IT Corporations Research Articles

Notas desde la Dirección Editorial

Yeiyá (“caminar” en wixárica, grupo étnico de México), revista de estudios críticos sobre ciencias sociales de los problemas y retos más importantes del mundo, y en particular de América Latina, hace su aparición a finales del 2020, año de enorme incertidumbre por la pandemia del capitalismo global que de forma inédita presenta la sincronía con una crisis civilizatoria multidimensional evidente desde los años setenta del siglo anterior, que se profundiza con la Gran Recesión económica de 2007-2010 y ahora con la doble pandemia mundial, sanitaria y económica, muestran la enorme vulnerabilidad de la humanidad y del planeta de seguir bajo los dictados del modelo de la muerte neoliberal y la financiarización de todos los aspectos de la economía, la sociedad, la naturaleza y la vida. Los impactos planetarios a nivel sanitario, económico, de desigualdad social creciente y de mayor ecocidio frente a un acentuado proceso de concentración de la riqueza de las corporaciones financieras, informáticas, de la salud y la industria militar obligan a promover un debate profundo sobre nuevas propuestas de organización social, de estrategias diferentes de desarrollo con la seguridad humana, el bienestar y la sostenibilidad ambiental como prioridades centrales. Lo que implica, entre otras tareas, definir el regreso del Estado al frente de las políticas sanitarias y económicas en todo el mundo como única estrategia para enfrentar los impactos y construir la salida de la doble pandemia, se convierte en una etapa de transición hacia la construcción de escenarios de posdesarrollo que erradiquen la explotación, la desigualdad, la depredación de la naturaleza y el aniquilamiento de las diferentes expresiones de la vida.

The Social Appraisal of Techno-Experiments: Whirlpools and Mosaics of Smart Urbanism

ABSTRACT Technology-driven experiments—techno-experiments—have become a central mode of spatial intervention in a paradigm of smart growth. They are often considered a manifestation of a techno-managerial approach to governance, built upon the increasing influence of IT corporations on urban politics. Yet, there is little evidence indicating how these interests articulate techno-experiments and shape their legacies over the long run. This paper questions the varied politics of techno-experiments by comparing four projects in Stockholm and Amsterdam: two smart energy grid pilots and two online community-based platforms. Mobilizing the notion of the “social appraisal of technology,” it argues that techno-experiments can take different forms depending on how the role of digital technology is defined and negotiated by actors throughout the process of experimentation. The paper empirically shows that experiments can evolve in two main ways, defined as “whirlpools” and “mosaics.” As whirlpools, they upscale self-referentially; as mosaics, they instead extend into a set of scattered spin-offs. The key factors producing such outcomes, these cases show, are the form of partnership established at the outset of techno-experiments, and the ability of research funding and governmental agencies to steer projects as they develop.

Designing the Information Educational Environment of the Studying Course for the Educational Process Management Using Cloud Services

The authoritative International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that by 2023, global spending on public cloud services and infrastructure will be more than double, mainly due to the introduction of digital transformations. Globally, the cloud market is becoming a field of increasingly fierce competition between the world's leading IT corporations. Modern education is rapidly evolving due to teachers who in recent years have introduced cloud services in their professional activities. There was an urgent question about the formation of information and educational environment for cooperation, collaboration, communication and learning mobility. This study is devoted to the analysis of the methods peculiarities of designing the information and educational environment of the discipline with the help of GoogleServices. The authors reviewed Google Services for designing open and closed information and educational environments, which are free, so they can be actively used in the educational process. The advantages of open and closed information-educational environment of the discipline as environments for the organization and management of the educational process are described. In the study, the authors identified the following characteristics of the information and educational environment: openness (support for modern standards, Internet / Intranet technology); scalability (increasing the number of services provided in the environment; the amount of information that can be processed); expansion of databases and knowledge (does not lead to the need to reconfigure the system); integration (the ability to organize a single educational environment to expand the tasks associated with the development and design of educational and methodological support of the educational process); adaptability (dynamic adjustment to the needs of both a particular educational institution and an individual user).

