The major purpose of this chapter is to explore the options of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to complement conventional agricultural extension services in Tanzania. Group discussions and meetings were conducted to investigate the role of ICTs in extension services delivery using CATWOE framework of Soft Systems Methodology. The findings of the study reveal that the use of SS...

Cyber-infrastructures have transformed the practice of research. Researchers can now access distributed data worldwide with the help of cyber-infrastructures. User support services play an important role to facilitate researchers to accomplish their research goals with the help of cyber-infrastructures. However, the current user-support practices in cyberinfrastructures are not properly organiz...

Lack of effective involvement of stakeholders is one of the main drawbacks of enterprise architecture initiatives. Ongoing attempts to overcome this involve using Collaboration Engineering to develop a collaboration process that enterprise architects can execute to facilitate collaborative sessions with stakeholders during architecture creation. However, a field study evaluation of this process...

The trend towards utilising geographically and temporally dispersed personnel has grown quickly over the past decade; enabled by swift advances in computing, telecommunications, and networking technologies. The impact of these developments on corporate strategies and forms has manifested itself in a move to de-legitimise the rigid structure of a traditional bureaucracy and move towards one that...

Problems with water infrastructure are characterized by strong pressures of various stakeholders, besides to have heavy environmental and financial restrictions. This paper presents a group decisionmaking model for improvement of water infrastructure specially regarding with the reduction of water losses, by the integration of soft and hard approaches of Operational Research. Firstly, the soft ...

Open Source Software (OSS) has become the subject of much commercial interest of late. Certainly, OSS seems to hold much promise in addressing the core issues of the software crisis, namely that of software taking too long to develop, exceeding its budget, and not working very well. Indeed, there have been several examples of significant OSS success stories—the Linux operating system, the Apach...

Organizations are exposed to several types of risks, such as environmental, legal, operational, financial, and technological; that subjected epistemic uncertainty. In this context, a contemporary issue is how deal with accidents, greater difficulty in understanding the sociotechnical system, due its complex dynamic characteristics, an attempt prevent accidents based on components’ behavior. Alt...

We provide an overview and guidance for the Speed and Separation Monitoring methodology as presented in the International Organization of Standardization's technical specification 15066 on collaborative robot safety. Such functionality is provided by external, intelligent observer systems integrated into a robotic workcell. The SSM minimum protective distance function equation is discussed in d...