It Professional

Objectives and method: As the field of applied sport psychology (ASP) is witnessing a growth in interest in professional practice, it is also faced with the challenge of developing its professional status. Taking into account the lack of research on the career development of ASP practitioners, this article reviews research and information relevant to two major career phases: a) education in preparing for ASP practice, and b) initiation and development of professional ASP practice. The paper also provides an initial collation of information and research regarding ASP education, professional development, and service provision in Europe.

Rate making and risk-based pricing give users a definite competitive advantage in the general insurance business. This advantage is all the more compelling if the company is an industry leader. This paper attempts to tie the theory of rate making to technology ...

The application of formal research ethics and governance structures in social work research have lagged behind those applicable in health, although in the UK, social care has been deemed to be covered by those that were used in the NHS. Whilst this link is useful, it does not facilitate researcher involvement in the small-scale qualitative studies that feature in social work more than in health. Our exploration of the subject reveals that the dominance of the natural sciences paradigm in the social science is evident nationally, regionally and internationally. So, in this sense, the UK follows the usual paths that favour quantitative studies. In this article we explore the trajectory of governance structures in social work research in the UK to argue that social work needs its own ethics and governance structures, but that some agreement should be sought with other professions, particularly in those projects that cross professional and discipline boundaries so that social work research does not have to undergo dual processes for ethical approval. This implies a broader recognition of social work research ethics and governance structures than currently exist.

In a rapidly changing IT environment, IT professionals need to keep abreast of technological knowledge. We examined how well this is achieved by developing a motivational model of ''technological knowledge renewal effectiveness.'' We hypothesized that (1) renewal effectiveness was influenced by the IT professional's career orientation, perceived IT dynamism, tolerance of ambiguity, delegation; and (2) that this positively affected both intrinsic and extrinsic job satisfaction. Survey data from 126 IT professionals was used to test the hypotheses. The results generally supported the research model. We discussed the implications of these results in both research and practice.

Speed, around-the-clock availability, and security are the most common indicators of quality of service on the Internet. Management faces a twofold challenge. One the one hand, it has to meet customer expectations in terms of quality of service. On the other hand, companies have to keep IT costs under control to stay competitive. Therefore, capacity, reliability, availability, scalability, and security are key issues to Web service managers. Electronic business sites are complex computer-system architectures, with multiple interconnected layers composed of many software and hardware components, such as networks, caching proxies, routers, load balancers, high speed links, and mainframes with large databases. The nature of electronic business workload is also complex due to its transactional nature, security and authentication requirements, payment protocols, and the unpredictable characteristics of service requests over the Internet. Planning the capacity of electronic business services requires more than just adding extra hardware. It requires more than intuition, ad-hoc procedures, or rules of thumb. Many possible alternative architectures can be used to implement a Web service; one has to be able to determine the most cost-effective architecture and system. This is where the quantitative approach and capacity planning techniques come into play. Capacity planning techniques offer much more than just performance prediction. In these times of ubiquitous Internet services and businesses, capacity planning should be actually viewed as a powerful management technique. Performance problems on the Internet are exacerbated by the unpredictable nature of service requesting and information retrieval over the Web. It is not uncommon for Web sites to experience, without warning, a manifold increase in traffic volume. This type of load spike, also known as "flash crowds," creates terrible performance problems and slow page download times. Web delays frustate customers and cost over four billion dollars each year to online businesses according to an Intelliquest report (www.intelliquest.com/press/). The causes of delays are various. Overloaded networks and servers are the most common ones. The viability of electronic business depends on the ability of the IT infrastructure to offer timely and reliable services. For companies, whose business depends on the behavior of their online services, long waiting times and unavailability can be disastrous. Electronic businesses must continuously guarantee quality of service to avoid losing sales and customers. Security, performance, and availability are key issues for any service on the Web. This article introduces capacity planning as an essential tool for managing quality of service on the Web and presents a methodology, where the main steps are: understanding the environment, characterizing the workload, modeling the workload, validating and calibrating the models, predicting the performance, analyzing the costperformance plans, and suggesting actions.

... for FISMA (Federal Information Security Management Act) compliance for its Cloud-Computing services in order to be acceptable for the public sector[17]. ... 17. Howard, AB, FISMA compliance for federal cloud computing on the horizon in 2010. SearchComplaince.com, 2009. 18. ...

In this paper, we present an example humanitarian open-source software project that has been used since January 2006 at a small liberal-arts college as an experiment in undergraduate CS education. Sahana (Sinhalese for relief) is a free and open-source disaster management system developed in Sri Lanka by a group of IT professionals following the 2004 Asian tsunami. It is a webbased tool that addresses the IT coordination problems that typically occur in trying to recover from a large-scale disaster. We are currently exploring the wider use of Sahana as a sustainable model and platform for teaching about open-source software development while at the same time allowing CS students and educators to make a socially useful contribution of their time, effort, and expertise. This paper presents our experiences with Sahana including the benefits for both academia and industry.