ЩОДО ВПЛИВУ ЦИФРОВОЇ РЕВОЛЮЦІЇ НА ЕКОНОМІКУ ТА ЛЮДИНУ: ЕФЕКТИ ЦИФРОВІЗАЦІЇ

In the article we showed that the" digital revolution " had little impact on the development of the economy, as shown by the analysis of data on labor productivity growth (1995-2000) and multifactor productivity in the United States (2010-2015), a comparative analysis of incoming and outgoing flows of the IT sector (1987-1998). ICT spending in the world as a whole is huge and growing faster than GDP. However, ICT contributes to economic growth only upon reaching the minimum threshold of infrastructure development and the return of high cost requires growth in sales, which is problematic in the downturn in the global economy and not feasible for many countries.The largest IT corporations receive dividends from the development of the "digital economy". At the same time, most of the revenue of technology giants is associated not with the real, but with the virtual economy, and the value of their income is comparable to the GDP of the largest countries in the world by GDP. The dominance of IT corporations can lead to the fact that the whole new economy will be managed only by them.The role of technology in the modern world is changing, and if the third technological revolution was aimed at changing the economy, the fourth-a profound change in man and therefore it is more appropriate to call humanitarian and technological.It is a process of global and deep changes of the person and society on the basis of NBICS technologies which gluing basis are digital for the purpose of cardinal reorganization of the existing social and economic order. In the new system, the nature of benefits is concentrated not in the field of improving technical and economic processes, but in the field of behavior management.Even now, under the influence of digital technologies and modern culture, which is confirmed by many studies of the digital generation, deep changes are taking place with the human psyche. And this is the basis for the management of human behavior in all spheres, including in the economy, along with the process of algorithmization of all aspects of life in the modern world. But this is a dead end for the development of society and the traditional economy.

Engineering Privacy by Design: Are engineers ready to live up to the challenge?

Organizations struggle to comply with legal requirements as well as customers’ calls for better data protection. On the implementation level, incorporation of privacy protections in products and services depends on the commitment of the engineers who design them. We interviewed six senior engineers, who work for globally leading IT corporations and research institutions, to investigate their motivation and ability to comply with privacy regulations. Our findings point to a lack of perceived responsibility, control, autonomy, and frustrations with interactions with the legal world. While we increasingly call on engineers to go beyond functional requirements and be responsive to human values in our increasingly technological society, we may be facing the dilemma of asking engineers to live up to a challenge they are currently not ready to embrace.

IFLA Statement on Net Neutrality and Zero-rating: At the backstage of the problem

The article analyzes the IFLA Statement on Network Neutrality and Zero-rating adopted on August 15, 2016 at the meeting of the World Library and Information Congress of the 82nd IFLA Conference inColumbus,USA, its importance for the international library community, as well as the socio-economic and cultural context, which was due to its adoption. Speaking in defense of network neutrality and against the practice of the zero-rating, IFLA designated a zone of latent for that period conflict of commercial interests of Internet providers and rules of equal access of the user to all types of content without speed and additional fee. Conflict this year later, in 2017, became public in the period of active struggle against the abolition of the principle of network neutrality in theUnited States.The market rate of traffic, the green light of which was opened as a result of the cancellation of network neutrality in theUnited Stateson December 14, 2017 by the Federal Communications Commission, is particularly sensitive for libraries with limited funding, unable to pay for high-speed Internet. In addition to paid access to broadband Internet, the obvious danger for libraries is the practice of zero rating, providing free and unlimited traffic in the framework of popular social networks or package tariff plans from large corporations, which leads to the monopolization of the information market by the largest IT corporations and the further marginalization of libraries.The displacement of cultural and educational institutions as a non-profitable sector on the roadside negatively affects libraries as providers of access and as creators of Internet content; strikes both on the acquisition of funds, and on the maintenance of readers of high-quality noncommercial information. As natural opponents of progressing monetization, the Library's networks favor the interpretation of the Internet as a public service, a publicly available public resource with a transparent and stable tariff, legislatively protected from attempts by providers to receive super-profits.

