Supply chain analytics and post-pandemic performance: mediating role of triple-A supply chain strategies

PurposeThe abrupt outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) hit every nation in 2020–2021, causing a worldwide pandemic. The worldwide COVID-19 epidemic, described as a "black swan”, has severely disrupted manufacturing firms' supply chain. The purpose of this study is to investigate how supply chain data analytics enable the effective deployment of agility, adaptability and alignment (3As) strategies, resulting in improving post-COVID disruption performance. It also analyses the indirect effect of supply chain data analytics on disruption performance through the 3As supply chain strategies.Design/methodology/approachThe hypothesis and theoretical framework were tested using a questionnaire survey. The authors employed structural equation modelling through the SMART PLS version 3.2.7 to analyse data from 163 textile firms located in Pakistan.FindingsThe results revealed that the supply chain data analytics contributed positively and significantly to the agility and adaptability, while all 3As supply chain strategies impacted the PPERF substantially. Further, the connection between supply chain data analytics (SCDA) and disruption performance has substantially been influenced through 3As supply chain strategies.Practical implicationsThe results imply that in the event of low likelihood, high effect disruptions, managers and decision-makers should focus their efforts on integrating data analytics capabilities with 3As supply chain policies to ensure long-term company success.Originality/valueThis research sheds fresh light on the importance of data analytics in effectively implementing 3As strategies for sustaining company performance amid COVID-19 disruptions.

Failed Tech Deployment Initiatives: Is Poor IT Governance to Blame?

Information Technology (IT) solutions have become a critical enabling tool in businesses and communities. As a result, organisations invest heavily in technology solutions to transform businesses. Motivated by rapid technological advancements, there have been radical changes in IT infrastructure management, IT applications, and IT services delivery. The recent COVID-19 pandemic also encouraged the rapid adoption of technology solutions. However, despite numerous prescriptive models and 'best practice frameworks' available in the field, and an increased uptake of ITG in organisations, achieving key ITG outcomes is consistently ranked as one of the top concerns of management. After establishing a theoretical foundation for effective ITG practices (via literature review), this study begins a pilot examination to determine if tech deployment failure can be attributed to poor ITG. © 2022 Authors. All rights reserved.

Does Poor Governance Compromise Value Delivery of ICT Deployments

Organisations continue to make significant investments in enabling business via Information Technology (IT). To ensure a return on investment in IT and the relevance and value of tech deployment, there is a need for a broader accountability focus on strategic technology initiatives alongside a structured and evaluative approach to the effective governance of IT. Ongoing changes in tech development and emerging technologies have broadened the role of IT as an enabler. Moreover, businesses and communities expect to see value from tech deployment in shorter time spans. The emergence of the C forced organisations in all sectors to deploy technology to minimise contact and implement lockdown regulations. However, some organisations were challenged with a lack of preparedness of employees and infrastructure needs to cope with tech deployment in a short time. Overall, the fast-paced developments of emerging technologies alongside the pandemic signals a need for effective IT or technology deployment governance. Systems, processes, standards, and best practice frameworks have been developed to facilitate effective IT governance throughout the last decade. However, a large number of IT initiatives fail to deliver. This chapter, motivated by recent developments (including the emerging tech and COVID-19), discusses the role of effective IT governance in successful IT deployment. Overall, the systematic literature review followed by the analysis of several failed IT deployment cases studies demonstrated a strong connection between failed tech adoption projects and poor governance practices. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

The role of digital transformation in the socio-economic recovery post COVID-19

Several measures have been taken to reduce the impact of COVID-19 pandemic. One of these measures is the broad digital transformation that has rapidly and unexpectedly forced the deployment of digital technologies into corporations' business models and organizational structures. This digital transformation has affected all the socio-economic aspects. In response to the COVID-19 global pandemic, this paper explores the impact of the implementation of digital transformation on the socio-economic recovery by employing cross-sectional regression analysis on 99 countries in year 2020. The paper analyzes the impact of digital transformation on each of economic growth, health care, and income inequality. The results reveal that the digital transformation has a positive and significant impact on the GDP per capita in which a 1% increase in digital transformation results in 1.52% increase in GDP per capita, a positive and significant impact on income equality in which a 1% increase in digital transformation leads to 0.05% increase in income equality, and a negative and significant impact on infant mortality rate, in which a 1% increase in digital transformation results in 0.85% decrease in infant mortality rate which reflects its positive impact on the health care. Hence, the digital transformation has a positive and significant effects on different socio-economic aspects.

