Vladislav V. Fomin

Exploring the Suitability of IS Security Management Standards for SMEs

In this paper we examine the adequacy of IS security standards to the needs of SMEs. Using the findings of literature review, we identify general criticism for the security standards. Further, we benchmark the recently published ISO 27001 IS security standard to ISO 9000 standard - a similar standard with a 20 years history - to develop expectations of how the future adoption of the recently introduced ISO 27001 standard can be fostered. We suggest, among other, that the legislative environment can play a crucial role for further growth of security standards adoption.

Government coordination of conflicting interests in standardisation: case studies of indigenous ICT standards in China and South Korea

An increasing number of locally developed technologies have been globalising, and latecomers like China or South Korea are active in setting their national technology as international standards. This study presents five cases of information and communications technology (ICT) standardisation by China and South Korea and examines their promotion of indigenous technologies as international standards. International standardisation involves complicated networks of domestic and global stakeholders with different interests. Good coordination is therefore required. We identify differences and similarities among the cases and discuss implications. From the case studies, we find that coordination with foreign players is more critical than coordination with domestic players in determining the path and consequences of standardisation projects. Our analysis of the two countries’ standardisation efforts explores lessons to policymakers and firms in other latecomer countries in respect to promoting local technologies into the global market.

Indigenous standard development in the presence of dominant international standards: the case of the AVS standard in China

Standards are ubiquitous, affecting the lives and business of citizens, companies and governments in a multitude of ways. As governments around the world realised the economic consequences stemming from standardisation, newcomers to the international standardisation arena have found themselves at a disadvantage owing to a lack of expertise and skills to contribute to the process, and the ‘barring’ strategies practiced by the keepers of the system in part as a result of the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) royalties they collect from globally imposed standards. In this paper, we use the case of Chinas Audio Video Coding Standard (AVS) to examine government positions and possible strategies for standard market competition in the presence of a dominant international standard. In our analysis, we adopt a system perspective on the Chinese governments market intervention policy.

The role of policy in the development of Cognitive Radio systems: Co-evolutionary perspective

In this work we adopt the theoretical framework of co-evolutionary analysis to explore the different roles of relevant stakeholders in the development of Cognitive Radio (CR) systems in the modern wireless market. Our analysis is aimed at yielding better understanding of factors upon which success or failure of commercialization of CR will depend and their possible link to policy and standardisation. Our analysis shows the benefits of co-evolutionary development coordinated across various domains: technology, policy and market. In particular, we build a compelling case that the policy domain and its respective stakeholders represent some of the most crucial factors that could “make or break” the future prospects of technology deployment and its advancement towards commercial success.

Anticipatory Standards Development and Competitive Intelligence

More and more companies operate today in a worldwide market under conditions of globalization, increased complexity, and competition. In such an environment, business decisions need to be made quickly yet intelligent, substantiated by the most salient and relevant information available. Under the global competition, with a diligent and measured manner, many companies are increasingly treating business like an economic war. Enterprises are methodically monitoring and investigating their competitors, while deploying all the resources they have at their disposal in order to beat their current or future rivals. Competitive Intelligence (CI) has become the ‘latest weapon in the world war of economics’. This paper contributes to the growing body of literature on competitive intelligence by synthesizing knowledge stemming from many years of experience in the standardization arena. The authors aim to show how, in the economic war, engaging in committee-based standards development may be used for winning the competition battle.

Standards as Hybrids: An Essay on Tensions and Juxtapositions in Contemporary Standardization

