166,386 research outputs found
Federal Workforce: Sustained Attention to Human Capital Leading Practices Can Help Improve Agency Performance
[Excerpt] A careful consideration of federal pay is an essential part of fiscal stewardship and is necessary to support the recruitment and retention of a talented, agile, and high-performing federal workforce. High-performing organizations have found that the life-cycle of human capital management activities—including workforce planning, recruitment, on-boarding, compensation, engagement, succession planning, and retirement programs—need to be aligned for the cost-effective achievement of an organization’s mission. However, despite some improvements, strategic human capital management—and more specifically, skills gaps in mission critical occupations—continues to be a GAO high-risk area.
This testimony is based on a body of GAO work primarily issued between June 2012 and March 2017. It focuses on (1) lessons learned in creating a more market driven, results-oriented approach to federal pay, and (2) opportunities, in addition to pay and benefits, that OPM and agencies could use to be more competitive in the labor market and address skills gaps
Global Grids and Software Toolkits: A Study of Four Grid Middleware Technologies
Grid is an infrastructure that involves the integrated and collaborative use
of computers, networks, databases and scientific instruments owned and managed
by multiple organizations. Grid applications often involve large amounts of
data and/or computing resources that require secure resource sharing across
organizational boundaries. This makes Grid application management and
deployment a complex undertaking. Grid middlewares provide users with seamless
computing ability and uniform access to resources in the heterogeneous Grid
environment. Several software toolkits and systems have been developed, most of
which are results of academic research projects, all over the world. This
chapter will focus on four of these middlewares--UNICORE, Globus, Legion and
Gridbus. It also presents our implementation of a resource broker for UNICORE
as this functionality was not supported in it. A comparison of these systems on
the basis of the architecture, implementation model and several other features
is included.Comment: 19 pages, 10 figure
Motivations, Classification and Model Trial of Conversational Agents for Insurance Companies
Advances in artificial intelligence have renewed interest in conversational
agents. So-called chatbots have reached maturity for industrial applications.
German insurance companies are interested in improving their customer service
and digitizing their business processes. In this work we investigate the
potential use of conversational agents in insurance companies by determining
which classes of agents are of interest to insurance companies, finding
relevant use cases and requirements, and developing a prototype for an
exemplary insurance scenario. Based on this approach, we derive key findings
for conversational agent implementation in insurance companies.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figure, accepted for presentation at The International
Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence 2019 (ICAART 2019
Service-oriented modeling for e-business applications components
The emerging trends for e-business engineering revolve
around specialisation and cooperation. Successful
companies focus on their core competences, and rely on a
network of business partners for the support services
required to compose a comprehensive offer for their
customers. Modulariy is crucial for a flexible e-business
infrastructure, but related requirements seldom reflect on
the design and operational models of business
information systems.
Software components are widely used for the
implementation of e-business applications, with proved
benefits in terms of system development and maintenance.
We propose a service-oriented componentisation of ebusiness
systems as a way to close the gap with the
business models they support. Blurring the distinction
between external services and internal capabilities, we
propose a homogeneous model for the definition of ebusiness
applications components. After a brief
discussion on the foundational aspects of the approach,
we present the process-based technique we adopted for
component modelling. We then present an infrastructure
compliant with the model proposed that we built on top of
an EJB (Enterprise Java Beans) platform
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