSS fits the needs of human...

Long-term service agreements (LTSAs) for the maintenance of capital-intensive equipments like gas turbines, medical equipments, aircraft and locomotive engines, are gaining popularity. A typical LTSA contract, spanning 5-20 years, makes a provider responsible for fully maintaining the...

The availability of e-textbooks is increasing along with the variety of electronic readers. According to the “2010 Horizon Report,†adoption of this technology will be widespread in academia in two to three years as it will “… reduce costs, save students from carrying...

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, such as SAP, feature a rich set of integrated business applications. However, to maximize the long term benefits from ERP implementations, organizations need to careful manage the post-implementation phase and focus on supporting end users to achieve...

Resource Acquisition service is a network-based service that acquires sufficient resources to satisfy the application requirement. Set-top-boxes (STB) are good sources of resource providers delivering this type of service collaboratively. Unfortunately, the accessibility of STBs is controlled by...

Complex service-oriented organizations (such as IT customer service or the hospital emergency) deal with many challenges due to incoming request types that we characterize as non-routine. Each such request reflects significant variations in the environment and consequently requirements, which...

The traceability links existing between a business process and the supporting software systems s is a critical concern for the organizations, as it directly affects their performance. Methodologies and tools are needed for detecting these kinds of relationships and keeping an evidence of the...

The alignment of Business and IT is still an important concern of IT managers. Alignment, as most others organization challenges, is essentially promoted by people. So, adequate people´s incentives should be accordingly designed with that purpose in mind. A framework that enhances alignment...

This paper examines how customers view a set of hybrid services (eleven generic and self-service technologies) in the U.S. and China. The data are collected using questionnaires on location in the U.S. and China and are analyzed using multidimensional scaling. The study indicates that two...