The combination of low-cost access to increasingly powerful computing and networking capabilities combined with a deregulated internet has facilitated the rapid development of a new social phenomena, that of the online community. The potential for near universal internet access and the ability to communicate at costs lower than ever before in human existence has facilitated the development of online communities which work to fulfill two basic human desires, first, to reach out and connect to other human beings and secondly to obtain knowledge. This paper examines the concept and practice of online communities: first, by establishing an understanding of their historical and technological roots; and then by developing a threedimensional taxonomy through which the properties of the communities can be examined.Case study examples are utilized to illustrate the community types within the taxonomy. #
The promise of increased competitive advantage has been the driving force behind the large-scale investment in information technology (IT) over the last three decades. There is a continuing debate among executives and academics as to the measurable benefits of this investment. The return on investment (ROI) and other performance measures reported in the academic literature indicate conflicting empirical findings. Many previous studies have based their conclusions on the statistical correlation between IT capital investment and firm performance data of the same time period. In this study we argue that the causal relationship between IT investment and firm performance could not be reliably established through concurrent IT and performance data. We further submit that it would be more convincing to infer causality if the IT investments in the preceding years are significantly correlated with the performance of a firm in the subsequent year. Using the Granger causality models and three samples of firm level financial data, we found no statistical evidence that IT investments have caused the improvement of financial performance of the firms in the samples. On the contrary, the causal models suggest that improved financial performance over consecutive years may have contributed to the increase of IT investment in the subsequent year. Implications of these findings, as well as directions for future studies, are discussed.
VIRTUAL COMPANY HAS BEEN DEFINED AS ONEwhere "complementary resources existing in a number of cooperating companies are left in place, but are integrated to support a particular product effort for as long as it is viable to do so. ... Resources are selectively allocated to the virtual company if they are underutilized or if they can be profitably utilized there more than in the 'home' company." [4]. In addition, virtual organizations are designed to facilitate three types of capabilities:•Create or assemble productive resources quickly, •Create or assemble productive resources frequently and concurrently, and •Create or assemble a broad range of productive resources (such as research, manufacturing, and design).Although the idea of virtual organizations is not new [4], recent developments in information technology capabilities, such as the World-Wide Web (WWW) and artificial intelligence (AI), allow the development of new implementations of virtual organizations that exploit the capabilities of those new technologies. Information technology can be used aggressively, replacing or supporting human actions. Information infrastructure, such as the WWW, facilitates communications between and within virtual organizations, allowing development of widely dispersed virtual organizations.Since intra-and intercompany resource availability can change minute to minute, with advantage accruing to parties able to arbitrage resource availabilities rapidly, virtual organizations use information technology to supplement limited resources and cognitive capabilities. Humans have limited ability to keep track of what is going on in the broad range of virtual organization activities, given the tight time constraints and limited resources required and used by virtual organizations. This is exacerbated by frequent interruption of their work, with recent research indicating that white-collar employees receive a communication (electronic, paper, or oral) every five minutes. As a result, AI provides virtual organizations the ability to mitigate the limitations and constraints of human agents in order to monitor and control substantial resources without the time constraints inherent in human organizations.The use of agents, facilitators, and knowledge query and manipulation languages, together with negotiated ontologies, can provide a workable, reliable, and fiexible base of systems used in creating the platforms for virtual organizations. Virtual organizations may be the first large-scale industrial application of AI, beyond its fragmented use in knowledge-based systems and robotics. However, without the research that produced a theory of Definitions of TermsA command center provides Interfaces and communication capabilities for human actors that allow them to monitor agent and virtual organization activity. In their classic form, they are like military war rooms, where agent activi-ties can be watched. A computational agent is a con> puter program that functions autonomously or semiautonomously in communication with other computational ag...
The current patent process in many ways works against IT innovation by making the road to realization too dispiriting for today's independent inventors.
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