京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(情報学) / 甲第19106号 / 情博第552号 / 新制||情||98(附属図書館) / 32057 / 京都大学大学院情報学研究科知能情報学専攻 / (主査)教授 河原 達也, 教授 田中 利幸, 講師 吉井 和佳 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Informatics / Kyoto University / DFAM

Business-IT alignment (BITA) continues to be a top management concern. It generally refers to a preferred condition in which the relationship between business and IT is optimised to maximise the business value of IT. Early approaches in both research and practice have focused on the role of IT in supporting business strategies. Today, a more extended approach of BITA has been embraced that recognises soft factors that are related to people and culture issues at both tactical and operational levels of organisations. ‘Why alignment is important’ is not the crucial question today. In fact ‘how it can be achieved and matured’ is the real concern of business executives. There exists a number of theoretical models for conceptualising BITA, however, they have different focuses and contain different BITA components. Therefore, there is a need for a means of supporting practitioners for selecting an appropriate model. Furthermore, there is a need for a more practice-oriented research that target higher maturity of BITA by understanding the organisational context, including barriers that hinders BITA and the mutual relationships between organisational culture and BITA. Thus, the overall problem addressed in the thesis is the following: In spite of extensive literature on business-IT alignment, there is still limited maturity of business-IT alignment in practice due to the limited knowledge on barriers that hinder BITA achievement from practitioners’ perspective, on the means for supporting the selection of an appropriate model for assessing BITA, and on mutual relationships between BITA and organisational culture. Based on this research problem, five research objectives were developed. The first two objectives corresponded to barriers to achieving BITA and supporting the selection of BITA model respectively. The remaining three objectives corresponded to the two unidirectional influences between BITA and organisational culture (OC) and to the mutual relationships between them respectively. Different research methodologies and strategies were applied to achieve the research objectives, including qualitative and quantitative studies as well as design science. The results presented in the thesis, each corresponding to an objective, are the following:  A list of barriers that practitioners can use as a basis for better achievement of BITA, a better focus on strategic vs. tactical barriers, and their relationships to BITA components. An evaluation framework that supports practitioners in selecting appropriate BITA models for assessing and modelling BITA. An extended version of the strategic alignment model (SAM) of Luftman (2000), which considers organisational culture. An analysis of the impact of BITA components on organisational culture profiles. A BITA-organisational culture integrated view that supports decision-makers in facilitating decisions regarding both BITA and organisational culture. The results of the research provide both theoretical and empirical contributions to the business-IT alignment research and practice. / MIT

Det finns mycket publicerat om implementation och integration av IT-system generellt. Detta gäller även för Business intelligence (BI) system när det gäller den övergripande implementationen. Dock saknas forskning med större fokus på anpassning och alignment arbetet för att dessa system ska kunna brukas till full potential. Detta arbete syftar till att öka kunskaper gällande alignment och utmaningar som kommer med utveckling av BI lösningar för konsulter inom området. Detta görs genom en litteraturgenomgång som kompletteras med intervjuer av yrkesverksamma personer inom BI-utveckling, den insamlade empirin analyseras och tolkades för att identifiera och förstå utmaningarna.   Arbetet fokuserar endast på alignment delen av implementationsarbetet och är fokuserat på de IT relaterade faktorerna. Arbetet genomförs via ett konsultperspektiv, inte utifrån en specifik verksamhet.   Det som framkommit är vikten av kommunikation mellan konsult och kund för att på olika sätt motverka utmaningarna och bidra till ett effektivt arbetssätt som är mer optimalt. Detta genom att kommunikationen bidrar till ökad förståelse för kundernas verksamhet och hjälper konsulterna förstå och därmed hantera utmaningarna bättre. Kommunikationen bidrar även till att flera delar av processen fungerar effektivare och genererar bättre möjligheter för konsulterna att göra ett bra jobb genom att till exempel bidra till en bättre kravspecifikation och arbetsstruktur.

Over the past few years information technology (IT) and business alignment has become a great concern to organizations. To achieve alignment has become a daunting task for organizations due to rapid changes in business environment and lack of IT support. In business organizations business processes and IT are interrelated and interact with each other where one entity influences to another entity i.e. evolution in business processes requires evolution in IT and vice versa. When this co-evolution is not well aligned, a gap is created due to wrong configuration between business requirements and IT deployment. Organizations usually strive to bridge the gap by implementing business and IT strategies (i.e. top-down planning) and tend to ignore other aspects of the co-evolution. Alignment is a continuous co-evolutionary process in which all components of business and IT are interrelated and enhance organization performance. The co-evolution between business and IT is not restricted to a level but it occurs at all levels and therefore, it is necessary to understand and study co-evolution at all levels within organizations. This thesis presents a co-evolutionary framework that helps to study and understand the co-evolution at three levels i.e. strategic level, operational level and individual level in an integrated fashion. The three levels need to co-evolve so that all components at each level co-evolve. This framework will speed up the alignment in organizations. We argue that the lack of knowledge of business among IT people and IT knowledge among business executives may cause the gap; therefore, a need arises to have a knowledgeable mediator between the domains that could help in the co-evolution. A K-mediator (i.e. knowledge mediator) has been used in the proposed co-evolutionary framework that facilitates the co-evolution at each level. Finally the thesis presents a case study in financial domain in order to evaluate and validate the framework.

