In-house IT Research Articles

Technological Transformation of Accounting – Need for Firms to add Technology Training Employee Skill Sets

Purpose: The objective of this study is to determine the impact of the ineffective use of technology by accounting firms on employee skill sets. Theoretical framework: This study will focus on exploring the relationship between the use of technology in the accounting profession and employee training for both accounting and technology skills. Design/Methodology/Approach: A flexible research design with qualitative methods (specifically, a case study) was used in this study. Data collection methods for the study included interviews and surveys of accountants in the intermountain region of the United States at a regional accounting firm. Triangulation helped to create potency and legitimacy of the study by comparing the results from the multiple data sources of surveys, interviews, literature reviews, and quantitative summaries. Findings: The findings from the study confirm the existence of problems identified in this study and provide information to the current body of knowledge concerning the ineffective use of technology at an accounting firm due to a difference between traditional accounting skills and technology skills. Six themes emerged: 1) technology is essential for accountants to effectively perform their jobs, 2) support from the leadership of an accounting firms is essential for successful technology use, 3) in-house and internal IT staff are critical for successful technology use, 4) different generations of accountants perceive and use technology differently, 5) clients are a major driver of an accounting firm’s technology, and 6) the audit profession has and is changing dramatically due to technology. Research, Practical & Social implications: The study confirms the existence of problems identified in this study and provide information to the current body of knowledge concerning the ineffective use of technology at an accounting firm due to a difference between traditional accounting skills and technology skills. Originality/Value: The value of this study provides support on technology skill sets for accounting professionals that will help the accounting profession be better prepared to source and train staff accountants with the necessary skills to capitalize on the unfolding technology transformation. This, may in turn, help accounting firms produce better services and products.

EFFICIENCY OF ACTIVITY AND MANAGEMENT OF THE ENTERPRISE IN THE CONDITIONS OF POST-WAR RECONSTRUCTION

The economic growth of the national economy, first of all, depends on the level of production development. It is production that forms the basis of the economy of any state. Successful functioning of enterprises in modern economic conditions largely depends on various factors of external and internal environment, as well as on how effectively and purposefully the enterprise is engaged in innovation activities. Growth of economy of any country occurs due to two factors only: accumulation of capital (means of production, raw materials) and deepening of division of labor. The creation and accumulation of capital is carried out by entrepreneurs when they invest part of their profits in means of production, raw materials and inputs. The greater the profit of entrepreneurs, the more they invest in the creation of new capital. The development and implementation of innovations at the enterprise should contribute to the growth of the technical and technological base of the enterprise, which is a part of the production capital materialized in buildings, structures, machinery, equipment and other means of labor, which are repeatedly used in production, transferring their value to the finished product. Manufacturing, services, transportation, and even agriculture are using an increasingly wide range of digital technologies. The underlying technologies and processes have far-reaching implications for the organization of work, production and commerce, reinforcing the existing organizational and geographic dispersion of knowledge-intensive production functions and occupational groups. Companies using digital technologies can improve the efficiency of their organizations and gain opportunities to access and serve consumers more easily, accelerate product development, and create new goods and services at lower costs without the need for extensive systems-level expertise or in-house IT staff.

Data breaches (hacking) and trade credit

This study examines the relationship between data breaches (hacking) and trade credit for U.S. firms. Employing a staggered difference-in-differences approach, we observe that breached firms face shorter payable periods from suppliers than the control group. Data breaches increase the operational risk of breached firms. Suppliers associate high information risk with breached firms. Our findings remain robust to alternative specifications and are more pronounced for firms with no in-house IT expertise and an increased number of stolen records. Overall, our findings suggest that supplier firms become more prudent with the extension of trade credit after data breaches.

Virtual state, where are you? A literature review, framework and agenda for failed digital transformation

The users, sensors and networks of the Internet of Things generate huge amounts of data. Given the sophisticated (artificially intelligent) algorithms, computing power and software available, we would expect governments to have successfully completed their digital transformation into Jane Fountain's (2001) ‘Virtual State’. In practice, despite heavy investments, governments often fail to enact new digital technologies in an efficient, appropriate or fair way. This article provides an overview of techno-rational and socio-political failures and solutions at the macro-, meso- and micro-level to support digital transformation. The reviewed articles suggest a modest approach to digital transformation, with an emphasis on high-quality in-house IT infrastructure and expertise, but also better collaborative networks and strong leadership ensuring human oversight.

