Maritime Commerce in Greater Philadelphia: Assessing Industry Trends and Growth Opportunities for Delaware River Ports

Maritime Commerce in Greater Philadelphia: Assessing Industry Trends and Growth Opportunities for Delaware River Ports is an evaluation of existing port conditions along the Delaware River and market-driven opportunities for expansion. The report includes an economic impact analysis, Delaware River port descriptions, global trends, and recommended strategies for ports growth. Key findings include:Region-wide port activity generates $69 million in tax revenues for state governments across Greater Philadelphia and more than$11 million in Philadelphia Wage Tax revenues.Each on-site port job supports two jobs from port activity and employee spending. Total regional port-related employment is 12,000+ jobs.Delaware River ports import nearly 1/2 of the nation's cocoa beans, almost 1/3 of the bananas, and a 1/4 of all fruit and nuts.Growing maritime commerce in Greater Philadelphia will require collaboration among Delaware River ports to leverage existing strengths and strategically invest in regional infrastructure improvements

A Bi-Directional Approach for Developing Data Warehouses in Public Sectors

Data warehouse is proclaimed as the latest decision support technology. As data warehouses require a significant amount of organizational resources to develop, more research have been devoted to identifying the critical success factors and the formulas for assured investment return from data warehouses. This study proposes a bi-directional development approach for data warehouses in public sectors. The primary rationale for the proposed approach is the fundamentally different organizational goals of public sector organizations from private sector organizations. Whereas the ultimate goal of private sector organizations is profit making, public sector organizations have a set of conflicting goals including different social and political objectives. The star schema as a dimensional data model for data warehouse is not totally suitable for data warehouses that demand the analyses of both quantitative and qualitative measures. Using the data warehouse in the College of Business Administration at the California State University, Sacramento as a case study, we illustrate how the QQ (Quantitative and Qualitative) data schema accommodates the need of capturing both quantitative and qualitative information. In addition, we show the bidirectional top-down/bottom-up initiative, the formal/informal information collection, and the enterprise data warehouse/subject data mart architecture for the data warehouse

Task-Technology Fit in Data Warehousing Environments: Analyzing the Factors that Affect Utilization

Enterprise data warehouses are an expensive investment in both time and resources. The promise of data warehouses is improved decision-making through user empowerment and enablement of sophisticated decision support tools. Have organizations been able to achieve this goal? Task- technology fit defines a model that suggests that for a technology to be utilized, it must meet the needs of a user and provide features that support the fit of the requirements of the task; performance impacts will result. When an organization commits the time and resources necessary to develop an enterprise data warehouse, their expectation will be a high task-technology fit. This study extends prior task-technology fit research to provide an evaluation of task-technology fit in data warehouse applications. The focus of the study is to examine the factors that contribute to the task-technology fit specifically within data warehouse environments

