• Title/Summary/Keyword: Critical infrastructure

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Development of Korean Green Business/IT Strategies Based on Priority Analysis (한국의 그린 비즈니스/IT 실태분석을 통한 추진전략 우선순위 도출에 관한 연구)

  • Kim, Jae-Kyeong;Choi, Ju-Choel;Choi, Il-Young
    • Asia pacific journal of information systems
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    • v.20 no.3
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    • pp.191-204
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    • 2010
  • Recently, the CO2 emission and energy consumption have become critical global issues to decide the future of nations. Especially, the spread of IT products and the increased use of internet and web applications result in the energy consumption and CO2 emission of IT industry though information technologies drive global economic growth. EU, the United States, Japan and other developed countries are using IT related environmental regulations such as WEEE(Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment), RoHS(Restriction of the use of Certain Hazardous Substance), REACH(Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of CHemicals) and EuP(Energy using Product), and have established systematic green business/IT strategies to enhance the competitiveness of IT industry. For example, the Japan government proposed the "Green IT initiative" for being compatible with economic growth and environmental protection. Not only energy saving technologies but energy saving systems have been developed for accomplishing sustainable development. Korea's CO2 emission and energy consumption continuously have grown at comparatively high rates. They are related to its industrial structure depending on high energy-consuming industries such as iron and steel Industry, automotive industry, shipbuilding industry, semiconductor industry, and so on. In particular, export proportion of IT manufacturing is quite high in Korea. For example, the global market share of the semiconductor such as DRAM was about 80% in 2008. Accordingly, Korea needs to establish a systematic strategy to respond to the global environmental regulations and to maintain competitiveness in the IT industry. However, green competitiveness of Korea ranked 11th among 15 major countries and R&D budget for green technology is not large enough to develop energy-saving technologies for infrastructure and value chain of low-carbon society though that grows at high rates. Moreover, there are no concrete action plans in Korea. This research aims to deduce the priorities of the Korean green business/IT strategies to use multi attribute weighted average method. We selected a panel of 19 experts who work at the green business related firms such as HP, IBM, Fujitsu and so on, and selected six assessment indices such as the urgency of the technology development, the technology gap between Korea and the developed countries, the effect of import substitution, the spillover effect of technology, the market growth, and the export potential of the package or stand-alone products by existing literature review. We submitted questionnaires at approximately weekly intervals to them for priorities of the green business/IT strategies. The strategies broadly classify as follows. The first strategy which consists of the green business/IT policy and standardization, process and performance management and IT industry and legislative alignment relates to government's role in the green economy. The second strategy relates to IT to support environment sustainability such as the travel and ways of working management, printer output and recycling, intelligent building, printer rationalization and collaboration and connectivity. The last strategy relates to green IT systems, services and usage such as the data center consolidation and energy management, hardware recycle decommission, server and storage virtualization, device power management, and service supplier management. All the questionnaires were assessed via a five-point Likert scale ranging from "very little" to "very large." Our findings show that the IT to support environment sustainability is prior to the other strategies. In detail, the green business /IT policy and standardization is the most important in the government's role. The strategies of intelligent building and the travel and ways of working management are prior to the others for supporting environment sustainability. Finally, the strategies for the data center consolidation and energy management and server and storage virtualization have the huge influence for green IT systems, services and usage This research results the following implications. The amount of energy consumption and CO2 emissions of IT equipment including electrical business equipment will need to be clearly indicated in order to manage the effect of green business/IT strategy. And it is necessary to develop tools that measure the performance of green business/IT by each step. Additionally, intelligent building could grow up in energy-saving, growth of low carbon and related industries together. It is necessary to expand the affect of virtualization though adjusting and controlling the relationship between the management teams.

