The current state of copyright and intellectual property in the IT field

Fast improvement of the IT field requires relevant safety of intellectual assets rights. The legal protection of laptop applications, software programs and foreign legal practices is a contentious issue. With the rapid development of the IT sector within the international context, the issues of copyright safety, patenting and non-disclosure of personal data have gained urgency. The research methodology involved the use of methods of analysis and synthesis, logical and system - structural analysis, control methods, structural and functional analysis in combination with the method of case study and the method of content analysis. The article comprehensively analyses the modern perspective of intellectual belongings proper and copyright in IT outsourcing. The scope of unconventional challenges in the sphere of copyright safety inside the area of IT sphere are exemplified using the case of Ukraine. The case addresses opportunities to enhance the regulatory framework for copyright safety of experts engaged in IT outsourcing. It is stressed that the existing legal procedures and methods are slower in responding to changes in the field of IT outsourcing than the world's quickest trends in this sphere.

Business Model for Managing of the Small Economic System Such as IT-Outsourcing Company

For any economic system to function successfully we need to have business model. One of the advantages of having a model is that it shows detailed and visual information with its internal connections, qualitative characteristics and quantitative parameters. Modeling the management system of the economic system’s activities is currently one of the most effective systematic ways to describe options for the future and assess the potential consequences of management decisions. This current work demonstrates the construction of a business model for the management system of an IT-outsourcing company as an organizational system in the form of a unity of three subsystems: management, main production subsystem and the socio-cultural subsystem.

Auctioning IT Contracts with Renegotiable Scope

Motivated by challenges facing IT procurement, this paper studies a hybrid procurement model in which a reverse auction of a fixed-price IT outsourcing contract may be followed by renegotiation to extend the contract’s scope. In this model, the buyer balances the needs to incentivize noncontractible vendor investment and to curb the winning vendor’s information rent by choosing the initial project scope and the buyer’s investment in the quality of the project. We find that a buyer may benefit from inducing ex post renegotiation to motivate vendor investment, especially when the winning vendor has high bargaining power and the quality uncertainty is low. Broadening the initial scope reduces information rent but leaves little room for ex post renegotiation and, hence, discourages vendor investment, whereas increasing the buyer’s investment has opposite effects. Interestingly, the two measures can be strategic substitutes or complements depending on the likelihood of the renegotiation and the two parties’ bargaining powers. The buyer may strategically set a low initial project scope and high investment to incentivize renegotiation and vendor investment, which may explain why many IT outsourcing projects start small and allow expansions. Our findings also generate several testable predictions for IT outsourcing. This paper was accepted by Kartik Hosanagar, information systems.

The growing opportunity of clinical data management in Ukraine

Many specialized positions, even entry-level, in the pharmaceutical industry require training above and beyond standard University degree programs. A shortage of specialized clinical data managers in Ukraine means private sector companies are developing internal resource training programs to deepen their pool of available candidates. Given the strong medical education system and established IT outsourcing industry, we believed developing a pool of talented clinical data managers within Ukraine was a feasible goal.The IT outsourcing industry is the second largest export service industry in Ukraine, and one of the main sectors in the economy. More than 50% of Ukraine's IT services revenue came from the United States, the rest mostly from the EU.[1] Ukraine has built a workforce adapted to IT outsourcing, but the lack of local professionals in the fields of clinical data management and clinical data science hinders similar growth in the clinical research sector. Ukraine has a well-established medical education system that trains its healthcare professionals in accordance with EU regulations. Hospitals are predominantly state-owned; the private medical sector is almost nonexistent. The academic and non-profit clinical research sectors are small in comparison to Western European countries, and opportunities for careers within them limited. This leads to a 'brain drain' of medical professionals from Ukraine to other countries in search of higher wages and professional advancement. With its strong education system and highly educated medical workforce, Ukraine is an attractive but under-utilised location for clinical studies. [2] There are approximately 30 clinical research sites in Ukraine handling preclinical through Phase IV studies. In December 2020 on clinicaltrials.gov there were 557 active or recruiting clinical trials listed taking place in Ukraine. Regulatory hurdles and approval timelines have greatly improved in recent years.Currently, when CROs wish to hire data managers to assist with local clinical trials in Ukraine, they have to hire non-specialists who must teach themselves on the job. At present there are no university courses or formal training programs within the country for clinical data managers.Following the success of the Clinical Statistical Programming training program developed by our team and offered since 2013 in partnership V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University,[3] we recently launched an in-house clinical data management training program in partnership between leading Biometrics CROs Cytel and Intego Group. Upon program completion, students have the opportunity to transition into full-time employment. Ours is the first centralized training program for clinical data managers in the country. We already started a conversation with some of the country's leading universities to help them develop a formal educational program in clinical data management. Our internal training program will serve as a pilot and a proof of concept. We expect that many elements, such as curriculum, admission requirements, quality control, internships, etc., will successfully scale up in an academic environment. Our paper will discuss opportunities for the clinical data management sector in Ukraine, the challenges of recruiting data managers from the existing healthcare workforce, the region’s unique strengths, laws and regulations. We also discuss specifics of the internal training program, development of a course syllabus, and transitioning students from coursework into hands-on data management training.Article length: 8 pages. Article reference count: 9 references.---------------[1] AVentures. Software Development in Ukraine, Poland, Belarus and Romania in 2019.[2] Sinichkina L,  Smolina A,  Svintsitskyi V. Positive Changes for Clinical Trials in Ukraine. Applied Clinical Trials. December 2017.[3] Pirbhai E, Glushakov S. Development of a Clinical SAS University Training Program in Eastern Europe. PharmaSUG. 2015.

