In today's information-driven world, knowledge is the most essential organizational asset. Organizations often use these assets to place themselves as winners in the extremely competitive business environment. In recent years, India has seen the emergence of Science and Technology Parks (STPs) whose main purpose is to constantly review and renew our knowledge base and to assure the integration of scientific research with its application and growth. STPs are study centers intended for the development of innovations and scientific research, and for coordinating the development of technologies and businesses. As organizational entities with such wide ranging purposes, the role of management in developing these parks is of utmost important. In the paper, "The Role of Management in the Development of Science and Technology Parks", the authors, Abbas Ghavam Abadi and K V Aiahnna, have tried to provide an understanding of the various aspects of STPs and how modern management applications can help in its development.

In the paper, "Equating Human and Machines in the Management Perspective", the authors, TGS Rao and Gabriel Simon Thattil, draw inferences from Information Systems (IS) and Information Technology (IT) literature and try to find an application in management. More specifically, the authors draw the concept of an `Agent' from the Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) literature and identify three properties of an intelligent agent; namely Autonomy, Adaptivity and Sociability. Then they superimpose the properties on the functions of a manager and identify him/her as intelligent. Moving ahead, they link up the Planning, Organizing, Leading and Control (POLC) model of organizational behavior and try to find associations with that of agent properties. Based on the above similarities, they have tried to develop the Autonomy, Sociability and Adaptivity (ASD) scorecard. The ASD scorecard is supposed to be a weighted scale of the sum of scores of a manager in the three properties of Autonomy, Sociability and Adaptivity. The authors conclude with the possible implications of the model in a mixed system where Artificial Intelligence systems as well as human managers are working together.

Sindhuja P N and Surajit Ghosh Dastidar, in their paper, "Software Deployment: Concepts and Technologies", highlight the importance of software deployment. Software deployment encompasses the post-development activities of a software product and mainly deals with the delivery, installation and maintenance of applications after development. In this paper, the authors discuss the complexities of software deployment process. In addition, through literature survey, the authors discuss various technologies for software deployment.

In the paper, "A Metrics Framework for Determination of Requirement for Reengineering", the authors, Hardeep Singh, Arvind Kalia, Sumesh Sood, Parminder Kaur and Kuljeet Kaur, have tried to explain the notions of maintenance, reengineering and retirement for a software system. The authors argue that over a period of time, the maintenance of systems becomes a costly affair. Therefore, after a certain period, the organization needs to either retire or reengineer the system. Reengineering refers to redesigning the system or some parts of it with change in design and implementation techniques. In order to explore the reengineering requirements of a system, the authors propose a metric, which uses three variables namely, Defect Cost (DC), Fault Cost (FC) and Reengineering Requirement Cost (RRC). The authors conclude with a case study that illustrates whether a system requires reengineering or not.

The paper, "A Software Component Quality Model Proposal", by S Kalaimagal and R Srinivasan, focuses on evaluating software component quality with the help of software quality models. A review of existing literature suggests that existing software quality models do not take into account reusability and testability as high level quality factors. Hence, the authors propose a quality model Software Component Quality Model (SCQM) specifically for evaluating software components, which includes the above-mentioned quality characteristics.

In "UML Modeling of Aircraft Control System", the authors, Vipin Saxena and Gufran Ahmad Ansari, propose an UML diagram for the design of an aircraft system. The class and object diagrams are designed for all generic components of an aircraft system. The sequence diagram depicts the functioning of the aircraft system. On the basis of the proposed model, performance estimation is done for efficient functioning.

- M Raja
Consulting Editor