Executive SummaryBoth the information technology (IT) industry and the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) demand soft-skill training in higher education and require IT graduates to demonstrate competence in interpersonal communication, teamwork, and conflict management. Group projects provide teamwork environment for soft-skill training, but their practical success is difficult to assess. Group activities often take place outside classroom, and instructors are kept out of communication and interaction loops. Free-rider problems arise when some students are doing less work and awarded the same grades as others who contribute more. Many studies have suggested that, for group projects, peer evaluation is more effective than instructor evaluation. However, most peer assessment scales are ad hoc, neither standardized nor well-structured.This study designed a peer assessment scale for soft-skill and hard-skill evaluations. The assessment scale was administrated in an IT course and data was collected. Two dimensions, soft-skill and hard-skill, emerged from factor analysis and captured 67 percent of variance. Items on the assessment scale passed a reliability test with Cronbach's α values greater than 0.70.IT education should prepare future IT professionals with hard and soft skills to communicate with end users, to resolve conflicts, and to bring different functions together toward a common goal. This study should prove valuable for educators to promote soft-skill training in an active learning environment and to use peer evaluations to achieve success in IT education.

Purpose -As companies move their businesses offshore to developing countries, how to estimate market costs and select transaction governance structures (TGS) accordingly has become a challenge. Based on transaction cost theory, the purpose of this paper is to propose that corruption is an influential factor, which can potentially increase market transaction costs and favor selections of hierarchy oriented TGSs. Design/methodology/approach -Data are collected from World Development Indicators database and the Corruption Perception Index 2006. In total, 154 countries are included in the study. A regression analysis is used to demonstrate the correlation between levels of corruption and selections of TGS. Findings -The results indicate a strong correlation between corruption and TGS. Practical implications -Low labor costs and other incentives should not be the only reasons for moving businesses into developing countries. Managers should take a closer look at levels of corruption and estimate transaction costs accordingly. If a company plans to enter into a highly corrupted environment, it should consider using a hierarchy oriented TGS. Originality/value -This paper applies transaction cost theory to strategic management of outsourcing and highlights corruption as an unfavorable factor for outsourcing to developing countries.

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We consider the activity-based costing situation, in which for each of several comparable operational units, multiple cost drivers generate a single cost pool. Our study focuses on published data from a set of property tax collection offices, called rates departments, for the London metropolitan area. We define what may be called benchmark or most efficient costs per unit of driver. A principle of maximum performance efficiency is proposed, and an approach to estimating the benchmark unit costs is derived from this principle. A validation approach for this estimation method is developed in terms of what we call normal-like-or-better performance effectiveness. Application to longitudinal data on a single unit is briefly discussed. We also consider some implications for the more routine case when costs are disaggregated to subpools associated with individual cost drivers.

The process that Georgia Southern University used in designing its curriculum included extensive consultations with representatives from companies that were either directly involved in the IT industry or employed large numbers of IT professionals. The result of this consultation was the formulation of a set of skills that industry representatives agreed they would like any entry-level graduate in Information Technology to be able to demonstrate. The curriculum was then designed in such a way that it ensured that successful graduates would indeed possess such skills.The paper describes the curriculum offered at Georgia Southern University, and shows how the various courses in the curriculum contribute to the graduate's acquisition of the relevant skills. It pays particular attention to the inclusion of so-called second disciplines, a feature that distinguishes Georgia Southern University's curriculum from Information Technology curricula offered elsewhere. Second disciplines are 21 credit hour programs of study that give students an in-depth exposure to an IT application area and were included in response to the complaint made by many IT organizations that they have difficulty recruiting entry-level staff with both a good grounding in IT and in the particular application area of interest to the company in question. We believe that the process that Georgia Southern University used in the design of its IT baccalaureate curriculum in general and the inclusion of second disciplines in it, in particular, will lead to graduates who are more likely to meet the human resource demands of companies with a large IT workforce.