Practical aspects of implementing the IRIDA system as a solution for One Health bioinformatics analyses

Managing sequence data, associated metadata, bioinformatics analyses and results can be challenging. In a One Health context, the challenge is even larger as there are many actors involved, many diverse types of results need to be produced, and the ensuing process data, such as software versions and options have to be tracked for auditing purposes. In addition, results must often be produced rapidly to be actionable, and non-bioinformaticians should be able to perform the the analyses. Therefore, a graphical user interface (preferably web system) with pipelines and visualization tools are needed to do these analyses. The Public Health Agency of Canada has together with other actors developed the web based system IRIDA (https://www.irida.ca) which uses Galaxy for analyses. IRIDA comes with a set of pipelines, visualization tools and a project based data management system that allows for fine grained data access control, which satisfies many of the requirements that a One Health bioinformatics platform dictates. However, as is often the case with a system meant to satisfy high demands, the platform is not trivial to set up and adapt for local use. In our setup, we are using two web servers, two database servers and one file server. The IRIDA web server provides the user interface. The Galaxy web server receives commands from IRIDA, executes the commands and returns results. Each web server has a database that keeps their respective metadata: user information, file locations and results. The actual files are stored on the fileserver. This spoke-and-wheel infrastructure was implemented to ensure minimum disruption of service if a component should go down. To get the necessary compute resources for this system, we are contracting with the Norwegian Research and Education Cloud (NREC), which offers Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) services for Norwegian institutions and universities. NREC utilizes template VM images which can be instantiated according to need. The automated configuration and orchestration of images ensure that we can have dynamic access to resources according to need. This dynamic scaling is accomplished through collaboration with Elixir Norway. They have implemented the Pulse software which can check usage and instantiate and take down virtual machines as needed. At the Institute, we have spent close to two years on exploring and setting up this system. We have learned that it is important to not underestimate the amount compute resources needed to get a solid setup. However, having enough compute is irrelevant without knowledgeable staff. IRIDA comes with many features, which require considerable prior knowledge to adapt and set up in a local infrastructure. This includes knowledge on webservers, database systems, linux administration and Galaxy systems administration. The complexity dictates that these systems need to be set up and managed by in-house IT trained staff that will be able to tend the system along the way. It is also very important to maintain interactions with the users of the system, to ensure that the setup produces results that are useful to the users. To accomplish this, bioinformaticians are needed to develop pipelines and visualizations that give results that will on their own be easy for users to interpret in a biologically correct manner. Last but not least - such systems require a significant investment from the institution, thus it is important to showcase the benefits that the system will provide.

Business models for primary health care delivery in low- and middle-income countries: a scoping study of nine social entrepreneurs

BackgroundSocial enterprises are organizations created to address social problems that use business models to sustain themselves financially. Social enterprises can help increase access to primary health care in low resource settings. Research on social enterprises in health care have focused either on high-income countries, or on secondary and tertiary care in low- and middle-income countries, where common business models include differential pricing to cross-subsidize low income populations. This is the first study to examine social enterprises providing primary health care in low- and middle-income countries using primary data. The purpose is to determine whether social enterprise is a viable model in this setting and to identify common patterns and characteristics that could inform the work of social entrepreneurs, funders, and researchers in this area.MethodsWe identify social entrepreneurs working to deliver primary health care in low- and middle-income countries who have been vetted by international organizations dedicated to supporting social entrepreneurship. Through in-depth interviews, we collect information on medical processes, business processes, social impact, and organizational impact according to the Battacharyya et al. framework. We then conducted qualitative analysis to identify common patterns emerging within these four categories.ResultsCommon characteristics in the business models of primary health care social enterprises include flat rate rather than differential pricing and cross-subsidizing across services rather than patients. Subscription packages and in-house IT systems were utilized to generate revenue and increase reach through telemedicine, franchising, and mobile units. In some cases, alternate revenue streams are employed to help break even. About half of the social enterprises interviewed were for-profit, and about half non-profit. The majority faced challenges in engaging with the public sector. This is still a nascent field, with most organizations being under 10 years old.ConclusionsSocial enterprise has been demonstrated as a feasible model for providing primary health care in low resource settings, with key characteristics differing from the previously commonly studied social enterprises in tertiary care. There are opportunities to complement existing public health systems, but most organizations face challenges in doing so. More research and attention is needed by researchers, governments and funders to support social entrepreneurs and avoid parallel systems.

