Cost awareness and cost efficiency has always been major concerns to organizations from all industries but in the last few years its importance grew due to the global economic and financial crisis. Considering their small size and market exposure, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) need cost awareness and efficiency more than ever. However, efficient and accurate costing methodologies are out ...

Recent years increase in organizations’ dependence on information technology has ushered in changing roles for IT departments and IT governance alike. Instead of being primarily focused on the continuous and cost efficient maintenance and support of existing resources, there is a need for a more balanced take on IT Governance which calls for an ambidextrous approach. This involves an increased ...

This paper presents evidence on the impact of managers on cost efficiency in banking. Stochastic frontier analysis is applied to a unique Finnish data set. The paper finds that manager age and education have strong yet complicated effects. University education enhances efficiency if the manager is running a large bank. Managing director changes are systematically followed by efficiency changes....

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the de facto inter-domain routing protocol that connects autonomous systems (ASes). Despite its importance for the Internet infrastructure, BGP is vulnerable to a variety of attacks due to lack of security mechanisms in place. Many BGP security mechanisms have been proposed. However, none of them has been deployed because of either high cost or high complexi...

e-Learning has opened a multitude of possibilities for teaching and learning. As the market matures there is a demand for more effective and cost-efficient learning interventions that meet the learning needs of the diverse learner population. Currently, however, very few teaching attempts have been made to match the pedagogical styles underlying e-Learning interventions to students’ diverse lea...

This paper investigates the centralized resource allocation with centralized structures by using the data envelopment analysis-ratio (DEA-R) models. To this end, it proposes a method to determine the resource allocation of centralized structures such that the ratio of inputs to outputs are minimized.

Wireless sensor networks have been widely used for civilian and military applications, such as environmental monitoring and vehicle tracking. The sensor nodes in the network have the abilities to sense, store, compute and communicate. To enable object tracking applications, spatial queries such as nearest neighbor queries are to be supported in these networks. The queries can be injected by the...