HUMAN CAPITAL IN INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS IN THE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY INDUSTRY – RESULTS OF EMPIRICAL RESEARCH

The most important asset of any organization is the people. Measures taken to improve the quality and safety of work, the atmosphere and relations between employees should be treated as an investment, since the long-term benefits of such activities can be seen in many respects. The aim of this paper is to present the results of empirical pilot studies conducted in IT corporations concerning the implementation of corporate social responsibility principles towards employees

Do we Need a Political Economy of Surveillance? The Case of the GDPR: A Critical Account of the Norms Governing Cyberspace

This study examines the General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union from a critical perspective. By doing so, it aims to generate a comprehensive account of online surveillance practices for commercial purposes, and how public policy in this field is normatively conceived. In order to untangle the normative elements of this highly contested and complex regulation, which took more than five years to be signed under intense lobbying, this paper concentrates on the topics of Consent, Data Ownership and Profiling. These three interrelated elements constitute the primary sources of power asymmetries in the Web between users and providers of online services. By employing the proposed theoretical perspective of a political economy of surveillance, this paper draws from concepts of Foucauldian panoptic surveillance and of Marxist political economics, in order to draw a picture of current surveillance practices by major, quasi- monopolistic IT corporations such as Google and Facebook. The analysis then tests this framework with regard to the normative stance taken by the GDPR, the first major initiative aimed at regulating cyberspace. Deconstructing regulation in this way helps to understand the normative and ideological lines of action of the EU in the newly emerged policy area of the Common Digital Market.

Cloud Computing for Business

According to the Statists portal, the numbers of consumer cloud-based service users are reaching 3.4 billion, which is almost half of the world’s population, in 2018. This statistic clearly shows the cloud computing Technology has been expanding tremendously and it will be the future of Information technology. Cisco, HP and other enterprises IT corporations are introducing cloud-based equipment such as cloud-based wireless controllers, access points, switches, firewall and many other cloud-based infrastructures. Cloud computing is the great paradigm shift of information technology and business should aware of the wave that is shaking the whole industry. The main purpose of this paper is to identify and discuss the key components of cloud computing and cloud services for small to medium size businesses.

SCSMiner: mining social coding sites for software developer recommendation with relevance propagation

With the advent of social coding sites, software development has entered a new era of collaborative work. Social coding sites (e.g., GitHub) can integrate social networking and distributed version control in a unified platform to facilitate collaborative developments over the world. One unique characteristic of such sites is that the past development experiences of developers provided on the sites convey the implicit metrics of developer’s programming capability and expertise, which can be applied in many areas, such as software developer recruitment for IT corporations. Motivated by this intuition, we aim to develop a framework to effectively locate the developers with right coding skills. To achieve this goal, we devise a generativ e probabilistic expert ranking model upon which a consistency among projects is incorporated as graph regularization to enhance the expert ranking and a perspective of relevance propagation illustration is introduced. For evaluation, StackOverflow is leveraged to complement the ground truth of expert. Finally, a prototype system, SCSMiner, which provides expert search service based on a real-world dataset crawled from GitHub is implemented and demonstrated.

Programming Practices of Chinese Code Farmers

Built on the theoretical framework of articulation and assemblage, this article explores programming practices among grassroots programmers in contemporary China. Using data obtained from ethnographic fieldwork in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, it provides an account of the information technology practices in contemporary China at the nexus of the Beijing government, IT corporations, and individual programmers. Through examining how programming is articulated in both China’s advocacy for “a creative society” and grassroots programmers’ daily practices in the process of China’s informatization, this article has mapped myriad articulations such as engagement, communication, discourse, and practice that have made and unmade grassroots programmers’ programming assemblage. We argue that technology for Chinese programmers is a mixed blessing. As a means of survival, technology exacerbates the precariousness and marginalisation of grassroots programmers in China, while the capability of technology production also enables the remaking of subjectivity and social change. The findings of this study thus advocate a deeper and dialectical understanding of the interaction between technology, labour, and empowerment.

