With increased emphasis on the strategic role of IT in contemporary organizations, it is imperative to gain a deeper understanding of the factors that govern a firm’s IT capability. Yet, there exists very little understanding as to what constitutes a firm’s IT capability and how it could be measured. Drawing from theoretical perspectives and a systematic multi-stage research framework based on ...

A conceptual framework which defines the seismic resilience of communities and quantitative measures of resilience in a manner that can be useful for a coordinated research effort focusing on enhancing this resilience is one of the main themes at the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research (MCEER). This framework relies on the complementary measures of resilience: “Reduced ...

Goals are central to the design and implementation of intelligent software agents. Much of the literature on goals and reasoning about goals only deals with a limited set of goal types, typically achievement goals, and sometimes maintenance goals; and much of the work on interactions between goals only deals with achievement goals. We aim at extending a previously proposed unifying framework fo...

In addition to many statistical techniques Robust Design Methodology also consists of a set of principles and practices. Thus, in order to reach the full potential in applications of the methodology, efforts towards robustness must aim to realize the underlying principles. We characterize Robust Design Methodology by three principles: awareness of variation, insensitivity to noise factors, and ...

The limits of the utilitarian approach have led to a search for different notions of welfare. The income approach to well-being, in fact, doesn’t account for the diversity in human beings and for the heterogeneities of contingent circumstances. Amartya Sen, looking for broader notions of well-being, has developed an approach focused on the freedom of individuals to pursue their own project of l...

Growth that reduces poverty is often considered pro-poor regardless of whether the poor benefit from it more than the non-poor. Such growth could simply be termed povertyreducing growth. This paper argues that for growth to be pro-poor it should disproportionally benefit the poor. The paper proposes an operational definition of propoor growth that restricts it to the cases in which the mean inc...