Strengthening Baltimore's Workforce: Reflections and Lessons Learned

The report, Strengthening Baltimore's Workforce: Reflections and Lessons Learned, presents data on program completion, job placement, starting wage and employment retention rates for 1,187 participants. While the outcomes varied by program, most jobseekers benefited on every measure. For example, approximately 80% of participants in the construction program completed training and received at least one credential. Of those placed in jobs, 70% were still employed after six months. Graduates across all programs were able to secure average starting wages of $12 to$18 an hour, much higher than the $8.75 state minimum wage, the report finds.The collaborative is a public/private partnership between Casey, other local and national foundations, corporate donors and representatives of city and state workforce agencies. Collectively, its members have pooled more than$14 million to support sector-specific strategies that provide greater training and job opportunities for residents who face barriers to employment. These efforts are primarily focused on six growing industries: biotechnology, construction, food service, transportation and logistics, environmental sustainability and manufacturing.Baltimore's unemployment rate was 41 times the national average in August 2016, with many residents facing obstacles such as prior criminal convictions, limited math and literacy skills and unstable housing. The report outlines several strategies that have helped the local workforce development effort succeed despite these barriers:collaboration with employers and stakeholders to understand and address labor force needs;programming that includes relevant skill development and industry-recognized certifications;wraparound services, peer groups and supportive instructional approaches to address the barriers jobseekers face;rigorous job placement and post-program follow-up; anda commitment to monitoring and tracking the performance of training programs and allocating resources accordingly.The report calls for additional policy and system reforms to address the inequities that have left many communities disconnected from quality employment and educational opportunities. They include changes to wages, benefits and safety practices, as well as criminal justice reform and an expansion of mental health, addiction and adult education services. Many of the programs have already made notable shifts, including the BioTechnical Institute of Maryland, JumpStart and the Baltimore Center for Green Careers, which expanded job opportunities to individuals without a college degree and those with prior criminal records."These results show what's possible when we focus on the needs of local employers and create opportunities for residents to develop the knowledge and skills necessary to build family-supporting careers," says Allison Gerber, a senior associate at the Foundation. "The next step is to ensure more youth and young adults can benefit from these programs. This report gives us a good outline of what's working, and where we need to build."Considering the breadth of community employment needs, existing sectoral programs operate at a much smaller scale than what Baltimore requires. To expand the scope and ensure more residents can secure family-supporting jobs, the report recommends partners across the city work to increase investment in industry-specific workforce programs, increase the number of quality jobs that are available and educate and prepare more individuals to enter these programs

Investigating the impact of cross-cultural on CRM implementation: a comparative study

In a competitive world there is a need for companies to maximise all their resources. One of the resources that are often overlooked is that of existing customer base. Customer relationship management (CRM) is a tool that is becoming increasingly popular as it provides a method of maximising existing customer resource as well as adding value from the customers’ perception. CRM consists of three simultaneous considerations that drive CRM strategy: (1) people, business culture and relationships, (2) processes, and (3) technology. In a globalise economy, cross-cultural is becoming of extreme importance to many researchers and practitioners, but there is a lack of literature on the impact of cross-cultural on CRM implementation. Multinational organizations face the situation of how to adopt CRM implementation process according to differences in culture factors from country to country

Alignment between data warehouse design and business strategy

Data warehouse has become a very important tool for supporting the corporate executives in making important decisions in a highly competitive business environment. Data warehouse enables the top management to acquire and analyze integrated data extracted globally across the enterprise. Many organizations are sitting on vast amount of data already accumulated in their operational database. The huge data repository with potential strategic business information can be analysed comprehensively only through the usage of data warehouse system. The main objective of this paper is to systematically review the development and adoption of data warehouse design in business environment and the different models to assess the alignment between information technology strategy and business strategy

Business Intelligence and Big Data in Higher Education: Status of a Multi-Year Model Curriculum Development Effort for Business School Undergraduates, MS Graduates, and MBAs

Business intelligence (BI), “big data”, and analytics solutions are being deployed in an increasing number of organizations, yet recent predictions point to severe shortages in the number of graduates prepared to work in the area. New model curriculum is needed that can properly introduce BI and analytics topics into existing curriculum. That curriculum needs to incorporate current big data developments even as new dedicated analytics programs are becoming more prominent throughout the world. This paper contributes to the BI field by providing the first BI model curriculum guidelines. It focuses on adding appropriate elective courses to existing curriculum in order to foster the development of BI skills, knowledge, and experience for undergraduate majors, master of science in business information systems degree students, and MBAs. New curricula must achieve a delicate balance between a topic’s level of coverage that is appropriate to students’ level of expertise and background, and it must reflect industry workforce needs. Our approach to model curriculum development for business intelligence courses follows the structure of Krathwohl’s (2002) revised taxonomy, and we incorporated multi-level feedback from faculty and industry experts. Overall, this was a long-term effort that resulted in model curriculum guidelines

Financial Innovations Roundtable: Developing practical solutions to scale up integrated community development strategies

Essays from experts affiliated with the “think-do” tank , the Financial Innovations Roundtable, housed at the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire