ABSTRACT
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the vulnerabilities of the traditional physically co-located office, forcing many organizations to work remotely. During COVID-19, many knowledge workers work from home regularly, and as a result, the power distance between remote e-workers and their previously on-site colleagues has disappeared. An in-depth organization-wide case study was conducted to answer our research questions, how does the involuntary working from home requirement due to COVID-19 affect team collaboration and performance? What are the enabling factors to design and implement a hybrid way of working in knowledge organizations? And how does organizational culture influence IT governance performance in global virtual teams in a large organization during volatile and uncertain situations? The main conclusion of this research is that organizational culture does influence the performance outcomes of IT governance. © 2023 IEEE Computer Society. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
A clinical trial is a key step in the process of pharmaceutical research and development (R & D). It is a key indicator of the innovative potential of the pharmaceutical industry. ClinicalTrials.gov shows that the average annual growth rate of the total number of clinical trials globally in the past decade (2012-2021) was 20.7%, mainly distributed in Europe and the United States, and the total number of clinical trials registered in China accounted for 6% of the world. According to the statistics of IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science, the global proportion of early-stage R & D pipelines from China-headquartered companies increased from 1% in 2005 to 12% in 2020, which was still far behind that of European and American companies. Among 871 new active substances approved for marketing globally in the past two decades, 522 were for marketing in China, with the high number driven by regulatory acceleration mechanisms from National Medical Products Administration, such as breakthrough and orphan designations and priority reviews. Considering the gap in clinical research strength between China and developed countries such as Europe and the United States, the clinical trial research capacity and level should be improved to assist China in the R & D of innovative drugs. According to the Registration and Information Disclosure Platform for Drug Clinical Studies and the clinical trial institution filing management information platform in China, in the last five years (2017-2021), the average annual growth rates of the total number of new drug clinical trial registration and clinical trial units in China reached 26.9% and 12.6%, respectively. However, clinical trial resources are mainly concentrated in major institutions, municipalities, or provincial capital cities in the eastern and central regions of China, with distributions becoming increasingly polarised. Under the background of China's new medical reforms, the strategic direction of national political support is to motivate equitable access to high-quality clinical trial resources and cross-regional collaborative development of medical institutions by means of medical unions, national clinical medical research centres, Chinese national major projects for new drug innovation and so on. In the context of this background, clinical trial research unions (CTRUs) have been built in China. A CTRU is defined as a consortium formed by medical institutions, sponsors and third-party service institutions of various levels and functions, led by a national clinical medical research centre or clinical trial medical institutions undertaking major national science and technology projects or supporting projects of national key R & D plans, radiating and driving the improvement of clinical trial research capacity in multiple regions. CTRUs develop a multi-level clinical research centre system and collaborative network by vertically and horizontally combining multi-level medical institutions, sponsors and third-party service institutions. All participants of CTRUs are crucial. The leading clinical trial research medical institution, as the core, is responsible for establishing institutional system standards in CTRUs, designing and leading high-quality multi-centre clinical trials, central ethics and personality training. The major clinical trial research medical institutions are responsible for implementing high-quality, multi-centre, complex and high-risk clinical trials. The other member institutions are responsible for implementing basic clinical trials. The sponsors, contract research organizations (CROs), site management organizations (SMOs) and other enterprises are responsible for funding, supporting and promoting the construction of a clinical trial centre system and collaborative network. The specific construction contents of CTRUs include building a clinical trial research resource sharing platform, homogenising clinical trial quality management, constructing a rapid clinical trial process platform, diversified multi-level and multi-form talent training, information intercon ection, deepening strategic cooperation and designing and leading high-level trials. CTRUs have established the selection criteria and assessment exit mechanism and conducted work performance assessments from the dimensions of organisation and implementation, division of labour and cooperation, the connection of clinical trial resources from top to bottom, efficiency and benefit and sustainable development to ensure their good and sustainable development. Through CTRUs, we can achieve high-quality clinical trial resource sharing, improve the clinical trial research capability of member institutions, cultivate high-level skills, such as principal investigators (PIs), sub-investigators, institutional managers and clinical research coordinators (CRCs), and promote the development of clinical trials, economically and with high-quality. Through the trial operation with one member of CTRUs, it was found that the key points should be strengthened in deepening resource sharing, implementing central ethics review, interconnecting information platforms and leading high-quality clinical trials. The construction of CTRUs is an effective means for China's clinical trial research to solve the current problems and change from a `follow-on pattern' to leading high-level and high-quality international multi-centre trials. However, the construction of CTRUs is a complex systematic project. In addition to performing an excellent job in the top-level design and overall planning, CTRUs' specific implementation process and measures need to be continuously explored in the practice process.
