Cloud service level agreement negotiation is a process of joint decision-making between cloud clients and providers to resolve their conflicting objectives. With the advances of cloud technology, operations such as discovery, scaling, monitoring and decommissioning are accomplished automatically. Therefore, negotiation between cloud clients and providers can be a bottleneck if it is carried out...

Architectural decisions can be interpreted as structural and behavioral constraints that must be enforced in order to guarantee overarching qualities in a system. Enforcing those constraints in a fully automated way is often challenging and not well supported by current tools. Practitioners are reluctant to invest in new solutions because of the difficulty of estimating the cost-effectiveness o...

We introduce an end-to-end framework for data quality that integrates business strategy, data quality models, and supporting investigative and governance processes. We also describe a supporting IT architecture for this framework. Finally, we describe how this framework was implemented at Visa International Service Association (“Visa”) and some of the lessons learned during its use over the pas...

Customer service is increasingly being recognized as a source of competitive advantage. Determining customer needs accurately, meeting and exceeding them in a consistent manner is the key to the effective customer service. Companies should adapt a strategic, proactive focus on customer service based on understanding logistics process and designing logistics system to meet their needs. This ...

Information systems (IS) offshoring has become a widespread practice and a strategic sourcing choice for many firms. While much has been written by researchers about the factors that lead to successful offshoring arrangements from the client’s viewpoint, the vendor’s perspective has been largely scarce. The vendor perspective is equally important as offshore IS vendors need to make important de...

The purpose of this study is to identify the role, importance and outcomes attributed to HRD by line managers in the Mauritian hotel industry. Data were collected through in-depth interviews from a purposive sample of 135 hotel line managers. A two-step procedure was followed to analyse data. First, thematic analysis identified key themes in the textual data. Second, the artificial neural softw...

In this paper, we consider pricing schemes at an M/M/1 queue with infinite potential demand but where the number of customers in the queue depends on both the price and the offered quality of service (QoS). Our model aims at comparing the optimal revenue for three different strategies: first the case of a fixed price; second the case where there is a threshold on the queue occupancy such that a...

0 7 4 0 7 4 5 9 / 0 4 / $ 2 0 . 0 0 © 2 0 0 4 I E E E competitive advantage to simply “something good.” Consequently, the software community looks upon ROI with increasing suspicion as a vague and slippery gimmick used chiefly to make the sales pitch (invariably unsubstantiated) for a particular product or initiative. On the contrary, ROI analysis aims to achieve clarity in the decision-making ...

It is widely agreed that the rate of change in many industries is faster than ever before. Strategic decisions are, in addition to top management plans, made on a day-to-day basis closer to the firms markets. In order for the decisions made by individual employees to be strategically coherent it is necessary that the employees develop a shared understanding of some of the basic assumptions and ...