Much like its meteorological counterpart, "Cloud Computing" is an amorphous agglomeration of entities. It is amorphous in that the exact layout of the servers, the load balancers and their functions are neither known nor fixed. Its an agglomerate in that multiple service providers and vendors often coordinate to form a multitenant system…

The problem of information sharing and coordination was made starkly evident by the September 11th attacks. September 11th illuminated the problems that justice agencies had in sharing information in a timely and collaborative nature without an interoperable data-sharing system. A number of government audits and justice agency leaders have sought…

As digital data creation technologies become more prevalent, data and metadata management are necessary to make data available, usable, sharable, and storable. Researchers in many scientific settings, however, have little experience or expertise in data and metadata management. In this dissertation, I explore the everyday data and metadata…

For twenty-nine years, Red Clay Consolidated School District has managed data processing in a unique manner. Red Clay participates in the Data Service Center consortium to provide data management and processing services. This consortium is more independent than a department in the district but not as autonomous as an outsourced arrangement. While…

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 put great pressure to improve student achievement upon principals. Because the principals' work is much more complex since NCLB, it demands a more sophisticated set of skills and understandings than ever before. This qualitative case study examined changes in the principal's role and how current accountability…