Technology Deployment for Social Connection in Residential Aged Care: Care and Technology Providers' Experiences During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Information and communication technologies are being used for the social connection of people living in residential aged care. However, in HCI research concerning technology use in aged care, the perspectives of care and technology providers have received limited attention. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 aged care workers and technology providers to investigate the challenges and opportunities of deploying technologies in aged care during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings highlighted that technologies such as videoconferencing and smart displays connected residents with family and friends, kept families informed and reassured, and were used in small groups to meet individual needs. However, limitations in video calling, staff fatigue, volunteer availability, and infrastructural resources presented barriers to technology deployment. Future use of technology for social connection in aged care requires careful facilitation from staff, better resourcing and infrastructural support, collaborations with volunteers, and more attention to individual needs. © 2023 Owner/Author.

Bioprotection of Transportation and Facilities from SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19).

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has led to a nearly world-wide shelter-in-place strategy. This raises several natural concerns about the safe relaxing of current restrictions. This article focuses on the design and operation of heating ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems in the context of transportation. Do HVAC systems have a role in limiting viral spread? During shelter-in-place, can the HVAC system in a dwelling or a vehicle help limit spread of the virus? After the shelter-in-place strategy ends, can typical workplace and transportation HVAC systems limit spread of the virus? This article directly addresses these and other questions. In addition, it also summarizes simplifying assumptions needed to make meaningful predictions. This article derives new results using transform methods first given in Ginsberg and Bui. These new results describe viral spread through an HVAC system and estimate the aggregate dose of virus inhaled by an uninfected building or vehicle occupant when an infected occupant is present within the same building or vehicle. Central to these results is the derivation of a quantity called the "protection factor"-a term-of-art borrowed from the design of gas masks. Older results that rely on numerical approximations to these differential equations have long been lab validated. This article gives the exact solutions in fixed infrastructure for the first time. These solutions, therefore, retain the same lab validation of the older methods of approximation. Further, these exact solutions yield valuable insights into HVAC systems used in transportation.

How governance shaped military responses to the COVID-19 pandemic

Most countries deployed their military in some capacity to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. We present original data on early pandemic-related deployments, identifying seven types of deployment: logistic operations, enforcement, international involvement, border protection, information provision, intelligence operations, and domestic protection. We find that military deployments are shaped by capacity and electoral considerations, even after accounting for cross-country differences in perceptions of the military. Countries with elected leaders were significantly more likely to deploy the military for border protection. Incumbents facing reelection were especially sensitive to electoral concerns, becoming significantly less likely to deploy the military for domestic enforcement when facing an imminent election.

China's Health Silk Road in the Middle East and North Africa amidst COVID-19 and a Contested World Order

The COVID-19 pandemic has offered China a unique opportunity for worldwide deployment of its longstanding health diplomacy, renamed the Health Silk Road (HSR), now an integral part of its Belt and Road Initiative. As a self-proclaimed South-South collaborator and developer,11Niall Duggan, ‘China's changing role in its all-weather friendship with Africa', In, Sebastian Harnisch, Sebastian Bersick, and Jörn-Carsten Gottwald (Eds). China's International Roles: Challenging or Supporting International Order? (Role Theory and International Relations) (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 207-225..Beijing has assumed a leadership role, grounded in ‘moral realism', in the world's health governance. Beijing's health diplomacy has received acclaim in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). However, the pandemic has exacerbated preexisting tensions between China, the United States (US) and European Union (EU). Western countries, wary of China's rising power, reacted resentfully, confirming underlying systemic rivalry. This article argues that the currently disputed, or shifting, world order accounts for the diametrically opposed reactions between the West and the MENA toward China's Health Silk Road.

HEALTH RESOURCE ALLOCATION METHOD AT CORDON SANITAIRE FOR PANDEMIC CONTROL AND PREVENTION

The outbreak of COVID-19 and its variants has profoundly disrupted our normal life. Many local authorities enforced cordon sanitaires for the protection of sensitive areas. Travelers can only cross the cordon after being tested. This paper aims to propose a method to determine the optimal deployment of cordon sanitaires in terms of minimum queueing delay time with available health testing resources. A sequential two-stage model is formulated where the first-stage model describes transportation system equilibrium to predict traffic ows. The second-stage model, a nonlinear integer programming, optimizes health resource allocation along the cordon sanitaire. This optimization aims to minimize the system's total delay time among all entry gates. Note that a stochastic queueing model is used to represent the queueing phenomenon at each entry link. A heuristic algorithm is designed to solve the proposed two-stage model where the Method of Successive Averages (MSA) is adopted for the first-stage model, and a genetic algorithm (GA) with elite strategy is adopted for the second-stage model. An experimental study is conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and algorithm. The results show that these methods can find a good heuristic solution, and it is not cost-effective for authorities to keep adding health resources after reaching a certain limit. These methods are useful for policymakers to determine the optimal deployment of health resources at cordon sanitaires for pandemic control and prevention. © 2023.

