Ahmad Kamil Mahmood

The review of approaches to knowledge management system studies

Purpose – This paper reviews the current literature of knowledge management systems (KMS) studies in organizations. The authors systematically review the literature according to the principle of innovation studies approach, i.e. variance and process approaches. The purpose of this paper is to identify the current state of KMS studies in organizations. By doing this, the way is paved for the authors to find the research gaps, which would facilatively suggest the direction for future research. The authors hope that this review will be regarded as a source for those who share mutual interests in KMS research and could stimulate further research being conducted in the area with different approaches in the future.Design/methodology/approach – Journal articles published within the period 2003‐2013 were collected. The articles were sourced mainly from Emerald, Science Direct, IEEE, MIS Quarterly, as well as some other academic databases. The search was conducted using such keywords as “knowledge management syste...

Modeling Context and Exchange Format for Context-Aware Computing

This paper presents modeling concern to construct context data format that is applicable for context-aware computing. The first concern deals with developing abstract model at application entity which is defined independently from presentation entity. Regarding to this matter, the context data format have been constructed as higher and lower abstraction model presented in OWL and XML instance. The second concern deals with mapping lower abstraction model to exchange format. JSON exchange format is proposed in this paper as the alternative to the incumbent XML. The context data format, which is constructed at lower abstraction model, has been transformed to JSON by applying XSLT rule. As a result, JSON exchange format is obviously smaller than XML in term of exchange format size.

E-GOVERNMENT SERVICE QUALITY: A QUALITATIVE EVALUATION IN THE CASE OF SAUDI ARABIA

Government website services comprise awareness programs for their citizens and others, information distribution, and perhaps data collection, online enquiries, and submissions for regulatory or funding purposes. Quality of service is fundamental to public acceptance and use of e‐government websites, although this aspect is frequently overlooked during the design and implementation stages of online public services. Besides transparency, ease of navigation and comprehensive information, these websites require adequate monitoring resources, including targets for responses and reports. The intention of this study is to contribute to the development of e‐government services, and to raise awareness of user attitudes to public websites among researchers, government administrators and service providers, especially in the context of Saudi Arabia. This study explores dimensions that contribute to e‐government service quality, or have the capacity to detract from website support. A qualitative approach through individual interviews was taken that explored four categories of service quality: the system function category included ease of use, and system availability; and the content category included three dimensions: format, information, and personalization. Further, the procedural category comprised privacy and security, credibility, interactivity, and processing time; the citizen support category included responsiveness and contact dimensions. Development of an appropriate quantitative model and instrument is planned to facilitate research into the relationships among the e‐government service quality dimensions and user satisfaction and user trust. Further, it is planned to research various environments and contexts to provide cross‐cultural comparisons to understand e‐governments user behaviors.

A review of e-service quality dimensions in user satisfaction

Quality of e-service is one of the significant factors that play a major role in the success or failure of online organizations. It enhances the competitive advantages of online organization; in addition, it improves the relationships with clients and increases their satisfactions. Measuring online service quality becomes industry or context dependent in which, it may increase the difficulties to constitute a global measure. This paper reviews e-service quality literature in Malaysian educational institutions because it is of great importance in attracting and retaining tuition-based returns for education in Malaysia, which has become an increasingly competitive business.

Feasible Route Determination Using Ant Colony Optimization in Evacuation Planning

The most complex aspect of people movement on emergency condition is how to select the shortest way out from multi exit ways in the multi-floors building. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how an ant colony optimization (ACO) can be used in evacuation planning. Modified ACO applied as the algorithm to determine the feasible route during emergency evacuation. Physical obstacle during building evacuation such as bottleneck or disaster problem has been considered in transitional probability rule of ACO. By creating exit sign (an agent) with ACO as the algorithm, this agent decides the feasible route and guides the occupant during the evacuation. Two scenarios present to observe the performance of two different approaches in making decision during evacuation. When the obstacle appeared, route selection based on ACO algorithm has faster total evacuation time significantly than familiarity of environment exit method.

Software Development Practices and Problems in Malaysian Small and Medium Software Enterprises: A Pilot Study

This paper presents an empirical study that investigates Software Process Improvement (SPI) current practices amongst software development Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Malaysia. The empirical study determines the current practices of adoption of SPI and related problems. Six Malaysian software development SMEs were involved in the empirical study. The results of the study showed that the level of adoption of Software Process Improvement in Malaysian software development SMEs is still very much at the low level. Other organisational, software development and project issues were identified as contributing to the low level of SPI adoption in Malaysia.

Agent-based simulation using prometheus methodology in evacuation planning

Modeling human (agent) in evacuation planning is not just simply as controlling its movement but the challenge is how to quantify some behavior aspects of human as agent flexibility. Prometheus methodology for agent-based simulation has been applied in this paper to develop a simulation for evacuation planning in the building. Interaction and communication during evacuation between agents through protocol and its capabilities showed that the behavior of real human can be presented in a computer simulation. Two scenarios according to evacuation condition has been applied to the system, those are leaving immediately scenario and finding an obstacle scenario. Exit sign has been modified in evacuation system became an agent which ant colony algorithm was embedded on it to determine feasible route during evacuation. A testing to check the consistency of simulation model has been provided using prometheus design tool (PDT).

A review on resource availability prediction methods in volunteer grid computing

Computational grids comprise heterogeneous collections of resources. Resources have varying and unreliable performance because of network bandwidth, system load, network failure, connection between grid resources, tasks running on resources and various other factors. To predict when a new resource will be added or removed is quite difficult. A resource that was available at certain time might not be available in future. The resources administered under different policies in the grid forces resources having different availability properties. It also makes predicting the availability and selection of optimized resources a challenging job. In this paper, an attempt is made to survey few methods for prediction of resource availability in grids.

Development and performance analysis of grid resource allocation methods

A ‘grid’ is an infrastructure for resource sharing. A computational grid has the potential for solving large scale problems using heterogeneous and distributed resources. Resource allocation is a fundamental issue in achieving high performance on computational grids. Many methods have been developed for grid resource allocation. In this paper, we propose a new grid resource allocation method (modified least cost method) that assigns tasks to computing nodes in a way that is close to the optimum. This paper also proposes a linear programming model for grid scheduling and includes a comparative performance analysis of our proposed resource allocation method with other well known methods. To facilitate the research, a software tool has been developed which produces a comprehensive simulation of a number of grid resource allocation methods. The experimental results show that our proposed method yields improvements in terms of performance and results in a lower computational cost.

Performance Management Using Autonomous Control-Based Distributed Coordination Approach in a Volunteer Grid Computing Environment

In volunteer grid environment, it is difficult to fulfill the requirements of all jobs due to increasing demands of resources. A resource requester submits a job, require resources for the job to be completed within deadline and budget if specified any. Whereas resource provider makes use of available resources and wants to utilize resources to maximum. Therefore, satisfying the requirements of both i.e., jobs and resources makes it difficult to manage the performance of a volunteer grid. In performance management, the main objectives include maintaining service level agreements, maximization of resource utilization, meeting job deadline/budget and minimizing the job transfer. In this paper, only the maximization of resource utilization and meeting job deadlines will be addressed for managing the performance of a volunteer grid computing environment. An autonomous approach is introduced that provides dynamic resource allocation for submitted jobs in a volunteer grid environment depending on the availability and demand of resources. Grid resource brokers are considered third party organizations that work as intermediaries between volunteer resource provider and requester. Proposed autonomous approach is developed by utilizing distributed coordination approach for interactive assignment of volunteer resources. The proposed approach is applying distributed coordination approach and giving priority to maximization of volunteer resource usage while completing jobs within deadline.