ВДОСКОНАЛЕННЯ ERG-СИСТЕМИ УПРАВЛІННЯ ПІДПРИЄМСТВАМИ МОРЕГОСПОДАРСЬКОГО КОМПЛЕКСУ

In the article, we analyzed the ERG management system of enterprises of the maritime complex, the existing problems and prospects for the development of modern management systems in the changing challenges of today. At the present stage of development there is a need to support and improve the management system of maritime and river transport enterprises. The development of the maritime complex depends on the effective organization of the management system. The purpose of the article is to improve the ERG management system of the enterprises of the maritime complex. The management system of maritime transport enterprises is correlated with the management of the enterprise. Business owners, the project steering committee and the project manager develop a hierarchy and determine who is responsible for each component of the system implementation. It is unusual to find in-house IT staff that are aware of all the intricacies of ERP, so relying solely on in-house IT staff slows down the implementation process. Third-party consultants have experience with previous implementations in other organizations that work for them, so they understand what worked and what didn’t in those other implementations. However, the growing need of enterprises for specialized software can be fully met by ERP-management systems of enterprises of the maritime complex. We believe that this is one of the most useful platforms in which an investor can and should invest, because its use provides a number of advantages: formalization of business processes, automatic control over their implementation, and convenient access to information needed by employees, partners, and customers to making informed decisions. As for the shortcomings of the ERP system, they are the same as in all complex automation systems – it is data security and the need for a powerful server. The effectiveness of the implementation of the ERP system by enterprises of the maritime complex in view of the fact that manufacturers of enterprise resource management systems offer a wide range of products aimed at solving a variety of problems, prospects for further research may be market analysis of ERP systems.

Planning an Agile Response.

Planning an Agile Response John D Tupin Our IRB reviewed just over 200 COVID-related studies with an additional 170 individual actions in relation to those studies. [End Page 80] Social behavioral ranged from studies addressing PTSD among front line workers to transitions to telemedicine care; many of our studies focused on underserved and racially diverse communities. Biomedical and clinical studies addressed early efforts to evaluate the efficacy of remdesivir, convalescent plasma, and vaccines. Imaging studies included detection of ancillary effects on organ systems and inflammation. The university also created and validated high throughput, up to 56,000 tests a week, saliva-based testing. One of the challenges we faced was emergency use. Our first encounter with COVID-19 occurred in early 2020. The subject was in critical condition, incapacitated and on a ventilator. The patient had no definitive COVID diagnosis as the test was withheld by the responsible public health agency owing to irregularities in symptoms. However, due to the nature of the virus we made the decision to move forward with the manufacturer to treat the patient in the belief that the formal diagnosis would be made and coincide with administration. The IRB made the decision to verbally remote consent the legally authorized representative (LAR), with a waiver of documentation until the immediate hazard could be eliminated and document the process concurrently with written consent at a later time. Our early experience in obtaining treatment medication was rocky. The original study was funded by NIH and as such was beholden to a single reviewing IRB. At that time I believe that the potential scope and impact was less understood. As such, the reviewing IRB had not considered "out of network" providers and researchers and had to delay until institutional approval could be obtained. The problematic issue here was the unavailability of the institutional decision maker and no process for emergency delegation. I can't blame them, as this was new territory. It was apparent to the IRB and the potential PI that it was necessary to add a second IRB of record. The sponsoring agency was contacted and apprised of the issues; shortly thereafter a second IRB was activated. The additional IRB was structured for multisite studies and had a great deal of experience in pharmaceutical studies. Further, the second IRB employed Smart IRB, allowing for a streamlined reliance process and quick activation. Moving forward, we have developed a robust delegation chain and will advocate strongly for an expedited waiver of the single IRB requirement. The university has been an active and leading center for telemedicine, however, COVID 19 produced some interesting issues. First, there were many commercial services that provided peer to peer programs that are easy to use and accessible to the majority in the community. That meant that providers and researchers were no longer tied to proprietary, homegrown systems that required specialized hardware, software and user accounts generated by in-house IT. However, it presented a new host of issues. Security concerns including data transmission, encryption, storage and ownership became a very important issue. Best case scenario data was being transmitted only and never backed up or duplicated. But what if it was? And where were the duplicates residing: dedicated domestic servers, in the cloud? Were the systems HIPAA or part 11 compliant? Additionally, what about rural patients, the homeless and impoverished, or my 86 year-old father who uses his laptop as a paperweight? We quickly were able to identify systems and vendors that we had used in patient care as secure and validated a handful of others that could be used during the public health crisis. What remains to be done is a clearer way for new vendors or those who did not intend for their systems to be used in medical treatment to validate their products in a way that is acceptable to the end user and the vendor. As to the underserved communities, how to make the technology available in a safe secure way that addresses all of the above issues and public safety needs to be studied and addressed. Another challenge we faced, and one of the now-obvious issues that we didn't consider, is the budget crunch that...

