IT Construction Research Articles

Knowledge Sharing Enablers and Barriers: Insights From a Socio-Environmental Project

Knowledge is recognized as an organizational asset in projects, as it reduces failures, improves competencies, and saves resources. Knowledge sharing (KS), specifically, brings value to projects. However, it is poorly investigated in project management literature, as generally previous works have focused on IT and civil construction projects. The literature has described some factors which foster or inhibit KS, nevertheless, there is little consensus about KS enablers and barriers in the project’s contexts. Therefore, this paper investigates KS enablers and barriers in a socio-environmental project. It adopted Action Research as the strategy of investigation. Observations and semi-structured interviews were used for data collection, as well as field notes. The thematic analysis method was used for data analysis. The results highlight the participants’ systemic thinking, which can explain why the feeling of dependence and perceived personal benefits were assumed as KS enablers. Also, the team's collaborative and empathetic behavior and the participants' openness to dialogue influenced positively the intention to share knowledge. The project’s horizontal organizational structure and the availability of virtual and physical spaces facilitated the knowledge flow. Most of the interviewees were professors which possibly influenced their KS behavior. The social restrictions imposed by COVID-19 were a KS barrier. In addition, the team size, lack of time, and the multidisciplinary character of the project likely hindered KS. Surprisingly, the lack of previous social ties was not a significant KS barrier. In summary, our results confirmed previous results regarding KS enablers, and we found systemic thinking as a KS enabler. As a KS barrier, we highlighted the lack of time, suggesting it is common in projects due to their limited timeline. These findings add to the KS literature, mainly to analyze an organizational context that is unsatisfactorily investigated. Furthermore, this study helps managers to identify KS enablers and barriers aimed at adopting appropriate organizational interventions to increase KS. Moreover, this research has shown evidence from a multidisciplinary project from the socio-environmental field which needs to integrate several professionals' knowledge to provide substantial conclusions regarding the social, cultural, and natural aspects they were analyzing.

Gender Aspects of Working from Home in Serbia

In this exploratory research, we examined the socio-economic aspects of working from home for men and women in Serbia, their psychosocial adjustment to that work, and especially the differences among Serbian freelancers by gender. In an electronic survey participated 180 women and 228 men. According to socio-demographic variables, it was determined that women are significantly younger, that they work significantly shorter at home, and that there are significantly fewer of them in predominantly "male" occupations: IT sector, construction, and transport. According to several economic variables, no statistically significant differences were found by gender, except that women are significantly more likely to be guided by a good business idea and higher earnings when starting a business at home, and more often consult a psychologist when in crisis. No statistically significant differences were found in terms of psychosocial adjustment, but also among men and women - freelancers, with some minor exceptions. Based on the analysis of the content of three types of questionnaires, the social profiles of women and men working at (from) home are described. In the final part of the study, unexpectedly similar research results by gender were elaborated in detail.

Fuzzy simulation of integrity break risks of project documents

Simulation and risk management in accordance with international standards is the basis for building an information security policy of the enterprise. An overview of the current state of development in this area, the current update of cybersecurity tasks and the corresponding increase in costs indicate the need to develop new approaches to measuring information security risks. One of the possible areas of research is the simulation of project security risks, as project activities are inherent in enterprises of many industries, including IT companies, construction companies and others. In the article the issue of information security of the project is considered on the basis of its formal presentation in the form of a set of documents and operations on them. During the processing of each document, which generally includes the creation, storage, editing and transmission of the document, there are risks of breach of its confidentiality, integrity or accessibility. Blurring and incomplete information regarding the characteristics of information security risks of documents necessitates using of fuzzy logic to formalize them. In this paper, a model is proposed to assess the possibility of violation of the integrity of project documents and the damage from such a violation on the basis of the mathematical apparatus of fuzzy logic. The developed model has a generalized structure, as it is based on the formalization of set of project documents and operations on them using certain information systems and personnel. To assess the damage from the implementation of the threat of violation of the document integrity, it is proposed to use the method of hierarchies analysis on the basis of the tree of criteria. The developed model can be used in the creation of specialized information systems for risk assessment of projects and used to manage information security in enterprises whose activities are of a project nature.