Evaluation of a Cloud Computing Environment by different Strategies of Sensitivity Analysis

For several years, cloud computing systems have been generating debate and interest within IT corporations. These cloud computing environments provide storage and processing systems that are adaptable, efficient and simple, thus allowing for rapid infrastructure modifications to be made, according to constantly changing workloads. Organizations of any size and type are migrating to the cloud supporting solutions based on Web. Due to the benefits of the pay-per-use model and scalability factors, services such as Video Streaming. Recent failure events in Video Streaming services have demonstrated the critical importance of maintaining high availability in cloud computing infrastructures. One of the methods used to identify the trends of occurrences of failures in computational systems, occurs through the application of strategies of sensitivity analysis. This paper uses hierarchical modeling and different sensitivity analysis techniques to determine the parameters that cause the greatest impact on the availability of a Video on Demand. The results show that distinct approaches provide similar results regarding the sensitivity ranking, with specific exceptions. A combined evaluation indicates that system availability may be improved effectively by focusing on a reduced set of factors that produce large variation on the measure of interest.

THE IMPACT OF RESEARCH AND DEVELEOPMENT ON REVENUE GENERATION AND INVESTMENT VALUATION OF INFO-TECH CORPORTIONS

In today’s rapidly changing business world, it has become imperative for companies to be innovative, in order to stay in business. At the heart of this approach is research and development (R&D). While, R&D practices differ across industries and companies, we recognize that the practice is prevalent in the pharmaceutical and the information technology (IT/ info-tech) industries. Despite the fact, that much research has been done on R&D in the pharmaceutical industry, there is limited literature and research on the subject in the information technology industry. Consequently, this study is our effort to assess the impact of R&D on revenue generation and investment valuation of IT corporations. In this study, we investigate the impact of R&D on revenue generation and investment valuation of 40 United States (U.S.) based information technology corporations. We find that info-tech companies that invest more on R&D generate more revenue. We also find that investors place higher value on corporations that invest larger parts of their revenues on R&D. This suggests that investors expect higher earnings growth in the future of companies that invest greater parts of their revenues on R&D.

Disclosure of Intellectual Capital in Annual Reports: An Exploratory Study of Indian IT Corporations

Knowledge, innovation, information technology, and people are the key contributories in the future of any organization, and IC is the key driver of market value in the ―knowledge‖ economy. Voluntary disclosure of IC information in the annual reports is done by a few leading corporations. The omission of IC information, therefore, may adversely influence the quality of decisions made by shareholders, or lead to material misstatements. This study attempts to provide an insight into the ―narrative‖ style of IC disclosures done by the Indian corporations. In order to survey the recent IC disclosure scenario, we conducted a study of 16 Indian IT corporations in which the ‗content analysis' was done on their 2007 to 2009 annual reports. The results of this study confirmed that IC disclosure by these IT corporations is almost negligible and its disclosure had not received any preference from the mentors of these corporations. IC reports may initially be used for ‗internal' management purposes; but an ‗external' stakeholder-focus of IC report should be the ultimate goal.

An Unequal Partnership: The Privatisation of Information Technology in Ontario

This paper presents a case study of the outsourcing of IT services between 1996 and 2003 by the Government of Ontario using a Public Private Partnership (P3) as an example of the commodification of public services including the impact on labour. It argues that three key features of the arrangement led to it becoming an ‘unequal partnership.’ First, ideological notions of a ‘knowledge economy’ and the techno-wizard status of independent IT workers were used by IT corporations to charge very high corporate rates for the time of outsourced IT staff, despite the fact that they were in fact undergoing a process of proletarianisation. Second, the P3 cost-benefit structure of shared costs and shared payments provided the framework for corporate partners to realise higher profits from investment in privatised state activities. Third, the explicit support of influential state and near-state actors undermined opposition to P3 projects.

Settlement concentration of economic potential represented by IT corporations

The paper attempts to discuss research on spatial variation in the distribution of the headquarters of 100 leading IT corporations by city in the years 2003-2011. The research shows that the global space offers powerful opportunities for differentiating the headquarters of leading IT corporations. This is emphasised by the number of headquarters per city and their spatial concentration. Predominantly, they can be found in six areas: the Japanese-Korean area, eastern China, the West Coast of the USA, the East Coast of the USA, the central part of the USA, and north-western Europe. Tokyo, Kyoto, Hsinchu, Paris, Santa Clara, San Jose, Sunnyvale and Taipei offer the best conditions for locating headquarters of IT corporations and house the highest number of headquarters.

