David H. Olsen

Dimensions of Network Security Planning For Web Services

Abstract Web Services technologies are gaining prominence in industry and are displacing established standards such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) for B2B transactions. The highly distributed nature of Web Services, and the tight tie between the network and application layers, creates new vulnerabilities requiring Information Security professionals to re-evaluate their network and application security planning. This paper reviews Web Services technologies, challenges to their implementation, demonstrates nine ways that traditional security best practices are inapplicable to Web Services, and suggests possible solutions to these problems.

Clarifications on the Design of Customer Comment Cards: Question Type, Question Wording, and Writing Space

Comment cards are a common way to obtain timely customer feedback. Prior research has shown, however, that comment cards are often poorly designed. As such, researchers have identified areas where improvements can be made. Despite these efforts, there are at least three issues where additional clarification is warranted; namely, the appropriate types of questions to ask, question wording related to the use of double-barreled questions, and the appropriate amount of writing space for comments. This research note helps clarify these issues by proposing: (a) that the most appropriate questions are those that help quantify the qualitative comments, (b) that not all double-barreled questions are as problematic as some suggest, and (c) that the minimally acceptable amount of space for writing comments is more than previously thought. The proposed clarifications are illustrated using a sample of restaurant comment cards.

Team projects in a Systems Analysis and Design class: elements of success

An essential part of many Systems Analysis and Design capstone courses is the development of operational, meaningful and real-world information systems. The development of such systems typically takes place in a small group setting to realistically simulate the future work environment of Management Information System (MIS) students. We investigated how previous work experience, time spent on the project, project complexity, and the relationships among project team members and between team members and project stakeholders affected the outcome of the system development projects. Our findings indicate that three factors: prior work experience in information technology; experience with project management; the ability to select relatively simple projects positively affected the project outcome. While difficulties among team members showed a negative impact on the outcome of the projects, difficulties in the relationships with the stakeholders and total time spent on the project did not have significant effects.

An empirical analysis of the object-oriented database concurrency control mechanism O 2 O 2

Object-oriented databases are becoming increasingly popular in business. Some areas of research interest include formal object-oriented database models, query optimization, analysis and design techniques, and concurrency control. Many of these issues have been well researched as they pertain to the relational model and to centralized databases. Specifically, many studies have concentrated on relational database concurrency control but few have concentrated on object-oriented database concurrency control. Once a concurrency control mechanism is proposed and implemented, the next phase is to analyze its performance using simulation techniques. This paper includes the simulation study for the object-oriented database concurrency control mechanism named O2C2. Contributions of this study include offering a method of simulating concurrency control in an object-oriented database model. This includes extending prior studies that deal only with reading or writing a single data item without implications to the rest of the database. Specifically, the method of simulating concurrency control in an object-oriented database model is applied to the mechanism O2C2. The simulation demonstrates some intuitive, yet important properties about concurrency control in object-oriented databases. For example, as the mix of transactions progresses from operating mostly with instance objects to operating with more class and method definitions, throughput decreases.