An Investigation of a Framework for the Implementation of Service Management in the Information and Communication Technology Sector

The true value of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can only be realised when it provides solutions that meet or exceed the client’s expectations. The successful management of services includes maintaining service levels, which involves defining and satisfying customer requirements. Service Management is a misunderstood dynamic process with key elements and associated problems. This paper identifies the requirements for a Service Management framework and proposes a two phase framework for its implementation. These two phases are the preparatory phase and the managed services phase. The preparatory phase is characterised by the absence of a client and the development of a Service Catalogue. The managed services phase pivots around the client and the Service Agreement

ICT Service Agreements: Definitions, Purpose and Development Principles

Service Agreements (SAs) are often inappropriately developed, documented and deployed. For the accurate management of the client’s requirements, SAs play a critical role. Appropriate SAs serve both the service provider and the client. The role, content and structure of an SA need to be understood before an attempt to develop them can be mounted to develop them. There are distinct process elements and key development principles for the development of an SA. This paper describes SAs, explores their purpose, content and structure and concludes by describing the eight SA development principles

Using the blended spaces framework to design heritage stories with schoolchildren.

Blended spaces are spaces where a physical space is deliberately integrated in a close-knit way with a digital space. Blended spaces may take the form of a carefully designed meeting room, for example, that integrates collaborative media with the design of the physical space. Another type of blended space integrates some digital content with a physical location to create a new, unified user experience (UX). Blended spaces aim to produce a more harmonized UX of a place by considering the correspondences between physical and digital spaces and by considering the movement through these spaces. We have developed a framework for the design of blended spaces that focuses on four principal constructs; ontology, topology, agency and volatility. This framework has proved useful for designing heritage stories in previous work. In this paper we describe how we have used the framework with a group of grade 5 schoolchildren as a participative co-design method to help them develop a digital tourism experience for a living-history village and museum. We describe how the framework was used to guide four design workshops with schoolchildren. The evaluation of a heritage story designed and acted out by the schoolchildren themselves and evaluated by another group of schoolchildren provides evidence that the experience was enjoyed. The outcomes of all four workshops gave us insights towards how to not only design blended spaces with and for schoolchildren, but also how to teach complex theoretical design methodologies that enable schoolchildren to become the designers of blended spaces

Narratives of blended experience

This paper focuses on interaction across and between the physical/digital divide. We use blending theory to design for these situations, otherwise known as conceptual integration. Initially, this paper offers a discussion of the literature around blends. From this literature, we applied Benyon’s (Benyon, 2014) proposition of conceptual integration in mixed reality spaces (Blended Spaces) to consider interactions with the digital that complement the physical. We investigated blended spaces in partnership with undergraduate students during a live theatre festival. Our collaborators designed applications that applied blending principles, employing techniques drawn from speculative design. Outputs consist of speculative, narrative storyboards that use data gathered directly from stakeholder interviews and over 380 festival visitors. Our work led us to propose reworking Blended Spaces into a model that novice designers could easily conceive and apply. The work we conducted highlighted the need to consider user transitions from physical to digital and back again and highlighted the experiential nature of this type of interaction.Peer reviewe

Using participatory visualisation of soundscapes to compare designers’ and listeners’ experiences of sound designs

There are numerous rules and well-established guidelines to help designers with the visual appearance of interactive technologies. In contrast, when it comes to the use of sound, there is a paucity of practical information regarding design for euphony, excepting musical composition. This paper addresses this hiatus by describing a theoretically based, practical method for evaluating the design of the auditory components of interactive technologies and media. Specifically, the method involves eliciting the auditory experiences of users of these technologies and media and comparing them with what the sound designers had intended. The method has been comprehensively tested in trials involving 100 users (listeners), and the results have been described as “useful” and “invaluable” by a group of 10 professional sound designers

Workshop on personalized and social navigation in information space

The workshop was organized in association with IFIP working group WG13.2 and the Navigation SIG of Esprit's i-net, Information Intelligence Interfaces network of excellence. Workshop editors: Kristina Höök, Alan Munro and David Benyon.</p

Using participatory visualisation of soundscapes to compare designers’ and listeners’ experiences of sound designs

There are numerous rules and well-established guidelines to help designers with the visual appearance of interactive technologies. In contrast, when it comes to the use of sound, there is a paucity of practical information regarding design for euphony, excepting musical composition. This paper addresses this hiatus by describing a theoretically based, practical method for evaluating the design of the auditory components of interactive technologies and media. Specifically, the method involves eliciting the auditory experiences of users of these technologies and media and comparing them with what the sound designers had intended. The method has been comprehensively tested in trials involving 100 users (listeners), and the results have been described as “useful” and “invaluable” by a group of 10 professional sound designers

Designing location based learning experiences for people with intellectual disabilities and additional sensory impairments

The research reported here is part of a larger project which seeks to combine serious games (or games based learning) with location based services to help people with intellectual disability and additional sensory impairments to develop work based skills. Specifically this paper reports on where these approaches are combined to scaffold the learning of new routes and ultimately independent travel to new work and educational opportunities. A phased development methodology is applied in a user sensitive manner, to ensure that user feedback drives the ongoing development process. Methods to structure this include group feedback on conceptual storyboards, expert review of prototypes using usability heuristics relating to the main system goals, and finally co-discovery methods with student pairs exploring all three modes of the system in real world contexts. Aspects of developmental and cognitive psychological theories are also reviewed and it is suggested that combining games based learning approaches with location based services is an appropriate combination of technologies for an application specifically designed to scaffold route learning for this target audience

How Was Your Day? evaluating a conversational companion

The “How Was Your Day” (HWYD) Companion is an embodied conversational agent that can discuss work-related issues, entering free-form dialogues that lack any clearly defined tasks and goals. The development of this type of Companion technology requires new models of evaluation. Here, we describe a paradigm and methodology for evaluating the main aspects of such functionality in conjunction with overall system behaviour, with respect to three parameters: functional ability (i.e., does it do the ‘right’ thing), content (i.e., does it respond appropriately to the semantic context), and emotional behaviour (i.e., given the emotional input from the user, does it respond in an emotionally appropriate way). We demonstrate the functionality of our evaluation paradigm as a method for both grading current system performance, and targeting areas for particular performance review. We show correlation between, for example, ASR performance and overall system performance (as is expected in systems of this type) but beyond this, we show where individual utterances or responses, which are indicated as positive or negative, show an immediate response from the user, and demonstrate how our combination evaluation approach highlights issues (both positive and negative) in the Companion system’s interaction behaviou

Gut microbiome-host interactions in health and disease

The gut microbiome is the term given to describe the vast collection of symbiotic microorganisms in the human gastrointestinal system and their collective interacting genomes. Recent studies have suggested that the gut microbiome performs numerous important biochemical functions for the host, and disorders of the microbiome are associated with many and diverse human disease processes. Systems biology approaches based on next generation 'omics' technologies are now able to describe the gut microbiome at a detailed genetic and functional (transcriptomic, proteomic and metabolic) level, providing new insights into the importance of the gut microbiome in human health, and they are able to map microbiome variability between species, individuals and populations. This has established the importance of the gut microbiome in the disease pathogenesis for numerous systemic disease states, such as obesity and cardiovascular disease, and in intestinal conditions, such as inflammatory bowel disease. Thus, understanding microbiome activity is essential to the development of future personalized strategies of healthcare, as well as potentially providing new targets for drug development. Here, we review recent metagenomic and metabonomic approaches that have enabled advances in understanding gut microbiome activity in relation to human health, and gut microbial modulation for the treatment of disease. We also describe possible avenues of research in this rapidly growing field with respect to future personalized healthcare strategies