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Budget 2010: Public Sector ICT Spending Slashed By £500 Million (article)
by Georgina O'Toole
from TechMarketView / eGovMonitor
"Georgina O’Toole from Tech Market View examines the impact of the Chancellor's Budget and subsequent efficiency statements from departments and agencies on the public sector ICT spend."

Adapting agriculture to climate change : preparing Australian agriculture, forestry and fisheries for the future [book]

Editors: Chris Stokes & Mark Howden

"Moves beyond describing the causes and consequences of climate change to providing options for people to work towards adaptation action. Climate change implications and adaptation options are given for the key Australian primary industries of horticulture, forestry, grains, rice, sugarcane, cotton, viticulture, broadacre grazing, intensive livestock industries, marine fisheries, and aquaculture and water resources. Case studies demonstrate the options for each industry." - cover.
Call number: 632.10994 ADA 2010
Click here, and request a copy from the library!

Projected Costs of Generating Electricity 2010 [online]

Authors: Nuclear Energy Agency / International Energy Agency

"Presents the latest data available for a wide variety of fuels and technologies, including coal and gas (with and without carbon capture), nuclear, hydro, onshore and offshore wind, biomass, solar, wave and tidal as well as combined heat and power (CHP). It provides levelised costs of electricity (LCOE) per MWh for almost 200 plants, based on data covering 21 countries (including four major non-OECD countries), and several industrial companies and organisations. For the first time, the report contains an extensive sensitivity analysis of the impact of variations in key parameters such as discount rates, fuel prices and carbon costs on LCOE. Additional issues affecting power generation choices are also examined." - abstract.

This book is overdue! : how librarians and cybrarians can save us all [book]

Author: Marilyn Johnson

"Those who predicted the death of libraries forgot to consider that in the automated maze of contemporary life, none of us--neither the experts nor the hopelessly baffled--can get along without human help. And not just any help--we need librarians, who won't charge us by the question or roll their eyes, no matter what we ask. Who are they? What do they know? And how quickly can they save us from being buried by the digital age?" - cover.

Call number: 025.04 THI 2010
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A Guide to the Business analysis body of knowledge (BABOK guide) [book]

Authors: Kevin Brennan / International Institute of Business Analysis
"Business analysis involves understanding how organizations function to accomplish their purposes and defining the capabilities an organization requires to provide products and services to external stakeholders. ... [This guide contains] a framework that describes the business analysis tasks that must be performed in order to understand how a solution will deliver value to the sponsoring organization." - page 3.

Call number: 658.401 GUI 2009
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Communicating climate change: history, challenges, process and future directions (journal article)
by Susanne C. Moser
from Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, Vol 1 No 1 pp 31-53
"Since anthropogenic climate change first emerged on the public agenda in the midto-late 1980s, public communication of climate change and—more recently—the question of how to communicate it most effectively have witnessed a steep rise. This paper synthesizes what is known, presumed, and still unknown about how to effectively communicate this problem."

A new look at carbon offsets (journal article)
By Marcel Brinkman
from McKinsey Quarterly Feb 2010
"Carbon markets will continue to play a role in pricing—and limiting—emissions, but the opportunity in developing markets may be less promising than once expected."
Contact the Library for a copy of this article.

Chasing the Hottest IT: Effects of Information Technology Fashion on Organizations (journal article)
By Ping Wang
from MIS Quarterly Vol. 34 Issue 1 Mar 2010, pp. 63-85
"What happens to organizations that chase the hottest information technologies? This study examines some of the important organizational impacts of the fashion phenomenon in IT. An IT fashion is a transitory collective belief that an information technology is new, efficient, and at the forefront of practice. Using data collected from published discourse and annual IT budgets of 109 large companies for a decade, I have found that firms whose names were associated with IT fashions in the press did not have higher performance, but they had better reputation and higher executive compensation in the near term. Companies investing in IT in fashion also had higher reputation and executive pay, but they had lower performance in the short term and then improved performance in the long term. These results support a fashion explanation for the middle phase diffusion of IT innovations, illustrating that following fashion can legitimize organizations and their leaders regardless of performance improvement. The findings also extend institutional theory from its usual focus on taken-for-granted practices to fashion as a novel source of social approval. This study suggests that practitioners balance between performance pressure and social approval when they confront whatever is hottest in IT."

Information Systems Innovation for Environmental Sustainability (journal article)
By Nigel P Melville
from MIS Quarterly Vol. 34 Issue 1 Mar 2010, pp. 1-21
"Human life is dependent upon the natural environment, which, most would agree, is rapidly degrading. Business enterprises are a dominant form of social organization and contribute to the worsening, and enhancement, of the natural environment. Scholars in the administrative sciences examine questions spanning organizations and the natural environment but have largely omitted the information systems perspective. We develop a research agenda on information systems innovation for environmental sustainability that demonstrates the critical role that IS can play in shaping beliefs about the environment, in enabling and transforming sustainable processes and practices in organizations, and in improving environmental and economic performance. The belief--action--outcome (BAO) framework and associated research agenda provide the basis for a new discourse on IS for environmental sustainability."

Open science : sharing knowledge in the global century [book]

Authors: Julian Cribb, Tjempaka Sari / CSIRO Publishing
Describes "low-cost, effective means to transfer knowledge to target audiences in industry, government, the community and to the public at large. ... Features sections on good science writing, practical advice on how to develop communication and media strategies, ways to measure communication performance, how to handle institutional 'crises', how to deal with politicians and much more." - cover.

Call number: 501.4 OPE 2010 or
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Information management (journal article)
By Brian Detlor
from International Journal of Information Management Vol. 30 Issue 2 Apr 2010, pp. 103-108
"Information management concerns the control over how information is created, acquired, organized, stored, distributed, and used as a means of promoting, efficient and effective information access, processing, and use by people and organizations. Various perspectives of information management exist. In this paper, three are presented: the organizational, library and personal perspectives. Each deals with the management of some or all of the processes involved in the information lifecycle. Each concerns itself with the management of different types of information resources. The purpose of this paper is to clearly describe what, “information management” is and to clarify how information management differs in regards to closely related terms."
Contact the Library for a copy of this article.

The critical success factors of business process management (journal article)
By Peter Trkman
from International Journal of Information Management Vol. 30 Issue 2 April 2010, pp. 125-134
"Although business process management (‘BPM’) is a popular concept, it has not yet been properly theoretically grounded. This leads to problems in identifying both generic and case-specific critical success factors of BPM programs. The paper proposes an underlying theoretical framework with the utilization of three theories: contingency, dynamic capabilities and task–technology fit. The main premise is that primarily the fit between the business environment and business processes is needed. Then both continuous improvement and the proper fit between business process tasks and information systems must exist. The underlying theory is used to identify critical success factors on a case study from the banking sector."
Contact the Library if you require a copy of this article.

Requiem for a species : why we resist the truth about climate change [book]

Author: Clive Hamilton
Sometimes facing up to the truth is just too hard. There have been any number of urgent scientific reports in recent years emphasising just how dire the future looks and how little time we have left to act. But around the world only a few have truly faced up to the facts about global warming.This book is about why we have ignored those warnings, so that now it is too late. It is a book about the frailties of the human species: our strange obsessions, our hubris, and our penchant for avoiding the facts. It is the story of a battle within us between the forces that should have caused us to protect the earth, like our capacity to reason and our connection to nature, and our greed, materialism and alienation from nature, which, in the end, have won out.

Call number: 363.73874 REQ 2010
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Transport for suburbia : beyond the automobile age [book]
Author: Paul Mees
The need for effective public transport is greater than ever in the 21st century. With countries like China and India moving towards mass-automobility, we face the prospects of an environmental and urban health disaster unless alternatives are found. It is time to move beyond the automobile age. But while public transport has worked well in the dense cores of some big cities, the problem is that most residents of developed countries now live in dispersed suburbs and smaller cities and towns. These places usually have little or no public transport, and most transport commentators have given up on the task of changing this: it all seems too hard.

This book argues that the secret of 'European-style' public transport lies in a generalizable model of network planning that has worked in places as diverse as rural Switzerland, the Brazilian city of Curitiba and the Canadian cities of Toronto and Vancouver. It shows how this model can be adapted to suburban, exurban and even rural areas to provide a genuine alternative to the car, and outlines the governance, funding and service planning policies that underpin the success of the world's best public transport systems.

Find it at: 388.4 TRA 2009 or Click here, and request a copy from the library!

The Internet of Things (journal article)
By Michael Chui, Markus Löffler, and Roger Roberts
from McKinsey Quarterly Mar 2010
"More objects are becoming embedded with sensors and gaining the ability to communicate. The resulting information networks promise to create new business models, improve business processes, and reduce costs and risks."
Contact the Library to obtain a copy of this article.

Knowledge creation measurement methods (journal article)
By Rebecca Mitchell and Brendan Boyle
from Journal of Knowledge Management Vol 14 Iss 1 2010, pp. 67 - 82
"This paper sets out to examine the operationalisation of knowledge creation. Given the importance of knowledge creation for national and corporate wealth, assessing its measurement is a valuable exercise; however, current research utilises a range of measures, and this lack of agreed construct operationalisation is a barrier to robust empirical investigation. This paper aims to review current measurement methods and to construct a taxonomy of knowledge creation measures."

Knowledge sharing in organisational contexts: a motivation-based perspective (journal article)
By Alice Lam and Jean-Paul Lambermont-Ford
from Journal of Knowledge Management Vol 14 Iss 1 2010, pp. 51-66
"Facilitating knowledge sharing within organisations is a difficult task: the willingness of individuals to share and integrate their knowledge is one of the central barriers. This paper aims to develop a motivation-based perspective to explore how organisations resolve the social dilemma of knowledge sharing."

Beyond the ‘iron triangle’: Stakeholder perception of key performance indicators (KPIs) for large-scale public sector development projects (journal article)
By Sharmas-ur-Rehman Toor and Stephen Ogunlana
from International Journal of Project Management Vol 28 Issue 3 Apr 2010, pp. 228-236
"Performance measurement criteria vary from project to project. Despite much work on the subject, there is no commonly agreed framework of performance measurement on mega projects. To bridge this gap, this research targets to investigate the perception of the key performance indicators (KPIs) in the context of a large construction project in Thailand. The study explores the significance of key performance indicators in perspective of various construction stakeholders (client, consultants, and contractors). Findings indicate that the traditional measures of the iron triangle (on-time, under-budget and according to specifications) are no more applicable to measuring performance on large public sector development projects. Other performance indicators such as safety, efficient use of resources, effectiveness, satisfaction of stakeholders, and reduced conflicts and disputes are increasingly becoming important. This implies that the Thai construction industry is slowly departing from the traditional quantitative performance measurement to a rather mix of both quantitative and qualitative performance measurement on large-scale public sector development projects."
Contact the Library to obtain a copy of this article.

Deliberate ignorance in project risk management (journal article)
By Elmar Kutsch and Mark Hall
from International Journal of Project Management Vol 28 Issue 3 Apr 2010, pp. 245-255
"The management of project risk is considered a key discipline by most organisations involved in projects. Best practice project risk management processes are claimed to be self-evidently correct. However, project risk management involves a choice between which information is utilized and which is deemed to be irrelevant and hence excluded. Little research has been carried out to ascertain the manifestation of barriers to optimal project risk management such as ‘irrelevance’; the deliberate inattention of risk actors to risk. This paper presents the results of a qualitative study of IT project managers, investigating their reasons for deeming certain known risks to be irrelevant. The results both confirm and expand on Smithson’s [Smithson, M., 1989. Ignorance and Uncertainty. Springer-Verlag, New York] taxonomy of ignorance and uncertainty and in particular offer further context related insights into the phenomenon of ‘irrelevance’ in project risk management. We suggest that coping with ‘irrelevance’ requires defence mechanisms, the effective management of relevance as well as the setting of, and sticking to priorities. "
Contact the Library to obtain a copy of this article.