CHANGES IN WATER USE AND MANAGEMENT OVER TIME AND SIGNIFICANCE FOR AUSTRALIA AND SOUTH-EAST ASIA

  • Knight, Michael J.
    • Proceedings of the Korean Society of Soil and Groundwater Environment Conference
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    • 1997.11a
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    • pp.3-31
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    • 1997
  • Water has always played a significant role in the lives of people. In urbanised Rome, with its million people. sophisticated supply systems developed and then fled with the empire. only to be rediscovered later But it was the industrial Revolution commencing in the eighteenth century that ushered in major paradigm shifts In use and altitudes towards water. Rapid and concentrated urbanisation brought problems of expanded demands for drinking supplies, waste management and disease. The strategy of using water from local streams, springs and village wells collapsed under the onslaughts of rising urban demands and pollution due to poor waste disposal practices. Expanding travel (railways. and steamships) aided the spread of disease. In England. public health crises peaks, related to water-borne typhoid and the three major cholera outbreaks occurred in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century respectively. Technological, engineering and institutional responses were successful in solving the public health problem. it is generally accepted that the putting of water into pipe networks both for a clean drinking supply, as well as using it as a transport medium for removal of human and other wastes, played a significant role in towering death rates due to waterborne diseases such as cholera and typhoid towards the end of the nineteenth century. Today, similar principles apply. A recent World Bank report Indicates that there can be upto 76% reduction in illness when major water and sanitation improvements occur in developing countries. Water management, technology and thinking in Australia were relatively stable in the twentieth century up to the mid to late 1970s. Groundwater sources were investigated and developed for towns and agriculture. Dams were built, and pipe networks extended both for supply and waste water management. The management paradigms in Australia were essentially extensions of European strategies with the minor adaptions due to climate and hydrogeology. During the 1970s and 1980s in Australia, it was realised increasingly that a knowledge of groundwater and hydrogeological processes were critical to pollution prevention, the development of sound waste management and the problems of salinity. Many millions of dollars have been both saved and generated as a consequence. This is especially in relation to domestic waste management and the disposal of aluminium refinery waste in New South Wales. Major institutional changes in public sector water management are occurring in Australia. Upheveals and change have now reached ail states in Australia with various approaches being followed. Market thinking, corporatisation, privatisation, internationalisation, downsizing and environmental pressures are all playing their role in this paradigm shift. One casualty of this turmoil is the progressive erosion of the public sector skillbase and this may become a serious issue should a public health crisis occur such as a water borne disease. Such crises have arisen over recent times. A complete rethink of the urban water cycle is going on right now in Australia both at the State and Federal level. We are on the threshold of significant change in how we use and manage water, both as a supply and a waste transporter in Urban environments especially. Substantial replacement of the pipe system will be needed in 25 to 30 years time and this will cost billions of dollars. The competition for water between imgation needs and environmental requirements in Australia and overseas will continue to be an issue in rural areas. This will be especially heightened by the rising demand for irrigation produced food as the world's population grows. Rapid urbanisation and industrialisation in the emerging S.E Asian countries are currently producing considerable demands for water management skills and Infrastructure development. This trend e expected to grow. There are also severe water shortages in the Middle East to such an extent that wars may be fought over water issues. Environmental public health crises and shortages will help drive the trends.

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The Impact of Service Level Management(SLM) Process Maturity on Information Systems Success in Total Outsourcing: An Analytical Case Study (토털 아웃소싱 환경 하에서 IT서비스 수준관리(Service Level Management) 프로세스 성숙도가 정보시스템 성공에 미치는 영향에 관한 분석적 사례연구)

  • Cho, Geun Su;An, Joon Mo;Min, Hyoung Jin
    • Asia pacific journal of information systems
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    • v.23 no.2
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    • pp.21-39
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    • 2013
  • As the utilization of information technology and the turbulence of technological change increase in organizations, the adoption of IT outsourcing also grows to manage IT resource more effectively and efficiently. In this new way of IT management technique, service level management(SLM) process becomes critical to derive success from the outsourcing in the view of end users in organization. Even though much of the research on service level management or agreement have been done during last decades, the performance of the service level management process have not been evaluated in terms of final objectives of the management efforts or success from the view of end-users. This study explores the relationship between SLM maturity and IT outsourcing success from the users' point of view by a analytical case study in four client organizations under an IT outsourcing vendor, which is a member company of a major Korean conglomerate. For setting up a model for the analysis, previous researches on service level management process maturity and information systems success are reviewed. In particular, information systems success from users' point of view are reviewed based the DeLone and McLean's study, which is argued and accepted as a comprehensively tested model of information systems success currently. The model proposed in this study argues that SLM process maturity influences information systems success, which is evaluated in terms of information quality, systems quality, service quality, and net effect proposed by DeLone and McLean. SLM process maturity can be measured in planning process, implementation process and operation and evaluation process. Instruments for measuring the factors in the proposed constructs of information systems success and SL management process maturity were collected from previous researches and evaluated for securing reliability and validity, utilizing appropriate statistical methods and pilot tests before exploring the case study. Four cases from four different companies under one vendor company were utilized for the analysis. All of the cases had been contracted in SLA(Service Level Agreement) and had implemented ITIL(IT Infrastructure Library), Six Sigma and BSC(Balanced Scored Card) methods since last several years, which means that all the client organizations pursued concerted efforts to acquire quality services from IT outsourcing from the organization and users' point of view. For comparing the differences among the four organizations in IT out-sourcing sucess, T-test and non-parametric analysis have been applied on the data set collected from the organization using survey instruments. The process maturities of planning and implementation phases of SLM are found not to influence on any dimensions of information systems success from users' point of view. It was found that the SLM maturity in the phase of operations and evaluation could influence systems quality only from users' view. This result seems to be quite against the arguments in IT outsourcing practices in the fields, which emphasize usually the importance of planning and implementation processes upfront in IT outsourcing projects. According to after-the-fact observation by an expert in an organization participating in the study, their needs and motivations for outsourcing contracts had been quite familiar already to the vendors as long-term partners under a same conglomerate, so that the maturity in the phases of planning and implementation seems not to be differentiating factors for the success of IT outsourcing. This study will be the foundation for the future research in the area of IT outsourcing management and success, in particular in the service level management. And also, it could guide managers in practice in IT outsourcing management to focus on service level management process in operation and evaluation stage especially for long-term outsourcing contracts under very unique context like Korean IT outsourcing projects. This study has some limitations in generalization because the sample size is small and the context itself is confined in an unique environment. For future exploration, survey based research could be designed and implemented.

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Installation Standards of Urban Deep Road Tunnel Fire Safety Facilities (도심부 대심도 터널의 방재시설 설치 기준에 관한 연구(부산 승학터널 사례를 중심으로))

  • Lee, Soobeom;Kim, JeongHyun;Kim, Jungsik;Kim, Dohoon;Lim, Joonbum
    • KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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    • v.41 no.6
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    • pp.727-736
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    • 2021
  • Road tunnel lengths are increasing. Some 1,300 tunnels with 1,102 km in length had been increased till 2019 from 2010. There are 64 tunnels over 3,000 m in length, with their total length adding up to 276.7 km. Safety facilities in the event of a tunnel fire are critical so as to prevent large-scale casualties. Standards for installing disaster prevention facilities are being proposed based on the guidelines of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, but they may be limited to deep underground tunnels. This study was undertaken to provide guidelines for the spacing of evacuation connection passages and the widths of evacuation connection doors. Evacuation with various spacing and widths was simulated in regards to evacuation time, which is the measure of safety, using the evacuation analysis simulation software EXODUS Ver.6.3 and the fire/smoke analysis software SMARTFIRE Ver.4.1. Evacuation connection gates with widths of 0.9 m and 1.2 m, and spacings of 150 m to 250 m, were set to every 20 m. In addition, longitudinal slopes of 6 % and 0 % were considered. It was determined to be safe when the evacuation completion time was shorter than the delay diffusion time. According to the simulation results, all occupants could complete evacuation before smoke spread regardless of the width of the evacuation connection door when the longitudinal slope was 6 % and the interval of evacuation connection passage was 150 m. When the evacuation connection passage spacing was 200 m and the evacuation connection gate width was 1.2 m, all occupants could evacuate when the longitudinal slope was 0 %. Due to difference in evacuation speed according to the longitudinal slope, the evacuation time with a 6 % slope was 114 seconds shorter (with the 190 m connection passage) than with a 0 % slope. A shorter spacing of evacuation connection passages may reduce the evacuation time, but this is difficult to implement in practice because of economic and structural limitations. If the width of the evacuation junction is 1.2 m, occupants could evacuate faster than with a 0.9 m width. When the width of a connection door is 1.2 m with appropriate connection passage spacing, it might provide a means to increase economic efficiency and resolve structural limitations while securing evacuation safety.

A Study on the Effect of the Introduction Characteristics of Cloud Computing Services on the Performance Expectancy and the Intention to Use: From the Perspective of the Innovation Diffusion Theory (클라우드 컴퓨팅 서비스의 도입특성이 조직의 성과기대 및 사용의도에 미치는 영향에 관한 연구: 혁신확산 이론 관점)

