Earticle

Recently, interests in IT Service Management (ITSM) are increasing internationally as well as domestically. In order to realize the benefits from ITSM, it is necessary to institutionalize it as a culture of the organization through effective change management. One of the most promising approach of effective change management is a Six Sigma technique. In this study, we analyze a success case in which 6 Sigma was applied to Service Desk function which is one of the most important functions of ITSM. Through the analyses, this study aims to propose a feasible and specific approach to institutionalize ITSM. To accomplish the objective, the study analyzed specific methods of application of 6 Sigma to ITSM, performance of the project and future directions based on interview and project document/deliverable review. This study could not provide detailed performance measures due to lack of previous research on this topic and difficulty of obtaining quantitative data. However, this study has contributed to proposing a direction to institutionalize ITSM in organizations by analyzing a feasibility of 6 Sigma in implementing ITSM.

As the mobile Internet spreads around the globe, a cross-national difference in the use of mobile services has become an important issue. The goal of this study is to propose and verify cross-national differences in the effect of each value-type on user satisfaction with the mobile Internet. We propose an analytic framework of four different types of value and apply this model to the value structures of mobile Internet users in two different countries. Large-scale online surveys were conducted in Korea and Hong Kong simultaneously with the same questionnaire. Results show that the relationships between the value components and user satisfaction varied between the two countries.

Role-based access control (RBAC) models are recently receiving considerable attention as a generalized approach to access control. In line with the increase in applications that deal with spatial data, an advanced RBAC model whose entities and constraints depend on the characteristics of spatial data is required. Even if some approaches have been proposed for geographic information systems, most studies focus on the location of users instead of the characteristics of spatial data. In this paper, we extend the traditional RBAC model in order to deal with the characteristics of spatial data and propose new spatial constraints. We use the object-oriented modeling based on open GIS consortium geometric model to formalize spatial objects and spatial relations such as hierarchy relation and topology relation. As a result of the formalization for spatial relations, we present spatial constraints classified according to the characteristics of each relation. We demonstrate our extended-RBAC model called OOGIS-RBAC and spatial constraints through case studies. Finally, we compare our OOGIS-RBAC model and the DAC model in the management of access control to prove the efficiency of our model.

Cases of botched information systems implementation have been surfaced due to poor IS project management and control. One major source of such failures is the perceptual difference between the participants of IS projects who should define potential risk factors well before considered IS projects are launched. Based on risk factors cited from prior works, this paper empirically examines the risk factors associated with IS service project management to analyze perceptual differences between the IS service providers and customers in Korea. Data analyses found significant differences in the area of scheduling/resource, technological newness, communications, and sponsorship/ownership while statistically significant differences were observed in eleven individual factors out of forty six risk factors. Risk factors are also ordered in terms of perceived importance to highlight the critical differences.

To minimize IT operational risks and the opportunity cost for lost business hours, it is necessary to have preparedness in advance and mitigation activities for minimization of a loss due to the business discontinuity. There are few cases that banks have a policy on systematic management, system recovery and protection activities against system failure, and most developers and system administrators response based on their experience and the instinct. This article focuses on the mitigation model development for minimizing the incidents of disk unit in IT operational risks. The model will be represented by a network model which is composed of the three items as following: ① the risk factors(causes, attributes and indicators) of IT operational risk, ② a periodic time interval through an analysis of historical data, ③ an index or an operational regulations related to the examination of causes of an operational risk. This article will be helpful when enterprise needs to hierarchically analyze risk factors from various fields of IT(information security, information telecommunication, web application servers and so on) and develop a mitigation model, and it will also contribute to the reduction of operational risks on information systems.

In this study, we investigate the possibility of deploying a recently emerging Internet-based technology, called Web log or Blog, to address the problems of knowledge transfer and sharing, particularly in the case of tacit knowledge. We examined the use practice of four blogs and then identified several properties relevant to knowledge transfer and sharing. They include the specific style of blog format, content ownership attribution, posted article organization, communication tools and method, news feed function, and various links from/to outside websites. These features were argued to facilitate knowledge transfer and sharing. In particular, we discussed a great deal about the structure of comments and links as tools for collaboration and idea sharing, which enables the knowledge conversion processes (socialization, externalization, combination, and internalization). We then provide several guidelines to develop blogs as a knowledge management tool.