An Empirical Study on the Influencing Factors for Big Data Intented Adoption: Focusing on the Strategic Value Recognition and TOE Framework

An Empirical Study on the Influencing Factors for Big Data Intented Adoption: Focusing on the Strategic Value Recognition and TOE Framework

Spatial Concentration of IT Corporation Headquarters

This paper analyses spatial concentration of IT corporation headquarters (HQs) with the intention to identify the countries where IT corporation headquarters are concentrated. According to the research, from 2003 to 2011, the most dominant IT corporations had their headquarters in the USA, Japan and Taiwan, as these countries created the best conditions for their operations. In European countries, the highest number of company headquarters was reported in France, Germany and Switzerland. An analysis of the economic potential indicator showed that, over that period, IT corporations were growing dispersed in the global space. The phenomenon manifested itself by a drop in the number of corporations placing their headquarters in the USA and Japan, which translated into dispersed economic potential that, by the time, had been concentrated in these countries. Furthermore, newly emerging corporations from China, Ireland, India, the Netherlands, Mexico and Malaysia increased their importance in the sales structure. The high degree of economic concentration of IT corporations was confirmed by the synthetic metric of the economic potential, calculated on the basis of: the number of corporations, sales value, profit, the value of their assets and their market value.

Redundant VoD Streaming Service in a Private Cloud: Availability Modeling and Sensitivity Analysis

For several years cloud computing has been generating considerable debate and interest within IT corporations. Since cloud computing environments provide storage and processing systems that are adaptable, efficient, and straightforward, thereby enabling rapid infrastructure modifications to be made according to constantly varying workloads, organizations of every size and type are migrating to web-based cloud supported solutions. Due to the advantages of the pay-per-use model and scalability factors, current video on demand (VoD) streaming services rely heavily on cloud infrastructures to offer a large variety of multimedia content. Recent well documented failure events in commercial VoD services have demonstrated the fundamental importance of maintaining high availability in cloud computing infrastructures, and hierarchical modeling has proved to be a useful tool for evaluating the availability of complex systems and services. This paper presents an availability model for a video streaming service deployed in a private cloud environment which includes redundancy mechanisms in the infrastructure. Differential sensitivity analysis was applied to identify and rank the critical components of the system with respect to service availability. The results demonstrate that such a modeling strategy combined with differential sensitivity analysis can be an attractive methodology for identifying which components should be supported with redundancy in order to consciously increase system dependability.

Koncentracja przestrzenna działalności gospodarczej korporacji ponadnarodowej Google w latach 2006–2010

The predominant role played by multinational corporations comes as a result of the globalization process. In the modern era of knowledge, we observe intensive development of high technology industries, mainly computer science. The IT corporations are looking for the effective locations for their offices. This article presents an analysis of the changes in the spatial structure of the economic potential of the Google corporation in years 2006–2010.Google was established in 1998. Since then, it has developed rapidly and become a leader in computing and Internet search. 73 departments of the corporation are located in 43 countries, usually in the capitals of these countries or in rather large cities, which are associated with major public markets. The leading actors are 26 departments located in Europe and 24 departments located in the North America. The headquarters of Google is located in Mountain View, California. Individual countries have varying degree of presence of Google offices, the greatest number being located in the United States – 20, whilst 3 are located in Poland: in Warsaw, Cracow and Wroclaw.The economic potential of Google has been concentrated in three areas: the United States, the United Kingdom and other countries. In years 2006–2010, the value of profits in each area increased; the most dynamic growth was noticed in other countries. In years 2007–2010, the value of assets had the same growth tendencies. Judging by its economic potential, it is said that Google is developing rapidly, especially outside the United States. It is caused by the fact that the American market is already controlled and new markets all over the world are searched for and explored.