Electronic health record systems (EHR) are used to store relevant heath facts about patients. The main use of the EHR is in the care of the patient, but an additional use is to reuse the EHR information to locate and evaluate clinical evidence for treatments. To efficiently use the EHR information it is essential to use appropriate methods for information compilations. This thesis deals with use of information in medical terminology systems and ontologies to be able to better use and reuse EHR information and other medical information. The first objective of the thesis is to examine if word alignment on bilingual English-Swedish rubrics from five medical terminology systems can be used to build a bilingual dictionary. A study found that it was possible to generate a dictionary with 42 000 entries containing a high proportion of medical entries using word alignment. The method worked best using sets of rubrics with many unique words that are consistently translated. The dictionary can be used as a general medical dictionary, for use in semi-automatic translation methods, for use in cross-language information retrieval systems, and for enrichment of other terminology systems. The second objective of the thesis is to explore how connections from existing terminology systems and information models to SNOMED CT and the structure in SNOMED CT can be used to reuse information. A study examined whether the primary health care diagnose terminology system KSH97-P can obtain a richer structure using category and chapter mappings from KSH97-P to SNOMED CT and the structure in SNOMED CT. The study showed that KSH97-P can be enriched with a poly-hierarchical chapter division and additional attributes. The richer structure was used to compile statistics in new manners that showed new views of the primary care diagnoses. A literature study evaluated which kinds of information compilations those are necessary to create graphical patient overviews based on information from EHRs. It was found that a third of the patient overviews can have their information needs satisfied using compilations based on SNOMED CT encodings of the information entities in the EHR and the structure in SNOMED CT. The other overviews also need access to individual values in the EHR. This can be achieved by using well-defined information models in the EHR.

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The dissertation consists of three essays that explore the relationship between information technology and firms' organizational and governance structure. The first essay examines how information technology (IT) moderates the impact of firms' assets on the level of vertical integration and horizontal diversification. The empirical analysis suggests that IT is associated with a decrease in vertical integration in firms with more tangible assets. The analysis also indicates that IT is associated with a greater increase in horizontal diversification in firms with more intangible assets. The general implication of this essay is that firms with more tangible assets may use IT to become more vertically specialized, whereas firms with more intangible assets may deploy IT to become more horizontally diversified. The second essay uses a moral hazard model to examine the relationship between environmental uncertainty and decentralization in IT governance. It is shown that this relationship is determined by a trade-off between the need for processing local information and the moral hazard problem. The trade-off results in an inverted-U-shaped relationship between environmental uncertainty and decentralization in IT governance. The increase in environmental uncertainty first increases and then decreases the likelihood of adopting decentralized IT governance, and thus decentralized IT governance is not likely to be desirable when the external environment is either highly stable or highly turbulent. An empirical study using a sample of 455 business sites of Fortune 1000 companies validates the theoretical results. The third essay presents an analytical model to examine the design and management of partner relationships in IT service. The firm hires a manager to manage the partner relationship. However, the firm has to decide whether to delegate the design of the relational contract with the partner, to the manager. We find that when the firm and the manager have asymmetric information about the manager's inclination to maintain a long-term partner relationship for the firm, delegation in relational contracting can help the firm in screening the myopic manager from the farsighted manager.

During the past decade, advances in information technology have profoundly impacted the business sector. In this dissertation, we focus on three aspects of the changes that influence firms' strategic and operational decisions. For the first research problem, we attempt to understand the competition between an online store and a traditional brick-and-mortar retailer. We incorporate multi-channel customers in our model, and investigate the implications of existence of multichannel customers on the effectiveness of profit-enhancing strategies for the retailer and online store. For the second problem, we study how manufacturers may incorporate information on anticipated demand and supply into its pricing and inventory allocation decisions. Our pricing policy highlights the interaction among the demands for multiple substitutable products as well as limited resource availability shared by the products. For the third problem, we study the complex tradeoffs that network planners face between minimizing the total cost of the network configuration while meeting end-to-end service requirements such as limits on traversal time or reliability. We propose a service network design model formulation for finding a minimum-cost network design in which the selected routes satisfy service requirements.

The development of information technology allows organisations to gather and store ever increasing quantities of data. This data, although not often collected specifically for such a purpose, may be processed to extract knowledge which is interesting, novel and useful. Such processing, known as data mining, demands algorithms which can efficiently 'mine' through the large volumes of data and extract patterns of interest. Modern heuristic techniques are a class of optimisation algorithms, which solve problems by searching through the space containing all possible solutions. They have been applied to a wide variety of such problems with great success, which suggests that they may also prove useful for data mining. Conducting a search through the space of all patterns within a database using such techniques is likely to yield useful information. Within this thesis, it is demonstrated that modern heuristic techniques may be successfully applied to a wide range of data mining problems. The results presented highlight the suitability of such algorithms for the demands of the commercial environment; as a consequence of this, much of the work undertaken has become incorporated within real business processes, bringing considerable savings. A variety of algorithmic enhancements are also investigated, yielding important results for both the data mining and heuristics fields.

