Existing Information Infrastructures Research Articles

Evaluating the Family Nurse Partnership Programme in Scotland: a natural experiment using linked data from health, education and social care.

ObjectivesThe Family Nurse Partnership (FNP) is an intensive home visiting service for teenage first-time mothers, developed/trialled in the US and adapted/trialled across Europe. The Scottish Government aims to build on and supplement the existing evidence base for FNP, to assess effectiveness of the programme, for future improvement work in Scotland. ApproachThe commissioned natural experiment of FNP, takes advantage of existing information infrastructures in Scotland from health, education and social care and FNP programme implementation data. A cohort design was used covering ten Health Boards in Scotland. The cohort included first-time teenage mothers enrolled as FNP Clients between 2010 and 2016 and women who met FNP eligibility criteria but were pregnant when the programme was not recruiting (Controls). Outcomes are mapped to the Scottish FNP logic model and include those being tested statistically (n=34) or, where direction of effect is uncertain, outcomes are rare or data quality poor, descriptively (n=20). ResultsWe established a model of data linkage to routine Scottish data. Approvals were obtained to access data on over 8000 mothers (FNP Clients and Controls) and their children which formed the study cohort and were mapped to routine health, education and social care data. Outcomes covered maternal (health (smoking, alcohol/drugs), subsequent pregnancies/births, education) and child (health, development, education, protection) domains. Observed baseline imbalances between study arms will be described and adjusted for in modelling. Results will be published by the time of the conference and include sensitivity analyses that explore a priori sub-groups, variation by health board, year of booking and programme dosage. ConclusionThe impact of this evaluation will establish a robustly matched study cohort, develop the evidence base on FNP in Scotland and internationally, develop a more streamlined linkage and approval process, and identify outcomes for short-term follow-up and importantly for a longer-term follow-up of the mothers and their children.

Communication in Smart Grids: A Comprehensive Review on the Existing and Future Communication and Information Infrastructures

Advanced information and communication infrastructures are essential to successfully operate smart grids (SGs) and provide efficient, reliable, and sustainable electricity to the customers. After providing the background of the communication paradigm in SGs, a comprehensive survey of the major issues related to the architectures, the key technologies, and the requirements of the SG communication infrastructure are analyzed in this article. The role of cloud computing and Internet of Things in SGs is also discussed. Finally, the standardization, potential applications, and future fruitful research issues of the communication infrastructures of the SGs are classified and discussed.

Infrastructuring and Participatory Design: Exploring Infrastructural Inversion as Analytic, Empirical and Generative

The participatory design of CSCW systems increasingly embraces activities of reconfiguring the use of existing interconnected systems in addition to developing and implementing new. In this article, we refer to such activities of changing and improving collaboration through the means of existing information infrastructures as infrastructuring. We investigate a relational perspective on infrastructuring and provide an overview and a detailed account of a local infrastructuring process by tracing the concrete relations that emerged. The elusive quality of information infrastructures as being invisible is analyzed through the notion of infrastructural inversion. Infrastructural inversion is the gestalt switch of shifting attention from the activities invisibly supported by an infrastructure to the activities that enable the infrastructure to function and meet desired needs for collaborative support. Initially, infrastructural inversion was conceived as a conceptual-analytic notion, but recent research has also positioned it as an empirical-ethnographic and generative-designerly resource. In this study, we rely on all of these stances and contribute to the generative-designerly position. We explain the notion of infrastructural inversion and describe how it is distinct from the CSCW concept of articulation work. The context of the analysis includes a participatory design project that sought to reduce patients’ fasting time prior to surgical operations by improving the interdepartmental coordination at a hospital. The project revealed the webs of relations and interdependencies in which fasting time is inscribed at the local level as well as regionally, nationally, and beyond. We pursue the relations, trace their connectedness across multiple scopes, and show how the process alternated between empirical and analytic activities of exploring relations and design-oriented activities of reaching closure. Our analysis shows that the notion of infrastructural inversion can enrich participatory design: Infrastructural inversion embraces the exploratory activities of tracing relations, while the design agenda drove the need for reaching closure. We conclude by discussing lessons learned for infrastructuring and for participatory design that engages with infrastructuring.