ABSTRACT
This paper aims to present the proposal of a platform founded on a Virtual Breeding Environment (VBE) as an alternative for resource sharing, survival, and growth of organizations that were impacted by the economic recession caused by COVID-19. Considering this, an informational platform model is presented, based on the theoretical framework of VBE and the potential to meet the needs of actors who are part of this environment. The result is a platform called Collabore. This platform helps with resource sharing between companies and enables the development of new network technologies. It also facilitates the co-creation of value between actors, allows lobby creation to compete with large companies in the global market, ensures new jobs and income generation, and facilitates the collaboration between companies dispersed globally, connected by Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). © 2022, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.
ABSTRACT
The study illustrates how airport collaborative networks can profit from the richness of data, now available due to digitalization. Using a co-creation process, where the passenger generated content is leveraged to identify possible service improvement areas. A Twitter dataset of 949497 tweets is analyzed from the four years period 2018–2021 – with the second half falling under COVID period - for 100 airports. The Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) method was used for topic discovery and the lexicon-based method for sentiment analysis of the tweets. The COVID-19 related tweets reported a lower sentiment by passengers, which can be an indication of lower service level perceived. The research successfully created and tested a methodology for leveraging user-generated content for identifying possible service improvement areas in an ecosystem of services. One of the outputs of the methodology is a list of COVID-19 terms in the airport context. © 2022, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.
ABSTRACT
Purpose of Review: This commentary aimed to propose the screening, brief intervention, and referral to treatment (SBIRT) model for gaming disorder (GD) and hazardous gaming (HG) on the basis of the International Classification of Disease, 11th version (ICD-11) classification. Recent Findings: COVID-19 and its preventive measures increase the risk of GD and the treatment needs could exceed the capacities of mental health systems. Brief intervention could be provided for adolescents with HG after screening. Psychiatrists make diagnoses of GD or HG and then refer them to school counselors, specialized psychologists, or integrated teams based on the severity, comorbidity, and complication of GD. Summary: The classification of GD and HG was suitable to develop a SBIRT model intervention. The SBIRT should work through the shortage of resources and provide a brief intervention guild to make it practical.
ABSTRACT
Collaborative decision-making across multiple government agencies is considered a critical and effective strategy to combat public health crisis; however, we know little about how the collaborative decision-making works and evolves during periods of crisis. To fill this lacuna, this study uncovers the structure and evolving dynamics of the network by employing a policy document analysis. Based on the policy documents, jointly issued by the agencies of Chinese central government in four phases regarding COVID-19 control, we first constructed a co-occurrence matrix of policy-issuing agencies to outline the network structure, then drew a breadth-depth matrix to identify the role evolution of agencies, and lastly built a two-mode network consisting of policy topics and agencies to determine the evolution mechanisms of policy attentions for each agency. It was found that the network structure of interagency collaboration involves three forms: discrete structure in the early phase, subgroup structure in the middle phase, and connected structure in the latter phase. Agencies embedded in the network can be categorized into three types: leading agencies, key agencies, and auxiliary agencies, with their constituent members changed as the pandemic risks are gradually becoming under control. Furthermore, each type has its own primary policy attentions, but shares some common foci in all four phases and shifts attention in the emergency management process. This study contributes to shedding light on the formation of and variations in collaborative networks in health emergencies and provides policy implications for other countries that have struggled against COVID-19.
ABSTRACT
The pandemics situation has brought unforeseen challenges to all organizations at a global scale. While some strongly profit from it, others thrive to survive or already died. In such times the bulk of leadership and management related skills, gains a disproportional importance especially for organizations where most of their workforce strongly depends on remote collaboration. Being aware of the difficulties to manage collaboration within and between teams in “normal times”, the “still” ongoing situation has only brought more complexity to organizations in that aspect. In this work is proposed a model to manage organizational remote collaborative networks in order to identify collaboration extremes (lack of collaboration, or collaborative overload) which emerges as people work together in projects or operations, developed based in three pillars (collaborative networks, social network analysis, and business intelligence). A real case study is presented to illustrate the functioning principles of the model. © 2021, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.