Nowadays, the comparison of educational courses and modules is performed manually by experts in the field of education. The main objective of this research work is to create an approach for the automation of this process. The main contribution of this work is a novel, ontology alignment-based methodology for the automated comparison of academic courses and modules, belonging to the cognitive learning domain. The results of this work are appropriate for such tasks as prior learning and degree recognition, the introduction of joint educational programmes and quality assurance in higher education institutions. The set-theoretical models of an educational course, its modules, learning outcomes and keywords were created and converted to the ontology. The choice of the information to be presented in the ontology was based on the careful analysis of programme specifications, module templates and Bologna recommendations for the comparison of educational courses. Ontology was chosen as the data model due to its ability to formally specify semantics, to represent taxonomies and to make inferences regarding data. The formal grammars of a keyword and a learning outcome were created to enable the semi-automated population of the ontology from the module templates. The corresponding annotators were designed in the General Architecture for Text Engineering 6.1. The algorithm for the comparison of educational courses and modules was based on the alignment of ontologies of their keywords and learning outcomes. A novel measure for calculating the similarity between the action verbs in the learning outcomes was introduced and was utilised. Both the measure and the algorithm were implemented in Java. For evaluation purposes, we utilised the module templates from the De Montfort and the Bauman Moscow State Technical Universities. The automatically produced annotations of the keywords and the learning outcomes were evaluated against a manually created gold standard. The high values of the precision, recall and f-measure proved their quality and their suitability for the task. The results produced by the alignment algorithm were compared with those produced by human judgement. The results returned by the experts and the algorithm were comparable, thus showing that the proposed approach is applicable for the partial automation of the comparison of educational modules and courses.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 28-31, 1996 / Town and Country Hotel and Convention Center, San Diego, California / The emergence of encrypted PCM as a standard within DOD makes possible the correction of time skews between diverse data sources. Time alignment of data streams can be accomplished before decryption and so is independent of specific format. Data quality assessment in order to do a best-source selection remains problematic, but workable.

Interference alignment (IA) has been shown to provide all users of an interference channel with half the capacity achievable in an interference free point-to-point link resulting in linear sum capacity scaling with the number of users in the high SNR regime. The linear scaling is achieved by precoding transmitted signals to align interference subspaces at the receivers, given channel knowledge of all transmit-receive pairs, effectively reducing the number of discernible interferers. The theory of IA was derived under assumptions about the richness of the propagation channel; practical channels do not guarantee such ideal characteristics. This paper presents the first experimental study of IA in measured multiple-input multiple-output orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) interference channels. We show that IA achieves the claimed scaling factors in a wide variety of measured channel settings for a 3 user, 2 antennas per node setup. In addition to verifying the claimed performance, we characterize the effect of several realistic system imperfections such as channel estimation error, feedback delay, and channel spatial correlation, on sum rate performance. / text

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Osteoarthritis (OA) of the knee affects between 5.4% and 38% of older adults and this prevalence is increasing as the population ages and becomes more obese. As health costs rise, it is important to have accurate and cost-effective methods to assess knee OA and the risk for OA. One risk factor for progression of knee OA is lower extremity (LE) frontal-plane malalignment. The first goal of this thesis was to assess the suitability of knee radiographs and LE photographs for the estimation of frontal-plane LE alignment. In the first study, several versions of the femoral shaft-tibial shaft (FS-TS) angle, assessed from knee radiographs, were compared to the hip-knee-ankle (HKA) angle, assessed from full-length radiographs. We concluded that the FS-TS angle is not a recommended substitute for the HKA angle, because the association between the two measures differs depending on alignment, OA severity and the method of determining the FS-TS angle. In the second study, the hip-knee-ankle angle determined from a pelvis-to-ankle photograph (HKA-P) was assessed for its ability to estimate the HKA angle. The HKA-P angle was reliable and highly correlated to the HKA. It therefore shows promise as an accurate and cost-effective assessment tool for the estimation of LE alignment. Commonly-used grading scales for the severity of knee OA seen on a radiograph emphasize just one feature of OA; therefore the second goal of this thesis was to assess the psychometric properties of the unicompartmental osteoarthritis grade (UCOAG), a composite scale which grades several features of OA in the tibiofemoral (TF) compartment. In the third and fourth studies, the reliability, validity and sensitivity to change of the UCOAG scale was assessed and compared to two commonly-used scales (Kellgren-Lawrence and Osteoarthritis Research Society International joint space narrowing). The UCOAG scale showed moderate to excellent reliability. All three scales demonstrated comparable validity and sensitivity to change. The UCOAG is therefore recommended for the assessment of OA severity and change over time. This research provides evidence for the use of accurate and cost-effective measures to assess LE alignment using photographs, and TF OA severity using radiographs, for clinical assessment and research purposes. / Thesis (Ph.D, Rehabilitation Science) -- Queen's University, 2013-09-26 13:21:06.097

The availability of large scale protein interaction networks for several species has motivated many comparative studies in recent years. These studies typically employ network alignment algorithms for the task and use the sequence similarity of proteins to aid the alignment process. In this thesis I use a quantitative measure of protein functional similarity and show that the results are superior to sequence based network alignment. I present a method for module detection that combines results from network alignments with clustering measures to achieve superior results over several existing methods. Next, I address the issue of generally low conservation detected by alignments of interaction networks from model organisms. By explicitly modelling evolutionary mechanisms on pairs of networks I test the hypothesis that divergent evolution alone may be the cause. I use a distance metric based on graph summary statistics to assess the fit between experimental and simulated network alignments. Our results indicate that network evolution alone is unlikely to account for the poor quality alignments given by real data. We also find that false positives appear to affect network alignments little compared to false negatives indicating that incompleteness, not spurious links, is the major challenge for interactome-level comparisons. Finally, I focus on the comparative analysis of a subset of the interaction network related to mitosis in Yeast, Human and Fly. Manual ordering of mitosis-related functional annotations allows the study of temporal aspects of the network. I also use a Markov random field approach to infer temporal labels for unlabelled proteins. Sequence based network alignment of the mitotic networks in the three species finds little conservation despite the proteins being functionally very similar. Further investigation suggests a fuzzy relationship between protein sequence and function that may have implications for future network alignment studies.