Today the political rhetoric of the European Union is focused on the transformation from service/industrial to Information Society – the concept emphasizing the role of national and global information infrastructures in the economic development of the state (Castells, 1996). Guided by the vision as laid out in European Commission’s programme “eEurope,” European societies and economies are accelerating the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in a hope to be able to fully exploit the potential of the new informational economy, which is expected to bring not less than a “tremendous potential for growth, employment and inclusion”1 (Council of the European Union, 1999, p.4). Similar to the processes of interconnecting roads and railways, bolts and nuts in the formation of the industrial economies, building informational economy requires networking of myriad of disparate information systems and resources on different levels of social organizing. Inter-operating informational resources and systems, making a “workable whole” out of disparate local implementations, brings about new requirements and dynamics unknown in the construction of industrial age infrastructure – the instantaneity of production and delivery of services, the inter-modality of different infrastructures (such as e.g., cellular mobile, the Internet, TV, radio, GPS) (Edwards, 2000), consistency of informational resources (Gill & Miller, 2002), a host of security-, safetyand privacy-related issues – just few to mention. With new unthinkable levels of complexity in assuring interoperability of informational tools and resources, scholars of standardization and infrastructure development are operating with theories on standards competition and interoperability based on the knowledge of pre-informational age, and the validity of the extant theories is tried and often refuted as new cases of informational age are studied. To take few examples, competition of Open Document Format (ODF) and Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) file formats is not like typical standards contests as we know from the Standards as Hybrids: An Essay on Tensions and Juxtapositions in Contemporary Standardization

Balancing Public and Private Interests in ICT Standardisation: The Case of AVS in China

This research inquires into how the public interest and private interests can be balanced by a new approach beyond the ”Fair, Reasonable and Non Discriminatory” (FRAND) term and Royalty Free in the standardisation process. Using the case of Audio Video coding Standard (AVS) in China, we analyse the mechanisms for treating the Intellectual Property Rights associated with technical contributions of stakeholders and establishing a patent pool with low royalty. The lesson from the AVS case is that, in the Public Dominated Model of standardisation (PDM), public units can successfully contribute intellectual property but cannot easily match the role of private corporations in the standard’s implementation. The public-private dilemma in standards development is more complex than that in terms of intellectual property rights.

Dual-band cognitive radio for wearable sensors in hospitals

Wireless communication technology has the potential to impact beneficially modern medical practice through the use of biomedical sensors combined with small intercommunicating radio transceivers. This development will enable cost-effective continuous monitoring of patients in hospitals and other healthcare centers. It is anticipated that a large number of medical body area networks (MBANs) will soon operate in unlicensed frequency bands, a fact that will create a coexistence problem with legacy medical equipment. This situation is particularly challenging in small indoor areas like intensive care units (ICUs) and operating rooms (ORs). Electromagnetic interference (EMI) from wireless devices can disrupt the performance of non-communication electronic medical equipment located in ICUs and ORs. Cognitive radio (CR) is a promising technology that can ease the coexistence of the aforementioned systems. In this work we present an EMI-aware CR protocol for e-health applications. This protocol protects noncommunication medical equipment from harmful interference while maintaining low outage probability for wireless communication devices and MBANs. We propose the use of an additional emergency channel in a different frequency band for control/data transmission, which exploits indoor propagation conditions to lower the outage probability. Performance evaluation of the proposed protocol through numerical simulations with realistic indoor propagation conditions is presented.

Development of e-Services in Latvian Insurance Industry: The Critical Role of Quality Benchmarking

The purpose of this paper is to report on the development of comparable set of metrics, or else – a benchmarking standard – on the Latvian non-life insurance market. In this research we used a case study methodology, deploying a number of research strategies, namely: in-depth interviews with heads of industry associations and a survey of representatives of insurance broker companies. We argue that for such information-intensive service industry as insurance to contribute to the development of e-Society, (e-)service offering must be based on common quality benchmarking standards to allow consumers and entrepreneurs have unbiased information on and be able to compare the offered services from different firms. Mutual interaction though e-services between society, enterprises and insurance industry contribute to the development of e-Society, and such service further can contribute to the improvement of insurance industry.

Factors affecting business and information technology alignment at the lower levels of a public organisation

This article describes how the alignment of business and information technology (IT) strategies impact organisational performance. The alignment involves an entire organisation. However, much of the research has focused on the factors affecting alignment at the senior executive level, and there appears to be less attention placed upon factors that affect the lower operational levels. This article attempts to address this gap in the literature through a case study of a healthcare organisation. Semi-structured interviews with ten employees at an operational level were qualitatively analysed to elucidate factors. Organisational culture, management expectations, communication, and the provision and recognition of skills were identified as main factors that may affect the alignment of business and IT strategies at the lower levels