  • Lim, Jae Su;Oh, Jay In
    • Asia pacific journal of information systems
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    • v.22 no.3
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    • pp.99-124
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    • 2012
  • Our society has long been talking about necessity for innovation. Since companies in particular need to carry out business innovation in their overall processes, they have attempted to apply many innovation factors on sites and become to pay more attention to their innovation. In order to achieve this goal, companies has applied various information technologies (IT) on sites as a means of innovation, and consequently IT have been greatly developed. It is natural for the field of IT to have faced another revolution which is called cloud computing, which is expected to result in innovative changes in software application via the Internet, data storing, the use of devices, and their operations. As a vehicle of innovation, cloud computing is expected to lead the changes and advancement of our society and the business world. Although many scholars have researched on a variety of topics regarding the innovation via IT, few studies have dealt with the issue of could computing as IT. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to set the variables of innovation attributes based on the previous articles as the characteristic variables and clarify how these variables affect "Performance Expectancy" of companies and the intention of using cloud computing. The result from the analysis of data collected in this study is as follows. The study utilized a research model developed on the innovation diffusion theory to identify influences on the adaptation and spreading IT for cloud computing services. Second, this study summarized the characteristics of cloud computing services as a new concept that introduces innovation at its early stage of adaptation for companies. Third, a theoretical model is provided that relates to the future innovation by suggesting variables for innovation characteristics to adopt cloud computing services. Finally, this study identified the factors affecting expectation and the intention to use the cloud computing service for the companies that consider adopting the cloud computing service. As the parameter and dependent variable respectively, the study deploys the independent variables that are aligned with the characteristics of the cloud computing services based on the innovation diffusion model, and utilizes the expectation for performance and Intention to Use based on the UTAUT theory. Independent variables for the research model include Relative Advantage, Complexity, Compatibility, Cost Saving, Trialability, and Observability. In addition, 'Acceptance for Adaptation' is applied as an adjustment variable to verify the influences on the expected performances from the cloud computing service. The validity of the research model was secured by performing factor analysis and reliability analysis. After confirmatory factor analysis is conducted using AMOS 7.0, the 20 hypotheses are verified through the analysis of the structural equation model, accepting 12 hypotheses among 20. For example, Relative Advantage turned out to have the positive effect both on Individual Performance and on Strategic Performance from the verification of hypothesis, while it showed meaningful correlation to affect Intention to Use directly. This indicates that many articles on the diffusion related Relative Advantage as the most important factor to predict the rate to accept innovation. From the viewpoint of the influence on Performance Expectancy among Compatibility and Cost Saving, Compatibility has the positive effect on both Individual Performance and on Strategic Performance, while it showed meaningful correlation with Intention to Use. However, the topic of the cloud computing service has become a strategic issue for adoption in companies, Cost Saving turns out to affect Individual Performance without a significant influence on Intention to Use. This indicates that companies expect practical performances such as time and cost saving and financial improvements through the adoption of the cloud computing service in the environment of the budget squeezing from the global economic crisis from 2008. Likewise, this positively affects the strategic performance in companies. In terms of effects, Trialability is proved to give no effects on Performance Expectancy. This indicates that the participants of the survey are willing to afford the risk from the high uncertainty caused by innovation, because they positively pursue information about new ideas as innovators and early adopter. In addition, they believe it is unnecessary to test the cloud computing service before the adoption, because there are various types of the cloud computing service. However, Observability positively affected both Individual Performance and Strategic Performance. It also showed meaningful correlation with Intention to Use. From the analysis of the direct effects on Intention to Use by innovative characteristics for the cloud computing service except the parameters, the innovative characteristics for the cloud computing service showed the positive influence on Relative Advantage, Compatibility and Observability while Complexity, Cost saving and the likelihood for the attempt did not affect Intention to Use. While the practical verification that was believed to be the most important factor on Performance Expectancy by characteristics for cloud computing service, Relative Advantage, Compatibility and Observability showed significant correlation with the various causes and effect analysis. Cost Saving showed a significant relation with Strategic Performance in companies, which indicates that the cost to build and operate IT is the burden of the management. Thus, the cloud computing service reflected the expectation as an alternative to reduce the investment and operational cost for IT infrastructure due to the recent economic crisis. The cloud computing service is not pervasive in the business world, but it is rapidly spreading all over the world, because of its inherited merits and benefits. Moreover, results of this research regarding the diffusion innovation are more or less different from those of the existing articles. This seems to be caused by the fact that the cloud computing service has a strong innovative factor that results in a new paradigm shift while most IT that are based on the theory of innovation diffusion are limited to companies and organizations. In addition, the participants in this study are believed to play an important role as innovators and early adapters to introduce the cloud computing service and to have competency to afford higher uncertainty for innovation. In conclusion, the introduction of the cloud computing service is a critical issue in the business world.

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