The changing returns on IT investment

PurposePrior IT productivity research usually assumes constant returns on IT investment. This study suggests that the impact of IT investment on productivity may not be constant but may change with the IT investment scale and over time. Specifically, we divide IT investment into commercial IT and in-house IT and investigate their changing impacts on industry labor productivity.Design/methodology/approachA model of the productivity impacts of commercial IT and in-house IT with changing effects of scale and over time is developed and empirically tested based on industry-level panel data from the US. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA).FindingsThe returns on commercial IT investment increase with scale but decrease over time, while the returns on in-house IT increase over time.Originality/valueThis study provides a new perspective for IT productivity research by investigating the changing productivity impacts of IT investment. It also suggests that commercial IT and in-house IT should be distinguished, as they have different impacts on productivity.

Role of E-communication in Healthcare: Sustainable Healthcare Solution

Background: Emerging new technologies have considerable potential for improving communication. E-communication in healthcare is a key to faster and efficient communication, reduction in paper consumption and increase in comfort level of end users. Environmental policy of the study hospital is aimed towards energy and resource conservation. Objective: To study the cost effectiveness of e-communication in healthcare. Method: A comparative study was conducted in a tertiary care NABH, ISO 9001:2008 and 14001:2004 certified teaching hospitals. A validated questionnaire based survey was conducted in 11 non clinical departments of the hospital. Comparative cost analysis of the paper consumption of the hospital (pre and post e-communication) was performed using t-test of ten different categories of stationery used. Results and Discussion: A majority of health expenditure in hospitals are wasted through misallocation and technical and managerial inefficiency within hospitals. A combination of hospital cost data with service statistics will highlight areas in which waste can be reduced. In order to have a paperless system our in-house IT department employees undertook the task of creating a software program catering to the needs of the hospital. A significant reduction in total paper consumption was found after the implementation of e-communication (5% level of significance, p value <0.05). Operations team of the hospital used the highest no of A4 size papers (Rs. 7480/100 inpatients) as compared to MRD (Rs. 3453/100 inpatient) Radiology (Rs. 1707/100 inpatients), Billing (Rs. 898/100 patients). Frequency of raising General store indents markedly increased after starting e-communication leading to decreased manpower consumption and increasing comfort level to the end users. Conclusion: Implementation of e-communication has resulted in a significant reduction in the cost incurred towards running the facility leading to surplus, giving more comfort to the end users and saving time. E-communication complies with the environmental policies i.e. environment conservation and resource conservation which helps to generate more time towards patient care.