Information services for European pork chains – Closing gaps in information infrastructures

Several global developments (e.g. diminishing production resources, growing demand for bio-energy) and numerous sector-wide crises (e.g. BSE, swine fever, dioxin) have led to a changing attitude of society towards the consequences of the food systems activities for social, economic and environmental issues, captured in the term of sustainability. Consumers in their role as final customers, and as a consequence also enterprises within agri-food supply chains, show increasing interest in the characteristics of food, and in turn, on the availability of related information and guarantees. Enterprises in agri-food supply chains are facing new expectations and are seeking to communicate social, economic and environmental performance of their business to customers within their supply chain and to consumers. New solutions for determination and communication of sustainability are needed for the agri-food sector, covering single aspects of sustainability as well as sustainability in a broader sense, including social, economic and environmental issues. Integrated, computer-based information services, since they are mainly building on existing systems, provide flexible solutions for enterprises to measure and evaluate sustainability of products throughout agri-food supply chains. Gained information on product characteristics might be used for decision support within enterprises as well as for communication of sustainable practices to customers and consumers, resulting in increased competitiveness of enterprises, supply chains and the sector by satisfying customers’ and consumers’ demands for information on the sustainability of a product. The present paper introduces a framework for developing information services for European pork chains using the three selected information domains food safety (representing social sustainability), quality (representing economic sustainability) and global warming potential (representing environmental sustainability). Resulting information models give an aggregated overview on information availability and exchange in European pork chains, additional information demands of possible service users and deficiencies in the existing information infrastructures. The paper supports different stakeholders involved in agri-food production, such as service developers, enterprise decision makers and management consultants, in developing enterprise- and chain-specific solutions which meet customers’ and consumers’ demands by providing appropriate sustainability information and guarantees.

Managing Socio-Technical Integration in Iterative Information System Development Projects

The challenges of information systems (IS) development have changed significantly in the past 15 years. From a situation where the main problem was to build stable systems based on a requirements specification, the IS project manager now faces challenges of integration; for example: how to integrate a new information system into large existing information infrastructures and unstable business processes? Building on a socio-technical perspective, four types of integration were identified and analyzed: external and internal stakeholder integration, and internal and external technical integration. A longitudinal case study of an e-business development project in the airline industry identified and highlighted some managerial challenges of integration. Findings include: Internal technical and (to some extent) stakeholder integration is well supported by traditional project management techniques and software engineering frameworks, such as the Rational Unified Process (RUP). However, the challenges of external stakeholder and technical integration is underrated in IS development research, and not well supported in RUP.

Dependable information infrastructures as complex adaptive systems

AbstractInformation infrastructures, such as the Internet and Computational Grids, have enabled a networked computing and communication environment. Although many organizations depend on network‐centric information operations to support critical missions, existing information infrastructures provide little guarantee of the dependability of network‐centric computing and communication. This paper discusses some problems with the dependability of existing information infrastructures, such as stateless or centralized resource management. A Complex Adaptive Systems approach to dependability of futuristic information infrastructures is then presented with emphasis on the detection of emergent states at the regional and global levels of these infrastructures, and the self‐synchronized control of such infrastructures in response to emergent states. The key concept underlying our control strategy at the regional or global level is that the two attributes of the Complex Adaptive System in a dynamic environment, accessibility to many states and sensitivity to small perturbation, present us with an opportunity to manipulate the system's dynamics. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Eng 6: 225–237, 2003

A framework of electronic tendering for government procurement: a lesson learned in Taiwan

To render government procurement efficient, transparent, nondiscriminating, and accountable, an electronic government procurement system is required. Accordingly, Taiwan Government Procurement Law (TGPL) states that suppliers may employ electronic devices to forward a tender. This investigation demonstrates how the electronic government procurement system functions and reengineers internal procurement processes, which in turn benefits both government bodies and venders. The system features explored herein include posting/receiving bids via the Internet, vender registration, certificate authorization, contract development tools, bid/Request For Proposal (RFP) development, online bidding, and online payment, all of which can be integrated easily within most existing information infrastructures.