Till Haselmann

Towards a Conceptual Model for Trustworthy Skills Profiles in Online Social Networks

For many users online profiles displaying other people’s skills are increasingly important, e.g., when contracting freelancers or finding candidates for a job opening. However, current profiles found in information systems offer either unstructured free text that is hard to handle efficiently or simplistic rating schemes that do not convey meaningful information. In addition, it is unclear how trustworthy the information on the profile is. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to online skills profiles based on users’ confirmations and the SkillRank credibility ranking and describe its prototype implementation. As spadework, we set forth six basic requirements for online skill evaluations which should generally be reflected in corresponding IS design.

EVACS: Economic Value Assessment of Cloud Sourcing by Small and Medium-sized Enterprises

While cloud computing is widely advertised as a “silver bullet” for many IT-related troubles of small and mediumsized enterprises (SMEs) because it can potentially lead to many attractive cost-savings, most enterprises struggle with creating appropriate business cases to support these claims. One major problem is that the effort – and, thus, cost – required to fairly evaluate a cloud sourcing solution is simply too high for a typical SME, partly due to the fact that even appropriate decision processes and assessment methods need to be developed. In this paper, we propose a generalized method to assess the economic value of cloud sourcing called EVACS, that facilitates the identification of valuable cloud sourcing projects for SMEs. We also present a cost-benefit framework that helps speeding up the process of building a detailed business case by outlining relevant decision factors.