Management and Services

Management in all business areas and organisational activities are the acts of getting people together to accomplish desired goals and objectives. Service is intangible, therefore, it is not too easy to define the theory application in varieties of service industries. Service Management usually incorporates automated systems along with skilled labour; it also provides service development. Due to enormous demand of service industries and management development, the book under the title "Management and Services" would create a milestone in management arena for all categories of readers including Business Administration, Engineering and Architecture. This book covers educational service development, service-oriented-architecture and case research analysis, including theory application in network security, GRID technology, integrated circuit application. The book is comprised of five chapters and has been divided into two parts. Part A contains chapters on service development in educational institutions and it depicts the application of supply chain management concept in service industries like tertiary educational institutions and multiple ways of web 2.0 applications transforming learning patterns and pathways. To understand the subject in a practical manner, Part B of this book consists of noteworthy case studies and research papers on management and services and represents theory application of Data mining, Fuzzy Cluster, Game theory, GRID Technology, simulation of Operational Amplifier and Current Controlled Conveyor II in network security, architecture, and integrated circuit application

The e-revolution and post-compulsory education: using e-business models to deliver quality education

The best practices of e-business are revolutionising not just technology itself but the whole process through which services are provided; and from which important lessons can be learnt by post-compulsory educational institutions. This book aims to move debates about ICT and higher education beyond a simple focus on e-learning by considering the provision of post-compulsory education as a whole. It considers what we mean by e-business, why e-business approaches are relevant to universities and colleges and the key issues this raises for post-secondary education

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks: a literature review

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation is a complex and vibrant process, one that involves a combination of technological and organizational interactions. Often an ERP implementation project is the single largest IT project that an organization has ever launched and requires a mutual fit of system and organization. Also the concept of an ERP implementation supporting business processes across many different departments is not a generic, rigid and uniform concept and depends on variety of factors. As a result, the issues addressing the ERP implementation process have been one of the major concerns in industry. Therefore ERP implementation receives attention from practitioners and scholars and both, business as well as academic literature is abundant and not always very conclusive or coherent. However, research on ERP systems so far has been mainly focused on diffusion, use and impact issues. Less attention has been given to the methods used during the configuration and the implementation of ERP systems, even though they are commonly used in practice, they still remain largely unexplored and undocumented in Information Systems research. So, the academic relevance of this research is the contribution to the existing body of scientific knowledge. An annotated brief literature review is done in order to evaluate the current state of the existing academic literature. The purpose is to present a systematic overview of relevant ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks as a desire for achieving a better taxonomy of ERP implementation methodologies. This paper is useful to researchers who are interested in ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Results will serve as an input for a classification of the existing ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Also, this paper aims also at the professional ERP community involved in the process of ERP implementation by promoting a better understanding of ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks, its variety and history

Numerical modelling of moisture motion in heterogeneous soils using 1D-MIRBF method

In the present paper, we develop an efficient and accurate numerical approach based on one-dimensional-moving integrated radial basis function (1D-MIRBF) and fully implicit modified Picard method for simulating fluid movement in heterogeneous soils governed by the highly non-linear Richards equation. The major advantages of the proposed 1D-MIRBF method include (i) a banded sparse system matrix that helps reduce the computational cost; (ii) the Kronecker Delta property of the constructed shape functions, which helps impose the essential boundary conditions in an exact manner; and (iii) high accuracy and fast convergence rate owing to the use of the IRBF approximation. The performance of the present method is demonstrated through several 1--D and 2--D soil infiltration problems. Numerical results obtained are in agreement with other published results in the literature. This solver for moisture motion in soils will be incorporated into a surface-water-flow solver to handle the surface irrigation problem

The ten million euro question:How do innovation intermediaries support smart specialization?