Catalysing innovation and digital transformation in combating the Covid-19 pandemic: Whole-of government collaborations in ICT, R&D, and business digitization in Singapore

IMPACTThis article illustrates how collaborative partnerships between the public and private sectors played a critical role in developing and deploying innovative practices in Singapore to manage the Covid-19 crisis. The study provides some important lessons for the international community to reduce the impact of emergencies by leveraging collaborative partnerships for innovation.Alternate :Collaborative partnerships between the public and private sectors played a critical role in developing and deploying innovative practices to overcome Covid-19 in Singapore. The extant literature has not paid adequate attention to the determinants for managing collaborative partnerships in the emergency context. Using the case of digital transformation and ICT deployment in Singapore, the authors show how and why rapid reactions and responses to pandemics and other emergencies can be achieved through public–private partnerships for collaborative innovation.

Automated Building of an Environment for Secure Software Development in Web Technologies Courses

This paper investigates the automated building of verified software environments that can be used in university courses. Over the last couple of years, it has become obvious that using online environments, video meetings, virtual lectures, online teaching, and learning is not a matter of choice. The coronavirus pandemic forced all parts of the education systems, and even of life, to go online. Deepening the research and development in the software automation field can lead to using various ways to allow university students and learners to "get in touch with” the real-world problems in software development. We developed such an approach by defining the steps, developing and evaluating specific automation processes of building an environment for secure software development. We defined both the functional and nonfunctional requirements for such a system, and the next major steps in development, such as virtualization setup (kvm), virtual environment (virtual machines) definition and creation, database configuration and management of user settings, have been defined and developed. The evaluation is performed according to the specifics defined in the Web technologies course, but the results and use are not limited to that course alone. In conclusion, the results of the evaluation conducted in a laboratory setting have been presented and appropriate scenarios, applications and future work have been defined. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

A comparison of various machine learning algorithms and execution of flask deployment on essay grading

Students' performance can be assessed based on grading the answers written by the students during their examination. Currently, students are assessed manually by the teachers. This is a cumbersome task due to an increase in the student-teacher ratio. Moreover, due to coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, most of the educational institutions have adopted online teaching and assessment. To measure the learning ability of a student, we need to assess them. The current grading system works well for multiple choice questions, but there is no grading system for evaluating the essays. In this paper, we studied different machine learning and natural language processing techniques for automated essay scoring/grading (AES/G). Data imbalance is an issue which creates the problem in predicting the essay score due to uneven distribution of essay scores in the training data. We handled this issue using random over sampling technique which generates even distribution of essay scores. Also, we built a web application using flask and deployed the machine learning models. Subsequently, all the models have been evaluated using accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. It is found that random forest algorithm outperformed the other algorithms with an accuracy of 97.67%, precision of 97.62%, recall of 97.67%, and F1-score of 97.58%. © 2023 Institute of Advanced Engineering and Science. All rights reserved.

Responding to COVID-19: Privacy Implications of the Rapid Adoption of ICTs

COVID-19 increased reliance on information communication technologies (ICTs) as public and private organizations altered standard business operations to adhere to public health guidance. Across most sectors, technology deployment was swift, which left organizations with little opportunity to assess corresponding impacts. This chapter highlights various technologies implemented during the pandemic within four key sectors, government, education, healthcare, and employment, and the purpose these technologies serve. Social implications of the widespread use of these technologies are discussed, emphasizing privacy, trust, ethics, and potential effects on socially vulnerable populations. Through the Company Information Privacy Orientation (CIPO) privacy framework, this chapter also presents factors that public and private organizations should consider in emergency technology deployment. The chapter closes with research considerations to further understand the role of ethics, privacy, and trust in using ICTs, to facilitate core functions of life, which will continue after the pandemic ebbs away. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Domestic Military Deployments in Response to COVID-19

Militaries are commonly deployed in response to domestic disasters. However, our understanding of this phenomenon remains incomplete, partly because the particulars of disasters make it hard to generalize about deployments used in response. This article leverages the COVID-19 pandemic's global reach to systematically evaluate common hypotheses about when and how militaries are used to respond to domestic disasters. It presents original global data about domestic military deployments in pandemic response and uses it to assess common theoretical expectations about what shapes whether and how militaries are used in such contexts. The results suggest that decisions about whether to deploy militaries stem from the securitization of domestic disaster relief rather than being responses to specific disaster-related features, state capacity shortcomings, or other social or political factors, even as some of these elements shaped how militaries were used. The article concludes by outlining some hypotheses for future research about the impact of this securitization on civil–military relations.

After the Spread of COVID-19: A Study of Board Game Design Factor for Game-Based Learning

This research had the objective to study the design factors of board games for game-based learning by being classified into two parts: 1) Studying the design factors for board games for learning through a systematic review. 2) Studying the design factors for board games of the customers' needs from the quality function deployment technique based on the data gathered from structured questionnaires. The population group comprised 100 board game customers, and the results found that there were two significant factors in designing the board game for promoting learning with the customers' needs that were related to the playing patterns or the mechanisms. Thus, both factors enabled the players to gain the motivation for participation in learning through the board games, including the design factors of the board games for promoting learning until they could respond to customer satisfaction at the same level as existing board games that are appropriately sold in the markets. © 2023, North American Business Press. All rights reserved.

