António Trigo

IT Professionals: An Iberian Snapshot

Nowadays, Universities and other Training Institutions need to clearly identify the Information Technology IT skills that companies demand from IT practitioners. This is essential not only for offering appropriate and reliable university degrees, but also to help future IT professionals on where to focus in order to achieve better job positions. In an attempt to address this issue, this study rely on 102 Chief Information Officers, from Iberian large companies, to characterize current IT professionals and what is expected from future hirings. Results revealed that IT Technicians and Senior Analysts are the predominant positions and also that future hiring will request candidates with at least two to five years of work experience. The two most important skills found were core functions at the IT department: business knowledge and user support. In contrast, traditional competences such as web development and management of emerging technologies were less demanded.

Motivations and Trends for IT/IS Adoption: Insights from Portuguese Companies

Over the past few decades, information systems and technologies have taken on a wide variety of roles within organizations, ranging from operational support to the strategic support of the company. Therefore, there have been significant changes in the motives for their adoption that are vital to understand to guarantee that investment is properly managed. With the purpose of identifying and characterizing the motivations currently behind the adoption of information technologies in large Portuguese companies, which systems the companies have been implementing, in which systems they intend to invest in short-term, and what is the current role of information technology within the organization, we carried out a study with the participation of several chief information officers. The findings of this study reveal that the reasons for adoption and the role that information systems and technologies play is evolving in Portuguese companies and that the adoption of certain types of systems like Enterprise Resource Planning systems is now consolidated, whereas the adoption of other systems like Business Intelligence systems should increase significantly in the near future.

Using integrated information systems in supply chain management

The aim of this paper is to empirically test not only the direct effects of information and communication technology (ICT) capabilities and integrated information systems (IS) on firm performance, but also the moderating role of IS integration along the supply chain in the relationship between ICT external and capabilities and business performance. Data collected from 102 large Iberian firms from Spain and Portugal are used to test the research model. The hierarchical multiple regression analysis is employed to test the direct effects and the moderating relationships proposed. Results show that external and internal ICT capabilities are important drivers of firm performance, while merely having integrated IS do not lead to better firm performance. In addition, a moderating effect of IS integration in the relationship between ICT capabilities and business performance is found, although this integration only contributes to firm performance when it is directed to connect with suppliers or customers rather than when integrating the whole supply chain.

I-Competere: Using applied intelligence in search of competency gaps in software project managers

People in software development teams are crucial in order to gain and retain strategic advantage inside a highly competitive market. As a result, human factors have gained attention in the software industry. Software Project Managers are decisive to achieve project success. A competent project manager is capable of solving any problem that an organization may encounter, regardless of its complexity. This paper presents I-Competere which is a tool developed to forecast competence gaps in key management personnel by predicting planning and scheduling competence levels. Based on applied intelligence techniques, I-Competere allows the forecast and anticipation of competence needs thus articulating personnel development tools and techniques. The results of the test, using several artificial neural networks, are more than promising and show prediction accuracy.

Simulation, Games and Challenges: From Schools to Enterprises

In the last decades simulation has been widely used for training and education. Traditionally used on military and medicine education, history shows that analyzing systems through simulation models reveal to be an interesting, safe, few-resources consuming and less disruptive with the real system. Students can experiment and test their knowledge in the simulators, this is, can learn by doing. In order to increase the simulation interactivity and competition spirit, games were added, generating a new concept: simulation games. Business world sees this technique as an opportunity to improve professionals’ skills at low cost. This paper discusses the simulation, games and challenges contribution in schools and enterprises.

A practitioner's roadmap to learning the available tools for Information System Function management

Organisations in the new emerging knowledge society are, now more than ever, becoming increasingly dependent on their Information System Function (ISF), which demands for a renewed attention to IT governance and to the available tools to support the ISF. In this paper, we present a roadmap-based framework that should provide IS managers and practitioners a useful method for not only choosing the appropriate tools to use in certain ISF activities, as well as, to learning the set of tools currently available for the ISF management.

Simulation – Concepts and Applications

Simulation in last decades has been widely used to analyze the impact of different scenarios in several areas like, for instance, health, military, business, and many others. When well used, it is an excellent tool to analyze alternative actions and to anticipate their impact, in order to rationalize the spending of resources. This paper introduces and resumes some of the main concepts of simulation, identifying and describing: systems; models; entities and attributes; resources; contexts of use; and, in particularly, the discrete-event simulation.

Sociotechnical Enterprise Information Systems Design and Integration

As technology continues to grow as an essential component of small and large enterprises, an ever increasing demand is placed on cutting-edge designs for information systems.Sociotechnical Enterprise Information Systems Design and Integration covers multiple systems and developments in design for businesses and enterprises of all sizes. This publication not only highlights the advancing technology and research in this area, but it also proposes strategic approaches to manage risks and detect errors. Researchers, practitioners, and professionals wishing to expand their knowledge on the most up to date information systems and its designs will benefit from this comprehensive compilation of research.

Taxi pick-ups route optimization using genetic algorithms

This paper presents a case study of a taxi drive company whose problem is the pick up passengers more efficiently in order to save time and fuel. The taxi company journey starts and ends in the two near by locations, which can be address as the same location for the problem solving, transforming this problem in a typical Travelling Salesman Problem where the goal is, given a set of cities and roads, to find the best route by which to visit every city and return home. The result of the study is a user-friendly software tool that allows the selection on a map of the pick-up locations of the taxi passengers presenting afterwards in the same map the best route that was computed using a genetic algorithm. The taxi company is currently using the developed software.

Simulation in Information Systems: Potential of the Vulnerability Theory

Systems simulation has been widely used in the last decades in order to analyze the impact of different scenarios in several areas, and its application to information systems in no exception. Analyzing information systems through simulation models is simultaneously much more affordable; it is required a smaller amount of resources and it is less disruptive with the real system. Since information systems are becoming a cornerstone for our society, a failure in these systems can have a huge impact. The theory of vulnerability identifies failures in which small damage can have disproportionate impact consequences in terms of the functionality of the whole system. This paper discusses the use of the theory of vulnerability in information system simulation.