In 2008, Bitcoin, the world’s first fully decentralized currency, brought with it a technological context that had broad application potential in virtually all areas. Years later, although explored in various applications, these decentralized technologies are still far from the common folk’s daily lives. This article brings a review of the literature that addresses the obstacles that most distance the paradigm of decentralization from the lay user in four main fields: (1) governance, (2) security, (3) scale, and (4) authentication. The results inform on the states of the practice and of the art and point to the difficulty in virtualizing real-world, material events without violating the principle of decentralization as the main obstacle to its popularization. In addition, by establishing a parallel between the early years of the Internet’s popularization and the decentralization paradigm, a research agenda is proposed to tackle the (other) gaps identified in the literature.

User Stories record what must be built in projects that use agile practices. User Stories serve both to estimate effort, generally measured in Story Points, and to plan what should be done in a Sprint. Therefore, it is essential to train software engineers on how to create simple, easily readable, and comprehensive User Stories. For that reason, we designed, implemented, applied, and evaluated a web application called User Story Tutor (UST). UST checks the description of a given User Story for readability, and if needed, recommends appropriate practices for improvement. UST also estimates a User Story effort in Story Points using Machine Learning techniques. As such UST may support the continuing education of agile development teams when writing and reviewing User Stories. UST's ease of use was evaluated by 40 agile practitioners according to the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and AttrakDiff. The TAM evaluation averages were good in almost all considered variables. Application of the AttrakDiff evaluation framework produced similar good results. Apparently, UST can be used with good reliability. Applying UST to assist in the construction of User Stories is a viable technique that, at the very least, can be used by agile developments to complement and enhance current User Story creation.

Aligning corporate support functions, such as Information Technology (IT), with business objectives is a good strategic practice. To spread risks and reduce costs, a company may contract some services to outside providers – in what is known as outsourcing, while insourcing some other services, by leveraging its own capabilities. Deciding on sourcing options to add business value is not trivial. It requires knowing and leveraging the company’s own capabilities and effectively managing sourcing customer-provider complex dynamics. Said dynamics are often subject to varying degrees of feedback and delays that evolve from outsourcing contracts. Such complexity causes managers’ decision making to be usually ill-informed about implications to the business. The specialized literature offers little insight on how and with what to assess such implications. This paper contributes to the literature by presenting a System Dynamics (SD) simulation model for the interactions among the customer’s capabilities and those of the provider. The model breaks down complexity by offering complementary SD views, allowing for what-if analyses to inform decisions on sourcing options that favor intended business results. The model aligns sourcing strategies with the business through (dynamic) Balanced Scorecard concepts. The paper assesses how capabilities of Contract Monitoring and Service Delivery affect the earned business value of IT service outsourcing orders. Validation of the model was carried out in a multi-year case study at a taxation agency in Brazil.

Providing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is becoming increasingly competitive due to its growing world market.IaaSrequires significant physical resources, e.g., network connections, bandwidth, load balancers, and servers.IaaSproviders of any size and reach, but especially private and public regional ones, have to manage the capacity of their resources properly to reduce costs and meet other business goals. Comprehensive capacity management byIaaSproviders involves objective and subjective analyses and it is thus, challenging. Complexity arises, for instance, as one tries to factor management behavior in analyses of business impact and infrastructure performance to produce indicators in support of interventions related to service capacity.IaaSmanagers frequently rely on their own expertise, experience, and knowledge to identify whether an apparent capacity deficiency may be due to an infrastructure problem or to an unexpected demand burst. This article presents a business-driven simulation model based on System Dynamics (SD), Balanced Scorecard (BSC) and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) concepts to support capacity management decisions byIaaSproviders in real-life operating scenarios. A case study in a real-world, public regionalIaaSprovider illustrates the model’s support to non-trivial decisions that are aligned with managers’ experiences and business expectations.

This paper presents a gamified empowerment approach to train future teachers. The approach aims to innovate teaching strategies and to provide a system which motivates players to read and to apply acquired knowledge towards actions to address social challenges within their community. The approach is supported by an alternate reality serious game called “ReadAct” which blends reading instruction with opportunities to act on social responsibility in the real world. Validation results are offered for experiments with the ReadAct approach in different but related contexts of drama reading, environmental education and introduction to computing. Results provide evidence that ReadAct motivates players (young readers) to engage themselves and to attract their schools’ and families’ communities to act on social challenges. The underlying challenges in the experiments are water conservation, urban violence and bullying at school. The paper contributes to the literature on computer-based educat ion by indicating how a ReadAct game may turn the school community, where it is played out, into a community school with an integrated view of academics and social services.