Research on Android Application Security Protection in China

With the development of mobile internet, it is necessary to take mobile application security into consideration as a strategic focus of enterprise’s IT construction. This article firstly introduces the establishment of mobile security standard and guidance. Then a lifecyle security protection from five perspectives is presented in detail to help to implement security strategies and solutions, including security assessment, security development, security test, security reinforcement and security monitoring. Finally, new security technique and tendency of mobile application is discussed to provide enterprise IT manager with more ideas.

RETRACTED ARTICLE: Cloud based u-healthcare network with QoS guarantee for mobile health service

Today’s medical industry can be represented by a human-centered u-healthcare paradigm that is available and accessible anywhere, where high-tech IT can serve as the basis at any time and any place. In addition, in the medical industry, studies of many of the developments and applications are actively conducted based on the development of information communication technology. The aim of medical-information systems is the construction of an advanced IT and integrated u-healthcare system that evolves in the direction of integrated medical-based IT-convergence systems. Accordingly, to resolve the problems of telemedicine, in terms of the remote access to medical data, some public and private initiatives have been proposed, ranging from patient-mobility approaches to medical data. In addition, regarding GENICloud, which provides links with the existing future Internet testbeds and the Eucalyptus Cloud, two out of the seven GENIAM APIs have been announced as the common APIs of the future Internet testbeds in GENI, and they have been implemented and are provided. In the present GENI Cloud system, due to the provision of limited APIs, restrictions may occur in the future Internet testbeds and the Eucalyptus Cloud system management. Therefore, this study proposes a cloud-based mobile health service for the enhancement of the quality of service (QoS) including factors such as reliability and response time to resolve the problems of the broadband-communication infrastructure in the existing mobile health service and the delay problem on the wireless body area network. In this paper, we propose the cloud-based u-healthcare network with a QoS-guaranteed mobile health service. For this method, the TMO-distribution object model that was used in the existing research to implement a reliable and efficient cloud system for users was not used, and instead, a cloud-platform environment was built up through the construction of a distributed system based on a cluster-based mobile object. For this purpose, this study considered the characteristics of the wireless-communication environments between the terminals and the cloud servers in the mobile cloud environment and the proposed cloud mobility services and the specialized mobile cloud-control software. Later, for linkages with cloud computing environments and testbeds was proposed. In addition, this study carried out a cloud mobility-control design to provide a service in the mobile cloud environment that is based on the actual future Internet testbeds. Lastly, based on the structured cloud-platform environment, this study designed access interfaces to provide a mobile healthcare service in consideration of the user convenience. For the mobile-service access interfaces, since the same service interfaces can be used to access the characteristics and functions of all of the applications from browsers and device clients, the model-view-controller structure of the platform was designed, including the components for the further improvement of the requirements, reuse, and maintenance of the codes in medium and large distributed systems.

Inter-industry analysis in the Korean flow-of-funds accounts

This study mainly aims to provide an inter-industry analysis through the subdivision of various industries in flow-of-funds (FOF) accounts. Combined with the Financial Statement Analysis data from 2004 and 2005, the Korean FOF accounts are reconstructed to form “from-whom-to-whom” basis FOF tables, which are composed of 115 institutional sectors and correspond to tables and techniques of input–output (I–O) analysis. First, power of dispersion indices are obtained by applying the I–O analysis method. Most service and IT industries, construction, and light industries in manufacturing are included in the first-quadrant group, whereas heavy and chemical industries are placed in the fourth quadrant since their power indices in the asset-oriented system are comparatively smaller than those of other institutional sectors. Second, investments and savings, which are induced by the central bank, are calculated for monetary policy evaluations. Industries are bifurcated into two groups to compare their features. The first group refers to industries whose power of dispersion in the asset-oriented system is greater than 1, mainly light industries, IT, and service. On the other hand, the second group indicates that their index is less than 1, mostly heavy and chemical industries. We found that the net induced investments (NII)–total liabilities ratios of the first group show levels half those of the second group since the former’s induced savings are obviously greater than the latter.