Smart Specialization Strategy (S3) has become a dominant regional economic development field with significant policy traction, in particular within the European Union. However, questions are being raised about its operationalization and a gap has been identified with respect to the role of innovation intermediaries’ interventions in support of the developing regional-sectoral innovation systems. In particular, reasons for diverging policy approaches of “niche specialization” versus “regional advantage” in comparable situations should be examined to illuminate the contextual factors impacting the interpretation of the intermediaries’ mandates. In this paper, the cases of two leading investments in innovation intermediation in the emerging New Space sector are analyzed (Space-SI and Higgs Centre for Innovation) in two EU NUTS level 1 regions (Slovenia and Scotland), which were previously peripheral players in this technological domain. In particular, using a novel innovation intermediation interventions’ classification, this paper identifies the difference between research and development (R&D) and business development (BD) support foci in the two locales, noting some of the contextual factors associated with them and arguing for the long-term balancing of the two approaches

Design support for constructing pilot training programmes

Deciding how to construct a training programme or a training exercise, and especially what and how training media and methods should be selected to deliver effective and efficient training is an ongoing endeavour that preoccupies training analysts and designers alike. There are many interactions and dependencies that one has to take into consideration when making decisions, about cost, safety, or interactions between various components of a training system (e.g. between various types of media; between media and methods; between media, methods and trainees) to produce the desired outcome. The focus of this PhD research is to develop an understanding of the challenges faced by decision-makers within the military fast-jet training domain in constructing the training and, further, to develop solutions that support the decision-making effort. A significant challenge faced by decision-makers in constructing training programmes, identified through this research, is the ever increasing amount of information that they need to have at their disposal to enable fully informed decision-making and the lack of methods and tools to facilitate the management and analysis of this information. This research specifically investigated the problem of media selection to construct the training and developed a series of concept solutions to support differentiation between training media, assessment of trainees previous experiences, management of TNA outputs, selection of instructional methods and understanding of the cognitive relationship between media, method and trainee. The thesis firstly introduces the problem to be addressed; the research context and research questions set to be answered. This research, sponsored by Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSERC) and BAE Systems, is preceded by another BAE Systems funded research project (the Training Optimisation Case Study), which provided the background for the work presented in this thesis. Secondly, it reviews the literature relevant to the subject matter to understand the current state of knowledge in the area of: UK RAF training programmes construction and training media selection; assessment of competencies; impact of media and method on learning; development of decision making support systems; and construction and management of knowledge. The main part of the work presented in this thesis is the development of a series of support solutions to aid the decision-making process of construction of UK fast-jet pilot training. These include: TNA output Analysis (ToA) tool; Trainee Contextual Proficiency Profile (TCPP) tool; Training Media Classification Framework; models that map the cognitive relationship between media, method and trainee, and a unified Framework of Selection of Instructional Process alongside a novel approach towards training media selection. This research work was initially scoped through an exploratory study (a case study) into the domain area, followed by requirements elicitation. This part of research helped at identifying the issues within the problem area and in defining the research questions. The TCPP and ToA were verified through two case studies and presented alongside the rest of the research to the customer (BAE Systems) that gave positive feedback on the research outcomes

Variables influencing network governance to promote good developmental governance

Abstract : The focus of this dissertation was on the critical variables that influences network governance terms of promoting good developmental governance. Public management within a network governance paradigm is seen as a way for government and citizens to manage public administrative and service delivery processes in a cooperative manner. The guiding primary research question for this dissertation was to determine how network governance can serve as a mechanism to promote good developmental governance. The dissertation focused on related contextual variables, knowledge of the determinants, theoretical approaches, concepts and trends that influence the role and value of network governance within the framework of a developmental state in general and in South Africa in particular. The research approach entailed the application of unobtrusive research techniques as research analysis instruments based on a qualitative research paradigm. Attempts to define network governance in literature, revealed that no single theoretical approach can explain the complexity of today's public networks and the governance thereof. A concept and content analysis of the term ‘network governance shows’ that, despite the recent upsurge of interest in network governance in public administration, few authors clearly define the meaning of governance network or network governance. As such, after more than two decades there is no scholarly body of literature on network governance.M.Com. (Public Management and Governance