The guarantee of the right to quality education is a fundamental principle for policy and management education. In addition to the organizational processes and regulation, as well as for citizenship, currently the student satisfaction plays a key role for the adequacy of actual courses and the needs of the educational community who depend on them. This way, interest on active methodologies has intensified with the emergence of new strategies that may favour the autonomy of students. Active Learning (AL) becomes an important strategy in healthcare to the extent that theory and practice go hand in hand in the training of health experts. This paper proposes a conceptual framework (Anais) for active learning in healthcare studies and summarizes a qualitative research with healthcare experts and students on the feasibility and applicability of Anais and its potentially positive results. Statistical tests and descriptive analysis of the collected data indicate Anais could indeed bring a contribution to the healthcare area in terms of benefits to use it as an AL tool for professional training of physicians and other healthcare professionals and specialists.

Information technology (IT) services have become more complex and diversified. The service desk establishes a single channel of communication between the internal IT provider and its users, through which incidents and problems are analyzed, escalated and resolved. Managers need to analyze different operating scenarios regarding service desk capacity to make effective decisions about what should be improved to meet the business demands. This paper presents a system dynamics model for evaluating an organization's service desk's service capacity. The model allows the performance simulation of scenarios, estimating the service capacity. Preliminary results are promising and seem to contribute to the improvement of capacity management processes.

An effective decision-making about using Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) resources in cloud computing projects is still a challenge to managers. We need to optimize resources use in cloud services, to obtain financial success in cloud projects. In this work, we propose a Petri net framework to model possible cost savings using public clouds spot instances pricing scheme. The results from initial simulations indicate that spot instances can be a very interesting option for savings in autoscaling process.

IT Service Transition (ITST) is naturally challenging because it usually involves changes that run counter customer and provider staffs’ preconceptions, habits and established practices. Changes that affect implicit or explicit business processes (BP) adopted by the provider’s Service Transition team are particularly daunting since they may impact the team’s morale negatively and contaminate customer’s personnel who might be anxious to start with. Inability to properly implement and manage changes due to Service Transition process adjustments and retooling may lengthen deployment time, lower quality and even cause the provider to fail. In order to efficiently handle such changes, the provider’s ITST team must be motivated towards, trained in and quickly made proficient with new work tools, routines and practices. This paper provides preliminary evidence that blending Business Process Management (BPM) to gamification concepts and tools can accelerate learning in an IT Service Transition context. For that, we consider the case of a small IT Service provider in Brazil when transitioning a sales support IT service from Palm OS to Android devices.

IT capabilities of contracting organizations and outcomes expected by IT outsourcing (ITO) initiatives should be evaluated through every stage of the ITO life cycle for effective ITO management. However, there is a lack of tools and models that consider the dynamic and integrated view of capabilities management, sourcing decision making and benefits management. In this paper we propose and use a model based on the concepts of dynamic capabilities and benefits management for evaluating and managing customers' IT capabilities that need to be applied to outsourcing relationships over time. Preliminary validation of the proposed model is carried out in a case study at a Brazilian state revenue agency where the model was used to support decisions on the distribution of limited human resources between IT capabilities of Contract Monitoring and Service Delivery in ITO scenarios of varying internal-external sourcing partitioning. Results provide evidence that the proposed model can ease and accelerate identification of (more) adequate ITO options.

Cloud computing has become a very popular technology for IT infrastructure (infrastructure as a service - IaaS), with big players offering attractive pricing schemes. Software vendors are interested in offering products in the cloud as services. However, in order to evaluate software as an offer of service (SaaS) for a given enterprise application, we need to assess some qualitative factors other than just price-security and trust being the most relevant factors. In this work, we propose a Petri net multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) framework to evaluate SaaS as opposed to an on-premises alternative. The proposed framework can help IT managers in deciding between the two options, as well as being able to help software vendors in their efforts to establish SaaS pricing.