<p> There was low participation (40%) by cattle producers in the United States&rsquo; voluntary traceability system known as the National Animal Identification System (NAIS). A mandatory traceability system was implemented by the United States Department of Agriculture on March 11, 2013. Any cattle that are moved between states must be identified. Participation in the new system needs to be at least 70% to be considered successful. Beef cattle producers may have privacy and trust issues that would be factors affecting participation in a traceability system. Surveys were sent to 2,000 subscribers of BEEF Magazine. Out of the 361 responses, there were 196 usable surveys. Drawing upon the theories of economics and compliance, research was conducted to determine if participation rates in a traceability system were affected by the entity that managed the system, either Government, Private Industry, or Private Non-Industry entity; the data that the system gathered, i.e., marketing claims; and the incentives received from the traceability system. The current research indicated that participation rates will increase if a private industry maintains the data. Antibiotic-free was the marketing claim of the data that the system gathered that influenced participation, and participation decreased with this marketing claim. Lastly the incentives or benefits received from the traceability will positively affect participation rates. Any government entity or organization wishing to implement a traceability system, could use these findings to increase participation in their traceability system.</p>

<p> Global scale identity management attempts to be the system of identifying and authenticating entities such as people, hardware devices, distributed sensors and actuators, and software applications when accessing critical information technology (IT) systems from anywhere. The term global-scale is intended to emphasize the pervasive nature of identities and implies the existence of identities in federated systems that may be beyond the control of any single organization. The purpose of this research was to analyze the current state of Global Scale Identity Management. Today, news of security breaches is far too commonplace. The results reveal that global scale identity management would have a positive effect on the individual person, businesses, government agencies, and institutions. However for global scale identity management to be operational much work remains. The remaining work is split between the physical realm, i.e., biometric equipment, quantum resistant cryptography, and the abstract realm, i.e., legal considerations, social and cultural mores, privacy issues, and international considerations. The research concluded that humans are repeatedly the weak link in password security that ultimately undermines a system&rsquo;s stability. For the short term, the best suggestion is to use password managers and have systems disallow poor password choices. For the long-term build infrastructures with quantum resistant cryptography interfacing with the ubiquitous smartphone to provide multifactor authentication. </p>

<p> The mobile telecommunications industry is in the process of a dramatic transformation into the smartphone industry, as new firms from the computer and internet sectors have used new technologies and business models to displace the incumbents. The key organizing structure of this new smartphone industry is the software "platform," a model which defined the PC industry for decades but is also present in other industries, such as console video games. Software platforms have distinct economic properties that shape competitive strategy, including the presence of positively reinforcing network effects, which lead to increasing returns to scale and the potential for winner-take-all markets. In the smartphone industry, the platforms by Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Xiaomi also function as two-sided markets, bringing together distinct groups (e.g., app developers and end-users) who transact through the platform. In the work that follows, I explore how these and other platform dynamics are exploited by the key firms in their apparent strategies, and the implications for competition in the industry. The analysis shows that new organizational forms such as hybrid platforms, where firms such as Amazon and Xiaomi have appropriated open-source Android for their own proprietary platforms, and nested platforms, where firms such as Line and Facebook build distinct platforms within other platforms, challenge the traditional platform model and our understanding of how firms exercise platform control. I argue that the "bottleneck" or control point of smartphone platforms has moved away from the operating system, and up the stack to cloud-based services. The final part of the analysis studies the app economy, and how the platform-mediated "app stores" are shaping participation and value capture. Using spatial analysis, I map the geography of digital flows of apps between developers and the most lucrative markets, revealing clear patterns of inter-regional trade and insular domestic markets.</p>

<p> Clerical review of Entity Resolution(ER) is crucial for maintaining the entity identity integrity of an Entity Identity Information Management (EIIM) system. However, the clerical review process presents several problems. These problems include Entity Identity Structures (EIS) that are difficult to read and interpret, excessive time and effort to review large Identity Knowledgebase (IKB), and the duplication of effort in repeatedly reviewing the same EIS in same EIIM review cycle or across multiple review cycles. Although the original EIIM model envisioned and demonstrated the value of correction assertions, these are applied to correct errors after they have been found. The original EIIM design did not focus on the features needed to support the process of clerical review needed to find these errors. </p><p> The research presented here extends and enhances the original EIIM model in two very significant ways. The first is a design for a pair of confirmation assertions that complement the original set of correction assertions. The confirmation assertions confirm correct linking decisions so that they can be excluded from further clerical review. The second is a design and demonstration of a comprehensive visualization system that supports clerical review, and both correction and confirmation assertion configurations in EIIM. This dissertation also describes how the confirmation assertions and the new visualization system have been successfully integrated into the OYSTER open source EIIM framework.</p>

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