Research and Implementing of Software Defined Border Protection in Hybrid Cloud

Hybrid cloud is composed of enterprise private cloud and public cloud tenant network. It has effectively reduced construction cost, improved enterprise IT construction efficiency and expansibility of private cloud, and brought security risk such as fuzzy boundary at the same time. This thesis studies the common access control means used in current hybrid cloud and has proposed a unified strategy control mechanism to address hybrid cloud. By applying software-defined network and network function virtualization, the mechanism has succeeded in multi-granularity of flow in east-west direction and in north-south direction of virtual network, realized internally unified access strategy, and improved the efficiency and flexibility of access control.

Separation and Identification of Two Fungal Strains in Stored Maize

The microbiological spoilage of stored grain is important for human health and economic loss. Two major predominant grain spoilage fungi (M15 and M16) were isolated from maize from a granary in China. Morphological observation of the fungal isolates, analysis of their ITS sequences and construction of their phylogenetic trees were conducted on these two strains, which were identified as Fusarium solani (M15) and Aspergillus sclerotiorum (M16). This method was shown to be a feasible, accurate and convenient way to identify fungi in stored grain.

Bluetooth-Tracing RSSI Sampling Method as Basic Technology of Indoor Localization for Smart Homes

In recent years, smart homes have become the center of interest for IT companies and construction companies and various types of smart homes have been made currently available on the market. Yet, these equipment are costly and it is not easy to convert existing equipment for smart home application as they may require additional resources which could also inflict much costs. The extra costs involving the remodeling of existing housing structure and installment of new equipments can be avoided by using advanced wireless technologies. As an example, this paper proposes an indoor localization system that adopts Bluetooth technology and uses RSSI values for localization. Researchers have configured a system where the central control device will recognize all other devices or equipments in the system, communicate with each other, and respond to the commands or the information provided. However, despite the efforts of many researchers, existing RSSI-based indoor localization systems do not show a satisfactory level of accuracy such that we have devised a system that traces the trend in the RSSI samples. The RSSI sampling algorithm uses Delta values obtained from the Delta sampling process to improve system accuracy and to lower the costs. The analysis results led us to believe that our algorithm has a reduced localization error rate by 12%-point compared to the algorithm that used raw sampling method.

Building Efficient Cloud Platform to Deal with Challenges of New Demand from Smart Grid

With the introduction of advanced information technology such as cloud computing, virtualization, we will solve the current and future IT construction difficulties. It can also be advantageous to improve the rational allocation of computing resources and improve the utilization rate through the application of this new type of resource organization, distribution and usage patterns. Finally it will promote energy conservation and emissions reduction, lift up green computing development.

Studies on Construction and Operation Mode of Intelligent Transportation Systems

Government departments of different areas are needed during the construction and operation process of intelligent transportation systems. So there is a contradiction that systems must be integrated but they need to be constructed and operated by different organizations. The division of the construction mission among different organization and the rules that all the joint members have to obey should be clear so that repetition and confliction in the whole system can be avoided. These modes of mission division are compared in this paper to provide a reference for our ITS construction and operation mode selection.

Avaliação da importância relativa dos critérios para a seleção de Sistemas Integrados de Gestão (ERP) para uso em empresas da construção civil

A adoção de Sistemas Integrados de Gestão, também denotados sistemas ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), introduziu a necessidade de se discutir o processo de avaliação deste tipo de sistemas, o qual está inserido em um contexto de múltiplas percepções ou critérios de avaliação. No presente trabalho, efetua-se uma revisão bibliográfica sistematizada em um conjunto de artigos publicados em periódicos indexados nas bases Scopus, ISI Web of Science ou Engineering Village, os quais relatam a construção/aplicação de modelos multicritério para avaliação de sistemas ERP. Com base nesta revisão bibliográfica, foi construído um conjunto de critérios e subcritérios, o qual foi submetido à validação por um conjunto de especialistas com experiência na seleção e implantação de ERP, resultando em uma árvore composta por 45 subcritérios agrupados em cinco critérios. Posteriormente, foi desenvolvida uma pesquisa de campo, da qual participaram 79 respondentes, principalmente das áreas de TI e Construção Civil, para captar percepções quanto à importância relativa destes critérios. A pesquisa revelou que os respondentes consideram os critérios Financeiro, Negócio e Software os mais importantes.