Most of hospitals, especially small-scale hospitals, have tried to get customers through the Internet as what companies have done recently. There are various attempts that increase visits to one’s web-site in plastic surgery hospitals. However, in plastic surgery, there have been few studies on which an attribute contributes to increase the number of web-site visit. In order to derive the important attributes on the number of visit, we compared functional attributes of 30 high-visit plastic surgery web-sites with those of 30 low-visit web-sites using statistical and data mining methods. For analysis, three methods have conducted including Multiple Discriminant Analysis (statistical method), Decision Trees (data mining method), and Artificial Neural Network (data mining method). Furthermore, results of each method have been evaluated one another. The result of this study shows that a few attributes like ‘Simulating cyber plastic surgery program’, ‘recommendation of information’ explain the number of the visitors between high and low visit web-site. The methodology employed in this study provides an efficient way of improving satisfaction of visitors of plastic surgery website.

RFID is an emerging technology and rapidly applied to various industries due to its high-tech characteristic and convenience. Although RFID provides valuable benefits, it might also generate serious privacy problems. Previous studies show that privacy issues should be incorporated in developing RFID system and more detaild privacy protection methods.. However, they just provide basic concept, rough guideline, and simple architecture about RFID privacy protection. Industry needs more structured framework and detailed systematic process to incorporate privacy issues into the RFID system. The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework and detailed process design of RFID privacy protection issues in retail industries. A framework is developed based on individual sensitivity concept, RFID contents, and interface with EPC global standard. Case study is applied to validate the framework and it turns out to be useful. It is expected that the proposed framework and process design would provide more systematic guide lines to solving RFID privacy problems.

The next generation mobile multimedia network is expected to provide higher-rate multimedia communication services to versatile mobile terminals moving in even higher speed. For achieving more efficient reusability of scarce radio resources and thereby accommodating more user population in this network, the smaller cell such as micro or pico cell structure is used. More efficient and faster hand-over schemes are necessary to prevent the degradation of QoS of multimedia services caused by hand-over processing delay and packet loss during frequent hand-over. This paper proposes a faster and more effective hand-over scheme for high-rate multimedia services in the future mobile multimedia networks. by utilizing the GPS information on the position of the mobile terminal and its estimated moving directions. The simulation results show that our proposed method provides a better performance than the conventional method.

This paper analyzed the effects of interactions among participants on the satisfaction and commitment of cyber education. Even if the quality of interactions in cyber education may not be so good as that of interactions in face to face education, various kinds of interactions could be introduced in cyber education. An email or Q/A between lecturer and students could be a good way to compensate the deficiency of cyber education. Common News Boards or Discussion Rooms among students themselves are also a powerful means to learn each other in cyber space. The result of this study shows that as interactions among participants increase, satisfaction and commitment of the lecture also increase. This study also analyzed how cyber educational effects differs as interaction type changes in space dimension and time dimension. The result shows interactions in the same cyber space such as News Board brings more desirable outcome than those in the different cyber space. But the effects of interactions classified by time dimension does not show statistically significant differences.

This study deals with the regulatory policy of government on the convergence of broadcasting and telecommunication by applying rent seeking theory to Internet Protocal TV (IPTV). Existing literature has mainly focused on the negative implications of rent seeking since Tullock [1967], Krueger [1974] and Buchanan [1980]. We have investigated the regulatory policy along with the progress of the convergence of broadcasting and telecommunication. Regulatory policy on broadcasting, despite its impartial intent, has created the entry barrier in the industry, resulting in high rents. Meanwhile, regulatory policy in telecommunication is more geared by the encouragement of more competitive environments, resulting in reasonably low rents in the market. Regulatory policy in the age of convergence needs to improve the efficacy of the industry and welfare, while maintaining the rent at a reasonably low level. This research has contributed to emphasizing the positive aspect of rent seeking in policy concerned with the convergence of broadcasting and telecommunication, notably IPTV.

Students in cyber universities can take every course because there are no physical constraints such as class rooms. On the other hand, cyber universities should take a heavy burden to schedule real-time exams in a designated time period. Any two courses a student takes must not be simultaneously allocated to a time slot in such a schedule. It is well known that the complexity of this kind of scheduling problem increases exponentially as the number of courses does. This research provides a heuristic method to make on-line real-time exam timetables with minimal exam time span. It considers the constraint of not allocating courses a student takes to simultaneous exam time and prioritizes courses by the number of students.