Triaging your human capital: an integrative perspective on strategic human capital asset allocation: MRN

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to provide an overarching framework to guide the understanding of the allocation and deployment of strategic human capital assets within an organization. Using the concept of medical triage with business units analogous to "patients” and their performance to "symptoms or injuries,” the framework suggests a "steal from the poor” perspective that is counter to conventional organizational decline literature.Design/methodology/approachThis is a conceptual paper proposing that there are five different categories of business unit need for human capital assets: expectant, deceased, immediate, delayed or minimal;all based on the type of environment and holistic performance of the business unit. Based on a business unit's specific situation, the authors suggest a process model guiding how to conduct a triage analysis to optimize the allocation of strategic human capital assets within an organization.FindingsThe authors argue that current trends in assessing strategic human capital assets which make comparisons across organizations are necessary but insufficient (e.g. comparing a store to other stores in its district or region). Each business unit has its own unique internal capabilities and external constraints that also must be accurately assessed to make an informed organizational-level decision about where and how to deploy strategic human capital assets.Originality/valueBorrowing from medical science, this paper demonstrates a new conceptual framework with propositions for researchers and guidance for practitioners.

Charging after Lockdown: The Aftermath of COVID-19 Policies on Electric Vehicle Charging Behaviour in The Netherlands

During the COVID-19—related lockdowns (2020–2022), mobility patterns and charging needs were substantially affected. Policies such as work from home, lockdowns, and curfews reduced traffic and commuting significantly. This global pandemic may have also substantially changed mobility patterns on the long term and therefore the need for electric vehicle charging infrastructure. This paper analyzes changes in electric charging in the Netherlands for different user groups during different phases of the COVID-19 lockdown to assess the effects on EV charging needs. Charging needs dropped significantly during this period, which also changed the distribution of the load on the electricity grid throughout the day. Curfews affected the start times of charging sessions during peak hours of grid consumption. Infrastructure dedicated to commuters was used less intensively, and the charging needs of professional taxi drivers were drastically reduced during lockdown periods. These trends were partially observed during a post–lockdown measuring period of roughly 8 months, indicating a longer shift in mobility and charging patterns. © 2023 by the authors.

Designing Fog Device Network for Digitization of University Campus

With the evolving digitization, services of Cloud and Fog make things easier which is offered in form of storage, computing, networking etc. The importance of digitalization has been realized severely with the home isolation due to COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers have suggested on planning and designing the network of Fog devices to offer services nearby the edge devices. In this work, Fog device network design is proposed for a university campus by formulating a mathematical model. This formulation is used to find the optimal location for the Fog device placement and interconnection between Fog devices and the Cloud (Centralized Information Storage). The proposed model minimizes the deployment cost and the network traffic towards Cloud. The IBM CPLEX optimization tool is used to evaluate the proposed multi-objective optimization problem. Classical multi-objective optimization method, i.e., Weighted Sum approach is used for the purpose. The experimental results exhibit optimal placement of Fog devices with minimum deployment cost. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Deploying Healthcare Providers during COVID-19 Pandemic.

As the COVID-19 pandemic runs its course around the globe, a mismatch of resources and needs arises: In some areas, healthcare systems are faced with increased number of COVID-19 patients potentially exceeding their capacity, while in other areas, healthcare systems are faced with procedural cancellations and drop in demands. TeamHealth (Knoxville, TN), a multidisciplinary healthcare organization was able to roll out a systemic approach to redeploy its clinicians practicing in the fields of emergency medicine, hospital medicine and anesthesiology from areas of less need (faced with reduced or no work) to areas outside of their normal practice facing immediate need.

SIGGRAPH Asia 2022-course notes: "become a guardian of al wasl": Developing productions for the world s largest real-Time interactive projection experience

At the time of writing (2021-22), "Become a Guardian of Al Wasl"represented the world's largest interactive experience. Designing, producing and deploying an immersive interactive experience at the monumental scale of the Al Wasl Plaza 360° projection surface necessitated the research, prototyping and testing of proposed solutions, including systems architecture, to meet the scope and specifications of the project. Four problem spaces emerged during development;real-Time rendering, projection-mapping, redundancy, and content synchronisation. In addition, budget constraints, Covid-19, and remote deployment motivated the exploration of other innovative solutions. As there is limited research on the design and development of interactive dome experiences, this paper will present the challenges encountered in developing productions for the world's largest dome display system and in building the underlying real-Time display and support systems. © 2022 Owner/Author.