Research on Construction and Operation Mode of Intelligent Transportation Systems

Intelligent Transportation Systems are highly integrated. Many government and business organizations are needed during the construction and operation process. In this paper, the task of construction and operation for ITS is discussed. Construction and operation mode is divided into government dominant mode, business dominant mode and mixed mode. These modes are compared with construction speed, information-sharing quality, service quality and economic benefits to analyze their applicability. This conclusion provides a reference for our ITS construction and operation mode selection.

Construction of web-based IT Assets Management System

As IT is also recognized as assets, IT assets management system is trying to introduce for the management and operation in domestic enterprises and public institutions. The general assets management system was introduced in domestic companies, but because it managed mainly the only simple information about the assets, there were a lot of operational difficulties of the assets. In order to operate effectively the IT assets used in special business such as bank, prosecutors, railway, etc the classification system of IT assets based on the EA was needed first of all. Accordingly, in this paper, we classified IT assets systematically according to the EA meta model Application Guide V1.4 in consideration of the characteristics about the IT asset business for A public institution, and performed to improve the operating costs and efficiency by implementing a web-based IT assets management system for this public institution.

A Comparative Biomechanical Analysis of Fixation Devices for Unstable Femoral Neck Fractures: The Intertan Versus Cannulated Screws or a Dynamic Hip Screw

First introduced in 2005, the "Intertan" (IT), an intramedullary nail with two cephalocervical screws, has become an increasingly popular option for treating intertrochanteric fractures. The purpose of this study was to identify the utility of this device for stabilization of unstable femoral neck fractures compared with cannulated screws (CS) and a dynamic hip screw (DHS). Twenty-four human cadaveric femurs were harvested and assigned to three groups that were matched with regard to bone mineral density (BMD). Standardized Pauwels-Type-III fractures were osteomized with a custom-made saw guide and fixated by an "IT," three CS, or a DHS. All constructs were biomechanically tested in a servohydraulic testing machine with a physiologic mechanical axis loading of the femoral head (700 N), cyclical compression to 1,400 N (10,000 cycles; 2 Hz), and loading to failure. All specimens were compared with respect to the number of survived cycles, mechanical strength, head displacement, load to failure, and failure mechanism. Regardless of the fixation, the mechanical strength of the stabilized femurs was significantly decreased to 71% compared with the intact femurs (100%). During cyclical testing 46% of the constructs (6 CS, 4 DHS, and 1 IT) failed. There was no difference between the mechanical strength of all survived constructs regarding the BMD, but the BMD of the failed specimens was significantly reduced compared with the surviving femurs (0.71 g/cm² ± 0.18 g/cm² vs. 1.07 g/cm² ± 0.33 g/cm²; p < 0.05). IT femurs survived significantly longer than CS specimens (IT, 9,063 cycles ± 2,480 cycles vs. CS, 3,325 cycles ± 3,885 cycles vs. DHS, 5,716 cycles ± 4,448 cycles; p < 0.01), endured higher failure loads (IT, 4,929 N ± 1,105 N vs. CS, 3,421 N ± 20 N vs. DHS, 3,505 N ± 905 N; p < 0.05), and presented a less inferior head displacement (IT, 8.5 mm ± 1.6 mm vs. CS, 16.4 mm ± 6.7 mm vs. DHS, 14.5 mm ± 6.4 mm; p < 0.05). Our results suggest that (1) none of the tested devices restore a comparable mechanical strength in the fractured specimens compared with the intact femurs, and (2) the "IT" possesses some biomechanical benefits for internal fixation of unstable femoral neck fractures compared with DHS and CS. Because the IT constructs failed with an inferior femoral neck fracture, complicating the mandatory anchorage of a prosthetic stem in a revision operation, more biomechanical experiments using the IT in the presence of a posterior comminution defect are required, along with clinical outcome studies.