This paper provides a preliminary analysis on Green IT awareness among Australian IT professionals based on a survey of 322 members of The Australian Computer Society. Overall, the study indicates that there is a discrepancy between IT professionals' awareness and concern for Green IT and the actions that they and their organisations have actually taken. Specifically, • The study shows

Requirements have remained one of the grand challenges in the design of software intensive systems. In this paper we review the main strands of requirements research over the past two decades and identify persistent and new challenges. Based on a field study that involved interviews of over 30 leading IT professionals involved in large and complex software design and implementation initiatives we review the current state-ofthe-art in design requirements management. We observe significant progress in the deployment of modeling methods, tools, risk-driven design, and user involvement. We note nine emerging themes and challenges in the requirement management arena: 1) business process focus, 2) systems transparency, 3) integration focus, 4) distributed requirements, 5) layered requirements, 6) criticality of information architectures, 7) increased deployment of COTS and software components, 8) design fluidity and 9) interdependent complexity. Several research challenges and new avenues for research are noted in the discovery, specification, and validation of requirements in light of these requirements features.

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E-commerce's impact on real estate is just as significant and multifaceted as in other areas. Its momentum springs from two factors: an increasing population of online customers and increased involvement and investment from the real estate industry (W.A.

Information technology (IT) projects are renowned for their high failure rate. Risk management is an essential process for the successful delivery of IT projects. In-depth interviews with IT professionals from leading firms in Western Australia were undertaken to determine how IT risks were managed in their projects. The respondents ranked 27 IT risks in terms of likelihood and consequences to identify the most important risks. The top five risks, in order, were: personnel shortfalls; unreasonable project schedule and budget; unrealistic expectations; incomplete requirements; and diminished window of opportunity due to late delivery of software. The respondents overwhelmingly applied the treatment strategy of risk reduction to manage these risks. Furthermore, these strategies were primarily project management processes, rather than technical processes. This demonstrates that project management is a risk management strategy. Scope, quality management, and human resource management were solutions applied to several risks. In particular, managing stakeholders' expectations is a specific risk treatment that helps to manage several key IT risks.

The increasingly global sourcing of IT work and other socio-economic trends are prompting fundamental changes in the availability of IT skills needed in both client and vendor organizations. This article analyzes the results of a survey conducted in 2005, in which IT executives were asked to describe the skills they felt were critical to keep in house now and in

This study investigates variation in IT professionals' experience of ethics with a view to enhancing their formation and support. This is explored through an examination of the experience of IT, IT professional ethics and IT professional ethics education.

Researchers have studied the energy efficiency of hardware, but what about application software? Using an experimental approach, the authors show how applications affect total energy consumption and discuss design factors that could influence software energy efficiency. E nergy costs have dramatically increased in recent years, making their effect on data center operating costs more significant. According to the IDC market research firm, energy costs account for more than 30 percent of the operating costs of a data center (based on the worldwide average cost of energy), and this figure might be even higher in countries where power is more expensive, such as in Italy or the UK. 1 Currently, the annual power and cooling costs of servers represent almost 60 percent of the servers' initial acquisition cost. 2 Moreover, energy requirements are an issue for data center scalability, because providers can't always supply sufficient energy for large data centers. 3 The annual energy bill for very large data centers is in the millions of dollars, so investing in green IT is also economically efficient.

Ethical issues related to information systems are important to the information technology (IT) professionals. These issues are also significant for organizations and societies. Although considerable literature on IT and related ethical issues exists, a review of this literature has found little empirical research on ethical practices within the government and private sector organizations. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to draw inferences regarding such practices currently in these sectors. The research results indicate a significant correlation between the code of ethics and the attitude of professionals towards the unethical use of software in government and private sector organizations. These also indicate significant differences in government and private sectors.

Complex Event Processing (CEP) is a defined set of tools and techniques for analyzing and controlling the complex series of interrelated events that drive modern distributed information systems. This emerging technology helps IS and IT professionals understand what is happening within the system, quickly identify and solve problems, and more effectively utilize events for enhanced operation, performance, and security. CEP can be applied to a broad spectrum of information system challenges, including business process automation, schedule and control processes, network monitoring and performance prediction, and intrusion detection. This talk is about the rise of CEP as we know it today, its historical roots and its current position in commercial markets. Some possible long-term future roles of CEP in the Information Society are discussed along with the need to develop rule-based event hierarchies on a commercial basis to make those applications possible. The talk gives empahsis to the point that "Rules are everywhere" and that mathematical formalisms cannot express all the forms that are in use in various event processing systems.

& Privacy, and Software. With the Computer magazine in its 52nd year of publication and most of the others in their fourth decade of publication, IT Professional is one of the youngest magazines, but nevertheless, it has established itself as a highly reputable publication for developers and managers of enterprise information systems. We celebrated the 20th anniversary of IT Professional with the following.

