H. R. Rao

The role of service level agreements in relational management of information technology outsourcing: an empirical study

This study extends the view that formal contracts and relational governance function as complements rather than as substitutes. We investigate how specific characteristics of service level agreements (SLAs) impact relational governance in information technology outsourcing relationships. Eleven contractual elements (categorized into three SLA characteristics: foundation, change, and governance characteristics) are hypothesized to act as complements of three relational governance attributes: relational norms, harmonious conflict resolution, and mutual dependence. Data for the study were collected through a survey of South Korean IT executives. Results of the study support the fundamental proposition of complementarity between formal contracts and relational governance, and indicate that well-structured SLAs have significant positive influence on the various aspects of relational governance in IT outsourcing relationships. However, the study also reveals that change characteristics of SLAs may act as a substitute for relational governance as these characteristics were found to dampen the level of trust and commitment through moderation effects. Overall, the findings support the proposition that well-developed SLAs not only provide a way to measure the service providers performance, but also enable effective management of outsourcing engagements through the development of partnership-style relationships with high levels of trust and commitment.

Dynamic profiling of consumers for customized offerings over the Internet: a model and analysis

Abstract Delivery of customized, targeted advertisement messages, and delivery of customized information products and software products to consumers requires effective gathering and analysis of preference information. In this paper, we propose a model for dynamically profiling consumers preferences that is based on the theory of questionnaires. The customization procedure is demonstrated for an example scenario of an informational brokerage where real-time financial, marketing, and company information products are offered to consumers. Simulation results show that the information acquisition and search process exhibits a nonlinear behavior in the information gained and the pattern of information gain is similar irrespective of the number of consumers polled.

Toward an Integration of Agent- and Activity-Centric Approaches in Organizational Process Modeling: Incorporating Incentive Mechanisms

This paper presents an approach to organizational modeling that combines both agent-centric and activity-centric approaches. Activity-centric approaches to process modeling capture the mechanistic components of a process (including aspects of workflow, decision, and information), but agent-centric approaches capture specific aspects of the human component. In this paper, we explore an integrative viewpoint in which the transactional aspects of agent-centric concerns--for example, economic incentives for agents to perform--are integrated with decision and informational aspects of a process. To illustrate issues in this approach, we focus on modeling incentive mechanisms in a specific sales process and present results from an extensive simulation experiment. Our results highlight the importance of considering the effects of incentives when decision and informational aspects of a process undergo changes.

Impact of Mobile Computing Terminals in Police Work

A major metropolitan police department in the Northeast recently began using mobile-computing terminals (MCTs). This research explores how MCTs have improved critical factors that affect the work environment of the officers in the department, particularly related to deterrence and job satisfaction. Amodel for investigation is developed and tested using a survey instrument administered to officers using the MCTs. We find that MCTs have enabled better communication among officers and have increased the availability of information, both of which are found to have a significant positive impact on the officers job satisfaction. Savings in time from plate checks are found to have a significant impact on deterrence. However, though the availability of information from MCTs has a positive impact on deterrence, the relationship is not very significant.

Research Note-Role of Social Media in Social Change: An Analysis of Collective Sense Making During the 2011 Egypt Revolution

This study explores the role of social media in social change by analyzing Twitter data collected during the 2011 Egypt Revolution. Particular attention is paid to the notion of collective sense making, which is considered a critical aspect for the emergence of collective action for social change. We suggest that collective sense making through social media can be conceptualized as human-machine collaborative information processing that involves an interplay of signs, Twitter grammar, humans, and social technologies. We focus on the occurrences of hashtags among a high volume of tweets to study the collective sense-making phenomena of milling and keynoting. A quantitative Markov switching analysis is performed to understand how the hashtag frequencies vary over time, suggesting structural changes that depict the two phenomena. We further explore different hashtags through a qualitative content analysis and find that, although many hashtags were used as symbolic anchors to funnel online users attention to the Egypt Revolution, other hashtags were used as part of tweet sentences to share changing situational information. We suggest that hashtags functioned as a means to collect information and maintain situational awareness during the unstable political situation of the Egypt Revolution.

Message diffusion through social network service: The case of rumor and non-rumor related tweets during Boston bombing 2013

Social Network Services (SNS) such as Twitter play a significant role in reporting media, particularly duringxa0the extreme events. We examined the impact of tweet features on the diffusion of two types of messages during 2013 Boston marathon tragedy—rumor related and non-rumor related (both in the context of the Boston tragedy). Negative binomial analysis revealed that tweet features such as reaction time, number of followers, and usage of hashtag have an impact on tweet message diffusion during the tragedy. The number of followers showedxa0a positive relationship with message diffusion. However, the relationship between tweet reaction time and message diffusion was negative. Finally, tweet messages that did not include hashtags diffused more than messages that contained hashtags. This paper contributes by adapting the innovation diffusion model to explore tweet message diffusion in Twitter space during extreme events.

Information Acquisition Policies for Resource Allocation Among Multiple Agents

This paper investigates a problem of resource allocation, where a manager allocates discrete resources among multiple agents in a team in a socially optimal manner. In making this allocation, the manager needs to understand the preference orders of the agents for the discrete resources. The manager does this by adopting an information acquisition policy. Three different information acquisition policies are investigated here. The trade off between the amount of information elicited and the costs involved are studied for each of the policies.

Matching intermediaries for information goods in the presence of direct search: an examination of switching costs and obsolescence of information

This paper investigates patterns of revenues earned by an intermediary that matches buyers and sellers in the presence of direct search markets. We develop a theoretical structure and a computer simulation model of such a marketplace where vendors are horizontally differentiated, and an intermediary matches clients to the optimal vendor for a fee. The model is applicable to information services such as application service providers (ASPs). The contribution of this paper is the identification of scenarios under which intermediaries that match clients and vendors are likely to be profitable considering switching costs and obsolescence of information.

Competition in Mediation Services: Modeling the Role of Expertise, Satisfaction and Switching Costs

This article analyzes competition among mediation service providers that match clients and vendors in a horizontally differentiated market. This is an issue that is important for decision support of mediators in determining pricing and service strategies. We present a simulation model to simultaneously represent search as well as the behaviors of clients, vendors, and multiple competing mediators. Among our findings: intermediaries find it optimal to offer registration fee incentives and derive revenues from transaction fees from successful matches; as switching costs increase, incumbent utilities increase and entrant utilities decrease; expertise, modeled as the ability of mediators to assess vendor attributes accurately, is a powerful competitive weapon for entrants to erode the incumbent intermediarys first mover advantage. On the other hand, client satisfaction is an instrument for an incumbent intermediary to deter entrance by competitors.

Using social media to study social pheonomena: An example using Twitter data

Twitter is a social networking platform that offers a simple, yet powerful service. The majority of its functionality resides in 140-character-maximum statuses, or ‘tweets’. We are developing a Java application that utilizes the services application programming interfaces (APIs). The purpose is to offer a level of integrated functionality not provided by their website, and to circumvent some of the time constraints of manual analysis. The application provides a convenient way to pull tweets for a particular user or a specified search query into a delimited text document, offering very simple integration with spreadsheet software for analysis. This would be an especially valuable tool for people researching social networking activity, but can also be utilized by anyone to analyze public response to current events or popular culture. An example based on current events is presented.