Resumo em Inglês:

Public sector procurement should be a transparent and fair process. Strict legal requirements are enforced on public sector procurement to make it a standardised process. To make fair decisions on selecting suppliers, a practical method which adheres to legal requirements is important. The research that is the base for this paper aimed at identifying a suitable Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) method for the specific legal and functional needs of the Maldivian Public Sector. To identify such operational requirements, a set of focus group interviews were conducted in the Maldives with public officials responsible for procurement decision making. Based on the operational requirements identified through focus groups, criteria-based evaluation is done on published MCDA methods to identify the suitable methods for e-procurement decision making. This paper describes the identification of the operational requirements and the results of the evaluation to select suitable decision models for the Maldivian context.

Resumo em Inglês:

This paper aims to investigate the usefulness of three user testing methods (observation, and using both quantitative and qualitative data from a post-test questionnaire) in terms of their ability or inability to find specific usability problems on university websites. The results showed that observation was the best method, compared to the other two, in identifying large numbers of major and minor usability problems on university websites. The results also showed that employing qualitative data from a post-test questionnaire was a useful complementary method since this identified additional usability problems that were not identified by the observation method. However, the results showed that the quantitative data from the post-test questionnaire were inaccurate and ineffective in terms of identifying usability problems on such websites.

Resumo em Inglês:

This work seeks to provide a new multi-criteria approach to assess IT Governance (ITG) in the area of Strategic Alignment. The complete methodological development process is described. The evaluation model uses Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) and it is targeted to IT processes, more specifically to the COBIT© IT maturity levels, domains and processes, thus providing a differentiated analysis of importance for each item. Its relevance is related to addressing isolated and individual evaluation criteria that are normally practiced in audits of processes. The model allows generating information that extends the guarantees of compliance and corporate governance from different organizations. This research demonstrates that the combined use of multi-criteria decision methodologies and soft computing proves to be particularly suitable for Strategic Alignment such as the focal area of COBIT. The model was applied in a big retail Brazilian company.

Resumo em Português:

A escolha de um Sistema Integrado de Gestão (Enterprise Resourse Planning - ERP) deve ser feita de forma criteriosa pelos altos custos envolvidos com a aquisição deste tipo de sistema. Gestores de áreas como contabilidade, financeira e tecnologia da informação necessitam de apoio e ferramentas que os auxiliem na seleção de um ERP adequado ao seu negócio. Com este artigo, apresenta-se uma pesquisa que visou verificar a possibilidade de um Sistema de Apoio à Decisão (SAD) ser utilizado para essa seleção, inter-relacionando critérios de avaliação, que possibilitassem contemplar o alinhamento estratégico entre o Negócio e a Tecnologia de Informação. A partir da revisão da literatura foram identificados 28 fatores relacionados à seleção de pacotes de software, com especial ênfase aos Sistemas Integrados de Gestão. Para a realização da pesquisa, adotaram-se procedimentos de natureza qualitativa em que os 18 fatores, considerados relevantes para uma boa seleção de ERP, foram classificados com a Técnica Delphi, utilizados como entrada em um SAD: Processo de Rede Analítica (Analytic Network Process - ANP) e aplicados como Estudo de Caso em uma empresa de pequeno porte que contratou ERP. Os resultados obtidos demonstraram que o ANP mostrou-se eficiente em inter-relacionar critérios e avaliar o alinhamento estratégico entre o Negócio e a Tecnologia de Informação.

Resumo em Inglês:

The choice of an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) must be made judiciously by the high costs involved in the acquisition of such systems. Managers in areas such as accounting, financial and information technology need support and tools that help in selecting an appropriate ERP for their business. With this article, we present a study aimed at investigating the possibility of a Decision Support System (DSS) to be used for this selection interrelating evaluation criteria, which could allow to contemplate the strategic alignment between Business and Information Technology. From the literature review 28 factors related to the selection of software packages, with special emphasis on ERP were identified. For the research procedures, the qualitative ones were adopted, in that the 18 factors considered relevant to a good selection of ERP were classified with the Delphi technique and used as input in a DSS: Analytical Network Process (ANP), applied as a Case Study in a small business that hired the ERP. The results showed that the ANP was efficient in interrelated criteria and evaluated the strategic alignment between Business and Information Technology.

Resumo em Português:

A Governança de TI é uma área de estudos recente que tem despertado muito interesse devido à importância cada vez maior da Tecnologia da Informação (TI) para as organizações, sejam elas públicas ou privadas. Isso justifica a existência de uma literatura científica sobre o tema governança de TI na qual este estudo se enquadra e para cujo desenvolvimento busca contribuir. Para tanto, realizou-se pesquisa empírica envolvendo 57 organizações públicas integrantes do governo federal brasileiro na qual foram examinadas as relações entre três mecanismos de governança – Comitê de TI, Gestores da Solução de TI e Processo de Portfólio de Investimento em TI – e a Efetividade da Governança de TI. Com base na literatura revisada, um modelo conceitual foi proposto para expressar as relações que esses construtos deveriam ter uns com os outros. Um questionário foi desenvolvido com base nesse modelo e aplicado a mais de 180 servidores públicos federais. As relações Causais foram testadas com análise de mediação e detectadas, em sua maioria, de acordo com o modelo. Os resultados indicam que o desempenho do Processo de Portfólio deveria sempre ser considerado em análises que tenham por objetivo avaliar os efeitos de Comitê de TI e de Gestores da Solução na efetividade da governança de TI. Isso significa que a não existência ou o baixo desempenho do Processo de Portfólio pode reduzir ou anular a contribuição positiva dos outros dois mecanismos para a efetividade da governança de TI. Por informar tomadores de decisão e gestores dos resultados em algumas das principais organizações da administração federal brasileira no planejamento e utilização TI em busca de efetividade da governança, as conclusões apresentadas neste artigo preenchem um vazio de conhecimento sobre as complementaridades e os efeitos de três mecanismos de governança na dinâmica dessas organizações.

Resumo em Inglês:

Information technology (IT) governance has received a lot of attention lately, with a growing strategic importance currently being given to IT by both public and private organizations. This justifies the existence of a body of scientific literature on IT governance, to which this paper belongs and makes an attempt to contribute to. Towards that end, an empirical study was performed involving 57 public organizations of the Brazilian federal administration, examining the relationship between three governance mechanisms – IT steering committee, IT solution manager, and IT investment portfolio management process and IT governance effectiveness. Based on the literature review, a conceptual model was developed to express the causal relations that these constructs were expected to hold with one another. Through a custom-designed questionnaire submitted to over 180 federal public employees, the causal model was tested using mediation analysis and mostly confirmed. Results indicate that Portfolio Management should always be taken into account for analyses that aim to evaluate the effects of IT steering committees and solution managers on IT governance effectiveness. This means that a nonexistent or an underperforming Portfolio Management Process can lead to a reduction or cancellation of the potential positive contributions of the other two mechanisms to IT governance. By informing decision makers and public managers at some of the main federal public organizations in the country on how to plan and deploy IT to promote a more effective governance, the conclusions presented herein fill a previous knowledge gap in the complementarity and the joint effectiveness of three IT governance mechanisms on the IT dynamics of key public organizations.

Resumo em Inglês:

Internet use by patients as a source of information on health and disease is expanding rapidly with obvious effects on the doctor-patient relationship. A self-administered questionnaire was used, about physicians´ perception on the use of the Internet by patients and about whether that use interferes with the doctor–patient relationship. 85.3% of the physicians reported that their patients accessed the Internet and that 92% used that information in a following visit. Overall, 56.9% of the physicians thought that the Internet helped the doctor–patient relationship, 27.6% thought it interfered with the relationship, and 15.5% believed that the Internet had a negative impact on it.

Resumo em Inglês:

This paper describes the state of the art of a simplified model for integration of services in mega events. The project context, which was financed by the National Research Council – CNPq, is divided into six major areas or functional groups: Urban Mobility, Tourism, Airports, Security, Energy and Telecommunications. The proposal is described in layers, as an infrastructure model of integration and services evaluation, describing its main layers and interaction processes. The proposal described in this paper is restricted to the telecommunication subproject; however, in the modeling of the scenario for the study case, it was necessary to consider requirements and variables that are common to all subprojects. In the specification process of these requirements, we noticed important processes that interact with some sectors in the city of São Paulo; however, in the mean time, we noticed some failures regarding the integration and collaboration performed by administrative elements of stadiums as a main focus in the mega event and part of our case study. Currently, the proposal is in its first version as open software for the evaluation of the services quality and the mega event infrastructure through the use of performance indicators.

Resumo em Inglês:

This paper presents a method that integrates Balanced Scorecard (BSC) concepts and IT strategic planning (ITSP) processes. The resulting method was applied in two organizations in order to verify contributions of Balanced Scorecard regarding the identified ITSP problems. The development of this work was realized in qualitative, exploratory research based on two case studies. The results show that the use of BSC contributed directly to work with IT strategic planning challenges and involved middle management, multifunctional teams, and top management support, all beyond IT boundaries.

Resumo em Português:

A busca por eficiência no setor cooperativista de crédito tem levado as cooperativas a adotarem novas tecnologias e novos conhecimentos gerenciais. Dentre tais ferramentas, a Mineração de Dados tem-se destacado nos últimos anos como uma metodologia sofisticada na busca de conhecimento “escondido” nas bases de dados das organizações. Entende-se que o processo de concessão de crédito é uma operação central de uma cooperativa de crédito, assim, o uso de instrumentos que auxiliem são desejados e podem tornar-se fator-chave na gestão do crédito. Os passos utilizados na execução do processo de Descoberta de Conhecimento do presente estudo de caso foram: seleção dos dados; pré-processamento e limpeza dos dados; transformação dos dados; Mineração de Dados; interpretação e avaliação dos resultados. Os resultados foram avaliados por meio de validação cruzada em dez conjuntos e repetidos em dez simulações. Este estudo propôs-se a desenvolver modelos para analisar a capacidade dos cooperados de uma cooperativa de crédito de saldar seus compromissos, utilizando Árvore de Decisão – algoritmo C4.5 e Rede Neural Artificial – algoritmo Multilayer Perceptrom. Conclui-se que, para o problema proposto, os modelos tiveram resultados estatisticamente semelhantes e que podem auxiliar no processo decisório da cooperativa.

Resumo em Inglês:

The search for efficiency in the cooperative credit sector has led cooperatives to adopt new technology and managerial knowhow. Among the tools that facilitate efficiency, data mining has stood out in recent years as a sophisticated methodology to search for knowledge that is “hidden” in organizations' databases. The process of granting credit is one of the central functions of a credit union; therefore, the use of instruments that support that process is desirable and may become a key factor in credit management. The steps undertaken by the present case study to perform the knowledge discovery process were data selection, data pre-processing and cleanup, data transformation, data mining, and the interpretation and evaluation of results. The results were evaluated through cross-validation of ten sets, repeated in ten simulations. The goal of this study is to develop models to analyze the capacity of a credit union's members to settle their commitments, using a decision tree—C4.5 algorithm and an artificial neural network—multilayer perceptron algorithm. It is concluded that for the problem at hand, the models have statistically similar results and may aid in a cooperative's decision-making process.

Resumo em Inglês:

Information technology governance is a process by which organizations align their information technology operations and services with their performance goals and strategic objectives and assess the results. The financial sector has benefited greatly from the development of information technology, primarily in bank automation. There are few research works aimed at describing information technology governance, and there are even fewer in the financial sector. This paper is aimed at measuring information technology governance in financial institutions using the methodology proposed by Weill and Ross (2004). The sample consisted of sixty professionals from financial institutions operating in Brazil. The average performance score was approximately 79.6, showing that the organizations studied have not achieved maximum performance (100), although many are very close to it. This paper describes an original empirical study of Brazilian financial institutions concerning information technology management performance. The survey investigates not only the context of performance, but also the importance that the organization places on each item related to information technology governance aligned with business needs and goals.

Resumo em Inglês:

This article reports the findings of an empirical study about Automated Text Clustering applied to scientific articles and newspaper texts in Brazilian Portuguese, the objective was to find the most effective computational method able to cluster the input of texts in their original groups. The study covered four experiments, each experiment had four procedures: 1. Corpus Selections (a set of texts is selected for clustering),2. Word Class Selections (Nouns, Verbs and Adjectives are chosen from each text by using specific algorithms), 3.Filtering Algorithms (a set of terms is selected from the results of the preview stage, a semantic weight is also inserted for each term and an index is generated for each text), 4. Clustering Algorithms (the clustering algorithms Simple K-Means, sIB and EM are applied to the indexes). After those procedures, clustering correctness and clustering time statistical results were collected. The sIB clustering algorithm is the best choice for both scientific and newspaper corpus, under the condition that the sIB clustering algorithm asks for the number of clusters as input before running (for the newspaper corpus, 68.9% correctness in 1 minute and for the scientific corpus, 77.8% correctness in 1 minute). The EM clustering algorithm additionally guesses the number of clusters without user intervention, but its best case is less than 53% correctness. Considering the experiments carried out, the results of human text classification and automated clustering are distant; it was also observed that the clustering correctness results vary according to the number of input texts and their topics.

Resumo em Português:

Business activities and business processes in the corporate world are technology-dependent. Such activities and processes drive the development of new audit techniques to investigate possible systemic failures that could affect the internal controls of companies. In this way, the need for automation of auditing tests led to the development of the concept and implementation of projects for continuous data auditing in the enterprise environment. This article evaluates the major critical issues for the construction of continuous data auditing, considering the use of information technology and computer assisted audit techniques. Four basic premises were formulated based on the theoretical foundation. From them eight propositions and eleven critical aspects were derived, which were placed in a proof of concept, through a multiple case study in the Brazilian business scenario. The main findings of this research were the critical aspects for the construction of continuous data auditing, originated in theoretical foundation and corroborated by the results of a multiple case study, which will serve as drivers for the initialization of continuous auditing projects as well as for their restructuring.