A study on the constraints of implementing Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in Malaysian Construction Industry

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) refers to a combination of hardware, software and communication facilities. Often, ICT is introduced to equip construction stakeholders with information and analytical tools for a better control throughout the entire construction delivery process. The aim of this study is to investigate the issues relating to implementation of ICT in Malaysian construction industry with the objectives of: (i) to identify the benefits of adopting ICT in construction industry; (ii) to determine the constraints of implementing ICT in construction industry; and (iii) to identify the methods to encourage construction industry in adopting ICT. A questionnaire survey was conducted in Johor and Klang Valley of Malaysia, a total of 70 completed questionnaires were collected from contractors and quantity surveying consultation firm. Based on the analysis conducted, the top three benefits of adopting ICT in Malaysian construction industry ranked by the respondents are improvement on accuracy of measurement works, minimization on usage of paper by digitalization and allowed rapid sharing of information among project team. The barriers in implementing ICT in Malaysian construction industry identified included unaffordable initial capital and long term investment required, difficulties encountered to recruit capable and trustworthy in-house IT specialist, and security issues on confidential issues. Training and vendor’s efforts to improve their software have been agreed as the most achievable and practical methods to encourage ICT uptake. This study had explore the implementation and acceptance level of ICT in Malaysian construction industry. The views from both contractor and quantity surveying consultation firm were revealed. The findings from this study could be used as the baseline for future development of ICT in the local construction industry.

Practical Privacy-Preserving MapReduce Based K-Means Clustering Over Large-Scale Dataset

Clustering techniques have been widely adopted in many real world data analysis applications, such as customer behavior analysis, targeted marketing, digital forensics, etc. With the explosion of data in today's big data era, a major trend to handle a clustering over large-scale datasets is outsourcing it to public cloud platforms. This is because cloud computing offers not only reliable services with performance guarantees, but also savings on in-house IT infrastructures. However, as datasets used for clustering may contain sensitive information, e.g., patient health information, commercial data, and behavioral data, etc, directly outsourcing them to public cloud servers inevitably raise privacy concerns. In this paper, we propose a practical privacy-preserving K-means clustering scheme that can be efficiently outsourced to cloud servers. Our scheme allows cloud servers to perform clustering directly over encrypted datasets, while achieving comparable computational complexity and accuracy compared with clusterings over unencrypted ones. We also investigate secure integration of MapReduce into our scheme, which makes our scheme extremely suitable for cloud computing environment. Thorough security analysis and numerical analysis carry out the performance of our scheme in terms of security and efficiency. Experimental evaluation over a 5 million objects dataset further validates the practical performance of our scheme.

HNSciCloud, a Hybrid Cloud for Science

Helix Nebula Science Cloud (HNSciCloud) has developed a hybrid cloud platform that links together commercial cloud service providers and research organizations’ in-house IT resources via the GEANT network. The platform offers data management capabilities with transparent data access where applications can be deployed with no modifications on both sides of the hybrid cloud and with compute services accessible via eduGAIN [1] and ELIXIR [2] federated identity and access management systems. In addition, it provides support services, account management facilities, full documentation and training. The cloud services are being tested by a group of 10 research organisations from across Europe [3], against the needs of use-cases from seven ESFRI infrastructures [4]. The capacity procured by ten research organisations from the commercial cloud service providers to support these use-cases during 2018 exceeds twenty thousand cores and two petabytes of storage with a network bandwidth of 40Gbps. All the services are based on open source implementations that do not require licenses in order to be deployed on the in-house IT resources of research organisations connected to the hybrid platform. An early adopter scheme has been put in place so that more research organisations can connect to the platform and procure additional capacity to support their research programmes.

Make or Buy: Offshoring of Services Functions in Manufacturing

About 40% of employment in manufacturing is in services functions. This paper develops a measure of narrow outsourcing, matching services functions performed by workers inside manufacturing firms to the same services functions provided by outside suppliers. Narrow outsourcing is entered into labour demand functions where labour is broken down on business functions using OECD data combined with the 2016 releases of the World Input Output Database (WIOD). The impact of narrow offshoring on manufacturing labour demand is small on average but depends strongly on the complexity of the value chain, the policy environment and technology. Manufacturing employment is more services intensive the longer the value chain. In-house IT functions complement and support offshored IT functions, while offshored R&D functions tend to replace in-house R&D. The results are largely driven by ICT mature manufacturing sectors.

Extending the Automation Pyramid for Industrial Demand Response

Industrial demand response uses a multitude of energy flexibility measures. Their planning and control requires various production IT systems. A widely accepted approach to classify these inhouse IT systems are the levels of the automation pyramid in companies. This paper broadens the scope of this concept to overcome the limitation to companies’ (virtual) borders by including required IT systems that refine and monetarize a company’s energy flexibility, e.g. energy markets, aggregators, etc. Therefore, a holistic approach for the classification of functionalities for industrial demand response across companies and energy markets is developed and applied exemplarily.