A readiness model for IT investment in the construction industry

The issues of IT failures have led to wide investigations efforts over the years. Ample evidence discovered that inability to evaluate organisation readiness among the main factor contributes to the failure. Most of the current IT/IS evaluation model focused on the post-implementation which failed to address the readiness of the organisation prior to the implementation. Assessing organisation readiness is critically important as a means for planning and adopting IT in organisation. Construction industry is among the critical industry that used IT extensively to support its long production processes. However, it is noted that the failure rate of IT project in this industry was also high, and one of the reasons identified was that the IT investment decision was made through ad-hoc manner without any adequate preparation. To date, it is found that only three readiness models available for IT evaluation in construction industry. Therefore, this paper will review the current available readiness model relating to IT investment in construction industry. It is anticipated that the findings can highlight the importance of developing an IT readiness model specifically for construction industry that focus on one aspect only that is the ‘soft issue’. Key words: Readiness, construction, IT evaluation, IT construction, readiness model.

Exploring the effects of direct experience on IT use: An organizational field study

Empirical studies have investigated the effect of attitude and behavior on IT acceptance in organizations but yielded ambiguous results. Possibly they have not effectively accounted for the moderating effects of experience gained through direct interaction with the target technology. We examined the moderating effect of the length of direct experience on IT acceptance relationships and constructs. Using multi-group invariance analysis, we demonstrated that relationships between key IT acceptance constructs differed, depending on the user's experience. The incorporation of direct experience can lead to convergent results and contribute to further understanding of the process. We discuss some implications from the knowledge that IT use is a dynamic process and suggest that IT management must account for direct experience in their decision making.

Enterprise Security for Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is among the most talked-about, highest-buzz IT constructs of late, the subject of numerous articles and blogs and, since 2004, multiple conferences. While in many respects an Internet phenomenon, Web 2.0 is quickly gaining a beachhead against the legacy "stovepiped" way in which users manage and disseminate information of all kinds within the enterprise. It's also an outside-in revolution: Technologies developed and explored outside the enterprise are migrating inside it. People who've gotten hooked on Web 2.0 demand the same user experience, tools, and networking in their work that they've experienced at play. The good news for enterprise security practitioners is that the impact of Web 2.0 has thus far been evolutionary. However, Web 2.0 growth is accelerating, and it's doing so for reasons as varied as compliance, privacy, and protection of corporate assets. Organizations considering deployment of Web 2.0 capabilities must exercise caution and control, just as they do with non-Web 2.0 technologies. What's needed, in short, is Security 2.0.

Construction of IT Based Learning System at University Level

Rapid progress of information and communication technologies has been changing the education method. In Japan, online lectures have been recognized as the credits for graduation by the change of a law since 2001. One trial to construct an IT based learning system has been done for the development of IT based higher education and training. Educational effect of online lecture taken anytime and anywhere is evaluated, and then an authoring software for online lectures is developed for educators who are not familiar to IT. A learning management system begins to be operated for whole lectures, and a wireless LAN system is equipped in whole campus of Kumamoto University.

地形確認業務への情報化施工の適用に関する一提案

With the development of IT technology, the next generation of CALSIEC is expected to improve the whole construction process. In order to implement this new CALS/EC, it is necessary to optimize the construction process by using the information technology.In this paper, firstly, the present topographic checking is questioned because it is a very important item in road construction period. Then, the process of topographic checking is analyzed from the viewpoint of IT construction. After that, a new business system is suggested. In order to verify its effectiveness, a pilot project is fmished with the data model of the system. At last, this new IT construction method is compared with traditional construction method to show their difference