A brief tutorial in the use of Secure Copy (scp) for Windows, Mac and Linux.

This dissertation presents the Participant-driven Group Support System (PD-GSS)framework. This framework presents an approach for Group Support System (GSS)designers to accommodate distributed or asynchronous groups through the use ofdifferent technologies and processes than traditional GSS.The goal of the PD-GSS framework is to further involve the collaborativeparticipants during the workflow in an effort to reduce the load on the meetingfacilitator. As the name implies, it is the participants that are increasingly responsiblefor conducting and executing the required actions during a collaborative processes. Thesystem empowers the participants in the meeting to conduct the meeting themselves,reducing the need for a dedicated facilitator to guide the process.One of the modules from the PD-GSS framework, Peer-reviewed Brainstorming,was developed into a prototype and tested experimentally. This module requires eachbrainstorming idea to be routed through a peer-review process whereby the originalbrainstorming idea is edited for clarity and completeness. The goal of this new moduleis to reduce the number of low quality, noisy comments while increasing the quantity ofhigh quality comments.Ten six-person groups participated in the first experiment. Five groups wereplaced in a traditional electronic brainstorming GSS while the other five groups wereplaced in the peer-review treatment. The results indicate that the peer-review processdid control the brainstorming process, yielding a higher percentage of validbrainstorming ideas.The second module examined was the categorization module, allowing groups towork autonomously to identify similar ideas that should be grouped together in the samecategory or bucket. This new approach to the categorization of brainstorming ideasenables groups to work independently, asynchronously, and anonymously to organizethe brainstorming input.An existing GSS, ThinkTank by GroupSystems, was utilized. Eighty-one groupswere used in the second experiment to test the ability of groups to work independently,without a facilitator, in an attempt to organize brainstorming ideas. The groups workingsynchronously outperformed the groups working in a mock asynchronous setting.Likewise, the groups that had to categorize the fewest number of brainstorming ideasreceived the highest performance measures.

Web forums offer open and interactive social communication platforms for numerous participants to share information and offer perspectives on a variety of business and social issues with audiences around the world. In addition to facilitating widespread communication, these web forums contain massive amounts of data and represent rich sources of information that can be utilized to advance the understanding of participants and society. In particular, web forums pertaining to firms and their customers, employees, and investors, represent valuable resources for the acquisition of business intelligence. However, web forums represent a complex analytic landscape requiring the development of automated, intelligent, and scalable analytic approaches. The dissertation follows the design science paradigm in management information systems research, and aims to develop and refine approaches to the analysis of web forums, and to apply these analytic approaches to firm-related web forums to derive information that may explain and predict firm stock behavior. The designs of the devised approaches to web forum analysis are informed by the stakeholder theory of the firm, and systemic functional linguistic theory. We introduce and advance a stakeholder approach to the analysis of firm-related web forums, and improve existing approaches to sentiment analysis in web forums. In Chapter 2 we develop and deploy a stakeholder framework to analyze a popular firm-related finance web forum and apply the extracted measures to explain firm stock return, volatility, and trading volume. In Chapter 3 we advance the stakeholder framework and perform dynamic analyses of web forums over time, and compare several feature representations of stakeholders and approaches to sentiment analysis. We deploy the stakeholder framework to analyze several firm-related web forums, and apply the derived measures to predict firm stock return and perform simulated trading of firm stock over a one year period to determine the economic value of the extracted information. Finally, in Chapter 4 we develop approaches to improve the scalability of sentiment analysis across multiple web forums in a collection. Overall the dissertation contributes to the literature on the analysis of web forums, and demonstrates the value of firm-related web forums as sources of business intelligence.

We are living in a world of service economy. Global markets have radically transformed from product-based industrial structures to service-based post-industrial ones over the past fifty years. IT has catalyzed a significant portion of this transformation. Advances in IT have not only alleviated the accessibility of existing service systems, but also enabled Servitization of products and commodities that were delivered through traditional mediums. Ironically, IT itself has been a commodity that has met its own share of Servitization. Hardware computing resources have been virtualized, whereas software and media content have been delivered through distributed networks. Causing a paradigm shift on how IT is delivered and used, Servitization of IT is expected to impose technical, economical and managerial challenges in various business domains of organizations. In this dissertation, I develop novel methods and policies to overcome such challenges. By conducting four closely related studies, I address common IT Servitization problems encountered in the service-oriented architecture and customer relationship management domains. Specifically, I make the following contributions: (1) in study one, I work on the efficient creation of software services out of legacy software by annotating source code components of an IT system with business semantics. The approach facilitates source code reuse in developing new web services. (2) In study two, I develop a financial valuation model for SOA investments. The model quantifies evident and elusive costs and benefits of SOA and supports managerial decision making regarding the investment. (3) In study three, I investigate the deployment of live-chat online service channels by evaluating the impact of priority-based admission control policies. I show that under imperfect profiling of customer types, reserve-type admission control policies may have negative consequences for the entire system. (4) In study four, I investigate the value of adding flexibility in live-chat contact centers. Contrary to the service management literature, I find out that cross-training of agents in large contact centers suffers from switching costs as well as capacity shifting inefficiencies. Methods, models and policies proposed in this dissertation are expected to contribute towards understanding the short-term applicability and long-term impact of service-orientation and IT Servitization in business organizations.

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