‘No, YOU make it!’: Outsourcing production to fashion consumers to mediate labour

This practice-based article examines an attempt to reconnect fashion labour with value, after the fast fashion system increased the gap between the two. Developed by Norwegian fashion brand and collective platform HAiKw/ (Harald Lunde Helgesen and Ida Falck Øien), the Drop-in Factory was a fashion design experiment conducted at the non-profit art space Kunsthall Oslo in 2019. In this experiment, labour was outsourced to consumers-visitors, who by contract paid for equipment rental and training, earning ‘Factory Coins’ that could only be spent on the finished product. Inviting amateurs to make their own garment in a workshop setting has become a common strategy of design activism in fashion. However, instead of focusing on teaching individuals craft expertise, the Drop-in Factory explored collective making practices in an industrial-like environment, inspired by manufacturing and scientific management. Tensions arose over pay when some participants felt that their labour was unfairly compensated. As a response, roleplaying emerged from the experiment. Interviews of participants, conducted months later, incidentally echoed roleplay debriefing sessions. Their accounts show that they acquired labour literacy and embodied knowledge of fashion manufacturing, which extended to contracts and remuneration. While it remains unclear whether the Drop-in Factory led participants to revalue fashion labour, audience participation itself became the mediation of fashion labour.

Methodological approach to evaluation of efficiency of it outsourcing

The aim of the article. When deciding on outsourcing, it is necessary to analyze the financial and organizational costs, without releasing from the analysis area the risks that arise when organizing the outsourcing of IT services. The lack of a full analysis in making this decision can instead of benefit cause significant losses. The purpose of the article is to develop methodological approaches to assessing the economic feasibility and effectiveness of the use of information technology outsourcing in the practice of domestic industrial enterprises. Analyses results. The article examines the existing scientific and methodological approaches to assessing the effectiveness of the use of information technology outsourcing in the production and commercial activities of industrial enterprises. Methodical recommendations for evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency of the IT outsourcing mechanism are formulated, which allows to determine the result of its implementation and the direction of its further development. Guidelines for deciding on IT outsourcing are proposed, the use of which is part of the decision-making process on the use of outsourcing in the enterprise and involves consistent implementation of measures to identify the business process for outsourcing to improve the quality and efficiency of delegated processes. A graphical comparative method for analyzing the effectiveness of decisions on the use of outsourcing by third-party companies and the practical implementation of the IT function by the company's own forces has been developed. The methodological approach to assessing the effectiveness of outsourcing management information systems in real business enterprises is sufficiently universal, as it takes into account the conceptual principles of outsourcing on the one hand and allows to adapt the structure of efficiency assessment depending on the complexity and cost of technologies used in business. enterprise, goals and scale of outsourcing. Conclusions and directions for further research. The proposed methodological approach allows to assess the economic efficiency of IT outsourcing to a greater extent in terms of economic justification of the management decision to accept services to IT outsourcers or perform them on their own. Graphoanalytical method for evaluating the effectiveness of outsourcing (Fig. 1) does not allow this. Its algorithm uses aggregated economic indicators (total costs, fixed costs, variable costs), the structure of which is not provided in the mechanism of using this method. Based on this, we consider as a direction of further development and research to develop guidelines for detailing these indicators in order to identify their components, to which the outsourcing company needs to pay special attention. Being based on the consideration of outsourcing as a process, the proposed approach has limitations that allow its application to assess the effectiveness of outsourcing only at a time when outsourcing is not yet implemented in practice. Additional research is needed to address this limitation.

How Trust Leads to Commitment on Microsourcing Platforms: Unraveling the Effects of Governance and Third-Party Mechanisms on Triadic Microsourcing Relationships

IS research has extensively examined the role of trust in client-vendor relationships, as well as the role of governance in information technology (IT) outsourcing, but little research has been carried out on the latest manifestation of outsourcing—namely, microsourcing, i.e., the sourcing of smaller scale projects. To extend the literature on the traditional IT outsourcing literature—a stream that largely focuses on medium-to-large scale offline projects—we investigate how to develop trust and commitment in a triadic microsourcing relationship which includes the microsourcer, the microsourcee, and the microsourcing platform (MP). We draw on transaction cost economics (TCE) to theorize a model specifically adapted to the microsourcing phenomenon to scrutinize the influences of formal contractual mechanisms, relational mechanisms, and third-party mechanisms. Combining data from a matched sample of microsourcers and microsourcees on the leading Chinese MP, Zbj.com, the paper deploys degree-symmetric modeling (DSM) for construct conceptualization, measurement, and data analysis. DSM is consistent with the holistic view used to develop the research model for triadic relationships. Findings confirm that the MP is critical in delivering governance mechanisms to ensure the development of triadic trust and commitment. The results suggest that researchers and practitioners should pay closer attention to triadic trust and commitment building through proper governance mechanisms in the online microsourcing marketplace. We argue that this work could be extended to other online digital platforms that involve multiple transacting parties.