Ram B. Misra

Value Creation in Virtual Communities: The Case of a Healthcare Web Site

Purpose – With the advent of the internet cafe, chat sessions, instant messengers, special interest e‐groups and now blogs, people do not need to be physically close together to exchange their ideas. The participants can have shared experiences that are instantaneous and pretty much of the same nature that is usually realized by the traditional collection of special interest people in close proximity. The members of these virtual communities share their knowledge, cooperate with each other to solve problems, and feel responsibility for each other. Internet based technologies have been the great enablers of virtual communities. In the high‐involvement healthcare sector, patients are increasingly seeking online advice and information by participating in virtual communities. The purpose of this paper is to understand the process of consumer value creation in virtual communities.Design/methodology/approach – This paper first adopts Cothrels framework for the creation of value in virtual communities followed ...

Motivation of Open Source Developers: Do License Type and Status Hierarchy Matter?

The motivational drivers of open source software developers have been researched by various investigators since about 2000. This work shows that developers are motivated by different extrinsic and intrinsic drivers, among them community aspirations, reciprocity and fairness, creative impulses, and monetary and career ambitions. There has been some work done in studying whether the profile of developer motivations is constant across open source projects or is sensitive to project organizational design. Among the many factors that could influence the mix of motives of OS developers is the license under which the work is performed. Licenses range in openness between those such as the GNU GPL that severely restrict the freedom of developers to mingle their OS code with proprietary code to those such as BSD licenses which allow programmers much greater latitude in integrating open source code with proprietary code. In addition to formal rules, meritocracies emerge to reward effort and performance, and also to direct, coordinate, and control other participants. The authors discuss these variables and how they may be related to motivations.

An integrated approach to the teaching of operations management in a business school

ABSTRACT The authors discuss a curriculum integration effort that a school of business piloted recently. This effort was aimed at integrating the core functions (finance, marketing, management, and operations) so that undergraduate students would better appreciate the full impact of functional decisions on each other and in achieving the corporations business objectives. The authors deployed a webbed integration model in which a business case was used to highlight the impact of a functional decision on the other three functions. The focus of the article is on how this model was implemented in the context of a required introductory course in operations management. The authors also discuss the results of this effort, lessons learned, and the path forward.

Quantifying the Risk of Intellectual Property Loss in Analytics Outsourcing

The safety of a companys secrets and proprietary competitive practices becomes an important concern when the company is involved in outsourcing. This concern becomes even more critical when the company is engaged in analytics outsourcing where the company shares proprietary data about the internal processes. While there is a growing concern about the larger costs and risks of the wholesale outsourcing of analytics functions in the business press, there are no statistics on the risks or a sense of how big they might be. This paper attempts to fill this gap by building a mathematical model of the vendor-client interaction that will allow some baseline quantification of the risks that are inherent in analytics outsourcing. The paper also discusses the implications of these ideas for companies that work with outsourcing vendors and closes with some ideas for further research.

The Use of Outsourcing as a Business Strategy: A Case Study

In this chapter, we discuss how a leading telecommunications software development company went about outsourcing some phases of the system development life cycle (SDLC) of network management systems in order to achieve both the short-term tactical goals as well as the longterm strategic goals. We present a framework consisting of seven factors that should be used by companies using outsourcing as a business strategy. This framework was used to analyze the outsourcing practices used by this company. The framework includes the driving forces for offshore outsourcing, the selection process of outsourcing vendors and the infrastructure (communication links, hardware, software, and organizational structure) that was needed to insure that the outsourced work meets company’s internal quality requirements, which are derived from CMM5 and ISO9001 certifications. We also present the challenges of making these things happen, what worked well, and the lessons learned.

Loop Optic Design Optimization Study

This paper reports the results of a study aimed at understanding the design process for fiber optic systems in subscriber lines, also known as loop network. Since loop spans are typically shorter and traffic volumes lower than interoffice trunks, the required performance level of a fiber optic system is often less than the maximum Obtainable from the technology. This affords us an opportunity to save money by designing a fiber optic system truly tailored to the application. The design problem is approached from an optimization point of view. A nonlinear programming model was formulated and solved for determining the optimal values of fiber attenuation, splicing loss, system gain and operating wavelength. The sensitivity of key parameters has been studied. We show that considerable savings can be realized if the components are selected based on the optimum values given by the model. The cost penalty is also calculated for nonoptimum designs. This study lays the groundwork for developing design techniques to be used by engineers in designing fiber optic systems and also for establishing the technical requirements of various fiber optic system components.