Challenges in data storage and data management in a clinical diagnostic setting

Abstract The implementation of next-generation sequencing (NGS) in a clinical diagnostic setting opens vast opportunities through the ability to sequence all genes contributing to a certain morbidity simultaneously at a cost and speed that is superior to traditional sequencing approaches. On the other hand, the practical implementation of NGS in a clinical diagnostic setting involves a variety of new challenges, which need to be overcome. Among these are the generation, analysis and storage of unprecedented amounts of data, strict control of sequencing performance, validation of results, interpretation of detected variants and reporting. In the following sections, key aspects of data management and integration will be discussed. In particular, issues of data storage, data analysis using in-house IT infrastructure vs. data analysis employing cloud computing and the need for data integration from different sources will be covered.

TRENDS OF IT HUMAN RESOURCES AND END-USERS INVOLVEMENT IN I.T. FUNCTION: A COMPARISON OF MANUFACTURING AND SERVICE SECTOR

ABSTRACT The main objective of this study is to better understand the current and future trends associated with in-house IT human resources and end-users involved in IT activities, i.e., end-user computing. Data was collected from the manufacturing and service sectors in the United States. Regarding IT human resources, respondents perceived an average growth of 30.73 percent in manufacturing and 37.31 percent in service; meanwhile, end-user computing growth was 32.54 percent in manufacturing and 37.56 percent in service over a period of five years from the year 2016. In both sectors, growth in IT applications was ranked in the top three. Keywords IT Human Resources, End-user Computing, Cloud Computing, IT Outsourcing/Offshoring, COTS/ERP

Challenges in data storage and data management in a clinical diagnostic setting

The implementation of next-generation sequencing (NGS) in a clinical diagnostic setting opens vast opportunities through the ability to sequence all genes contributing to a certain morbidity simultaneously at a cost and speed that is superior to traditional sequencing approaches. On the other hand, the practical implementation of NGS in a clinical diagnostic setting involves a variety of new challenges, which need to be overcome. Among these are the generation, analysis and storage of unprecedented amounts of data, strict control of sequencing performance, validation of results, interpretation of detected variants and reporting. In the following sections, key aspects of data management and integration will be discussed. In particular, issues of data storage, data analysis using in-house IT infrastructure vs. data analysis employing cloud computing and the need for data integration from different sources will be covered.

A conduit for knowledge? demonstrating the strength of technology improvements in Indian firms that buy outsourced information technology

The literature on the role of information technology outsourcing (ITO) and on knowledge intensive business services only rarely considers purchasers in developing countries and includes few wide-scale studies. This paper reduces that gap in that it quantifies the effect of ITO on total factor productivity using a sample of 10,100 firms in India. The results show that ITO purchasing brings strong returns and outperforms in-house IT. A comparison with studies from elsewhere reveals that Indian ITO also outperforms IT in a range of circumstances in developed countries. Taken together, these findings support the idea that ITO firms, just like other knowledge intensive business services, can act as a conduit for best practices and tacit knowledge, and that this role is very useful in a developing country context. The implication is that more ITO projects would be good for catching up in developing countries. In India, policy support for the ITO sector should be re-designed to incentivise domestic work.

Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems as a Service in Could-based Environment

Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (IDPSs) are standalone complex hardware, expensive to purchase, change and manage. The emergence of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) mitigates these challenges and delivers middlebox functions as virtual instances. Moreover, cloud computing has become a very cost-effective model for sharing large-scale services in recent years. Features such as portability, isolation, live migration, and customizabil-ity of virtual machines for high-performance computing have attracted enterprise customers to move their in-house IT data center to the cloud. In this paper, we formulate the placement of Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (IDPS) and introduce a model called Incremental Mobile Facility Location Problem (IMFLP) to study the IDPP problem. Moreover, we propose a novel and efficient solution called Adaptive Facility Location (AFL) to efficiently solve the optimization problem introduced in the IMFLP model. The effectiveness of our solution is evaluated through realistic simulation studies compared with other popular online facility location algorithms.