Under current approaches, service performance is generally evaluated using technical metrics, for the following two basic reasons: 1) They are easily understood by technical people and 2) They are typically easy to measure directly. The actual impact on the business of low value and quality are not apparent. Service metrics are objectively measured, however, subjective criteria - those that depend on the subject (person) being polled - are not easily brought into the picture. Uncertainty is not typically considered in the measurement process. Service metrics are gathered strictly on an operational level without any effective information available at a strategic level. Within this scope of work, we propose a model in order to quantify an IT service aggregated value and a hierarchical quality indicator within a time snapshot, which can be used to help managers in activities relating to continual service improvement. We carried out a case-study in a real environment of a Brazilian Bank whereby the results indicate that our non-intrusive model is useful and can be adopted by corporations in addition to their actual continual service improvement rules.

We explore the challenge of selecting the best among a set of alternative IT investments. Solving this problem is important since the difference between alternative investment options may be drastic in terms of business results, both positive and negative. The resulting model takes as input a set of investment alternatives and a parameterized description of IT services, and provides as output a Preference Index for each alternative. The solution takes into account such characteristics as epistemic and aleatory uncertainty as well as the decision maker's attitude toward risk. Through a case study and a sensitivity analysis, we conclude that the model is useful in practice and robust; we also describe its domain of validity.

The context: the selection of a maximum value IT service portfolio is a major challenge to be faced by IT executives, during the Service Strategy phase of the IT service life cycle defined in ITIL. The problem: ITIL states that the value of an IT service should be estimated based on the improvement of customers' outcomes brought by the service. It is hard to apply this approach due to difficulties to access data related to customers' outcomes and to precisely isolate the influence of IT on the improvements of customers' performance. Our proposed solution: in this work, we propose the application of a formal business value model to quantify the business value of IT services, so as to pave the way for the definition of a maximum-value portfolio. The quantification method presented estimates the value of IT services through low-intrusion interactions between the IT Service provider and its customers. Validation: our approach was applied with success to the IT department of a multinational manufacturer. Results from the experiments enabled higher expected IT ROI through the use of a value-based portfolio definition process.

This paper presents a model to support decision making for investments in IT services. As such it contributes to IT service portfolio management. Investment options are analyzed and ranked according to a utility index estimated from possible positive and negative business impact of IT services due to IT Service Level Agreement (SLA) compliance and violations. The Balanced Scorecard framework is used to infer the linkage between IT and business activities. The approach takes uncertainty into account by means of utility theory and interval arithmetic. Numerical illustrations encompassing tangible SLA-dependent criteria demonstrate how the approach may be of use.

In the Change Management process within IT Service Management, some activities need to evaluate the risk exposure associated with changes to be made to the infrastructure and services. The paper presents a method to evaluate risk exposure associated with a change. Further, we show how to use the risk exposure metric to automatically assign priorities to changes. The formal model developed for this purpose captures the business perspective by using financial metrics in the evaluation of risk. Thus the method is an example of Business-Driven IT Management. A case study, performed in conjunction with a large IT service provider, is reported and provides good results when compared to decisions made by human managers.

Change management is one of the most critical processes in IT management. Some of the reasons are the sheer number of changes and the difficulty of evaluating the impact of changes on the IT services being provided. Through carrying out a survey with IT managers and practitioners, we have found that, among the activities performed during change management, change scheduling (allocating changes to change windows) is the most problematic one. In this paper we solve the change scheduling problem by using a business-driven approach that evaluates the impact of a change schedule in terms of the financial loss imposed on the service provider. Toward this aim, we model the impact of SLA violations when the implementation of changes is done after their deadline. A change scheduling optimization problem is then formalized and its solution is applied to a typical scenario. The results show that optimizing the scheduling of changes can result in significant savings to an IT support organization.

This work proposes a business-oriented approach to designing IT infrastructure in an e-commerce context subject to load surges. The main difference between the proposed approach and conventional ones is that it includes the negative business impact - loss - incurred due to IT infrastructure failures and performance degradation. The approach minimizes the sum of infrastructure cost and business losses, rather than only considering infrastructure cost. A complete example scenario shows the value of the method

The choice of collision control algorithm has an effect on the performance of Ethernet. A linear incremental backoff algorithm is proposed and its performance is compared to the binary exponential backoff algorithm. Two variations of Ethernets are used in the comparison: one treats data and acknowledgement packets equally; the other gives priority to acknowledgement packets. The maximum throughputs achieveable by both variations are derived. The performance of both variations is then evaluated by discrete simulation. The evaluation is based on a Ethernet model with uniform or biased traffic.