ABSTRACT
In modern society, citizens aspire to get trusted and reliable digital services to authenticate theirs to payments. With the COVID-19 crisis, online shopping’s fast growth has led citizens to increase registration in different systems. The registration is typically done without any guarantee that the involved business entity is trusted and that private data is managed adequately, namely according to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). There are cases where online business adopts a federated authentication mechanism based on the existing and extensively adopted service providers, e.g., Facebook, and Google. With the European authorities’ complacency, this de facto trend seems to contribute to a dangerous unregulated digital services model. While avoiding the centralization risks, a possible alternative is to pursue the concept of regulated and competing digital online shops or services offered under a single collaborative model across Europe. Citizens aspire to get simple mechanisms based on a single provider for authentication and pay anywhere, even with some associated costs. In this direction, we propose a model that considers regulated providers managing citizens’ access to any online business in Europe, avoiding, in this way, the spreading of personal data across (business) organizations, thus decreasing the risk of personal data leaks. A collaborative network is foreseen to logically tie committed regulating authorities, providers, and digital online service providers. The proposed approach is ground on our previous research on systems integration, collaborative network infrastructure, and unified mobility payment services. This position paper offers a digital strategy for citizens, designated by Digital Person Ecosystem (DPE), which relies on Collaborative Networks concepts and centered on public authority leadership. © 2021, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.
ABSTRACT
Coronavirus pandemic has changed our lives and is likely to have a lasting impact on our economic development, i.e., industry and services. Most organisations must change their businesses and services to comply with the strategies and rules published by the governments of different countries for providing agility, sustainability, and resilience in the current situation. Non-compliance can result in an organisation paying a considerable sum of money in fines and litigation. In Collaborative Networks 4.0 (CN4.0), the importance of compliance is even more evident as its issue becomes more complicated when it involves collaborative processes due to its design principles for decentralized decision-making. The Collaborative Processes in CN 4.0 imply the collaborative business process and their relevancy in industry 4.0, i.e., the collaborative processes through Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Manufacturing Execution System (MES). In this paper, we adopt two motivating use cases, define some of the regulatory requirements that govern the execution of each process, and then evaluate each process with the current compliance checking approaches. Based on this, we identify the challenges of compliance checking of collaborative processes, formalized as requirements needed to support the compliance checking of collaborative processes at design and running time, respectively. This paper further explores how the FIWARE architecture supports the automated compliance checking solution of collaborative processes in industry 4.0. © 2021, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.
ABSTRACT
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in Brazil has grown rapidly since the first case was reported on 26 February 2020. As the pandemic has spread, the low availability of medical equipment has increased, especially mechanical ventilators. The Brazilian Unified Health System (SUS) claimed to have only 40,508 mechanical ventilators, which would be insufficient to support the Brazilian population at the pandemic peak. This lack of ventilators, especially in public hospitals, required quick, assertive, and effective actions to minimize the health crisis. This work provides an overview of the rapid deployment of a network for maintaining disused mechanical ventilators in public and private healthcare units in some regions of Brazil during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Data referring to the processes of maintaining equipment, acquiring parts, and conducting national and international training were collected and analyzed. In total, 4047 ventilators were received by the maintenance sites, and 2516 ventilators were successfully repaired and returned to the healthcare units, which represents a success rate of 62.17%. The results show that the maintenance initiative directly impacted the availability and reliability of the equipment, allowing access to ventilators in the public and private health system and increasing the capacity of beds during the pandemic.
ABSTRACT
PURPOSE: Communities are central to the practice of public health emergency preparedness and response. This article mainly focuses on COVID-19 and discusses the formation and structure of community disaster resilience, which is an effective method for coping with such a public health emergency. METHODS: Based on the management of the COVID-19 outbreak in China, this article uses Shanghai's experience to illustrate how a community disaster resilience was formed for risk management. Resorting to the analytical framework of risk city, principles of community disaster resilience are given. RESULTS: Four actions can be recommended based on Shanghai's experience: 1) Applying a vulnerability analysis matrix for targeted risk governance, 2) empowering volunteer groups for emergency response, 3) policy and action for public health emergency prevention, and 4) risk communication for uncertainty-oriented planning. CONCLUSION: Shanghai's experience offers a reference to tackle the COVID-19 at the global level. The COVID-19 outbreak highlights that humans still face various unpredictable health risks in the future. Forming a connection-based resilience at the community level is an effective way to risk management.