Maritime management encompasses the employment and manipulation of human resources, financial resources, technological resources and natural resources that relate to the sea, maritime navigation, shipping, port development and coastal protection. It contributes to the economic growth, price stability, transportation of cargoes and passengers, and business activities of shipping organizations. The efficient management of resources, operations and activities relies on a modern marine information system (MIS) whose information is provided by geomatics engineers and IT professionals, among others. This paper first introduces the role of the geomatics engineer as geodesist, engineering surveyor, land boundary surveyor, cartographer, hydrographer, photogrammetrist and geographic information system (GIS) engineer since all these fields are related to maritime trade, supply chains and development of ports and airports. It then describes the principal components of a web-based MIS and the important role of geomatics engineers in surveying data. This includes collecting data from electronic nautical charts (ENC) and raster nautical charts (RNC), by applying high resolution light detection and ranging (LIDAR), satellite platform sensors and GIS.

Digital visual media represent nowadays one of the principal means for communication. Lately, the reliability of digital visual information has been questioned, due to the ease in counterfeiting both its origin and content. Digital image forensics is a brand new research field which aims at validating the authenticity of images by recovering information about their history. Two main problems are

The diverse ways in which technologies are modified and appropriated into local contexts are an important theme in CSCW research. Today, translocal processes such as the formation of international corporations and the movement of people and ideas across nation states increasingly shape these local contexts of technology use and design. We draw from prior work on appropriation in CSCW and meld it with work from transnational studies to illustrate appropriation as a cultural phenomenon and as it unfolds in relation to emerging translocal processes. We ground our explorations in findings from ethnographic research on collaborations and exchange among IT professionals in urban China. This work makes two main contributions. First, it expands CSCW's focus on socio-technical systems by taking seriously socio-political and socio-economic processes. Second, it contributes to debates on crosscultural and global technological development by employing transnational imagination as an analytical tool.

s rational-emotive therapy (RET) is scrutinized on several conceptual and empirical grounds, including its reliance on constructive assessment and its ethical stance. Its professional impact thus far exceeds its scientific status. Opinion varies on how even to define irrational beliefs; 1 consequence is problems in assessing them. Meta-analytic reviews provide support for the general utility of RET, but more qualitative reviews question both the internal and external validity of much of the published research. Lacking are process studies that can shed light on the mechanisms of therapeutic change, a situation likely due to the complexity of RET and to a lack of consensus as well about its very definition. Perhaps more progress can be achieved by forsaking studies of RET as a package and shifting instead to examination of specific therapeutic tactics in particular circumstances.

elcome to the fifth IT Professional issue of 2021, devoted to digital transformation (DT). It presents four peer-reviewed papers on this theme, four peer-reviewed feature papers on different topics, and column/department articles that align to probe deeper into DT. Digital transformation is all about disruption. The theory is that strategic adaptation to digital technology leads to enterprise-wide transformation. Such transformation is meant to improve value creation, operating efficiency, organizational agility, and overall performance. The implication is that digital transformation, unlike change, is both irreversible and ongoing. The reality has been that only 30% of organizations engaging in digital transformation reported successful transformation in 2018. 1 Then, an external disruption, too big to be ignored, occurred. The COVID-19 pandemic issued a loud wake-up call. In an ironic way, this serious societal disruption led to what appears to be an awakening in the importance of disruptive organizational digital transformation. Based on this conceptual framework, this month's edition of IT Professional spotlights significant trends that are directly related to digital transformation.

In a society where information represents one of the most valuable assets of business and government, an holistic approach to the management of information systems security is mandatory in order to prevent and detect possible abuse and misuse of information. Facing computer crimes requires to look at aspects related to the technical, formal and informal part of an information system, using theories, methods and techniques lying on different disciplines. Although, the majority of methods and techniques to prevent, detect and investigate computer crimes are best practices based on the experience of IT professionals and practitioners and there is a general lack of theories both used and advocated by academics. We expect to contribute to the literature on computer crime detection, prevention and investigation by introducing a new framework, a formalism and techniques strongly founded on social, psychological and organizational theories. Our assumption is that by focusing on human behavior instead of IT, is possible to better understand computer crimes and to offer substantial insight into the area of IS security

Objective: Responding to the need for more foster families to provide care for increasing numbers of children coming into care, this study was designed to understand the motivations and needs of foster parents in order to improve recruitment and retention. To meet this goal, the study identified characteristics of current foster families, performed a factor analysis on the Foster Parent Satisfaction Survey (FPSS) (Denby, R. W., Rindfleisch, N., & Bean, G. 1999). Predictors of foster parent's satisfaction and intent to continue to foster were identified, and the results were used to differentiate between foster parents who did and did not consider quitting fostering.