The development and year one implementation of the Local Justice Reinvestment Pilot

This report focuses on the initial findings from a process evaluation of the Local Justice Reinvestment pilot (commissioned by the Ministry of Justice), which examines the early development and implementation of the pilot in the first test year. The pilot is one of the Ministry of Justice Payment by Results (PbR) schemes. The methodology was primarily qualitative and included: interviews with strategic and operational managers; interviews and focus groups with front line staff; workshops to map partnership and criminal justice system changes and a focus on exemplar interventions at three sites

An integrated core competence evaluation framework for portfolio management in the oil industry

Drawing upon resource-based theory, this paper presents a core competence evaluation framework for managing the competence portfolio of an oil company. It introduces a network typology to illustrate how to form different types of strategic alliance relations with partnering firms to manage and grow the competence portfolio. A framework is tested using a case study approach involving face-to-face structured interviews. We identified purchasing, refining and sales and marketing as strong candidates to be the core competencies. However, despite the company's core business of refining oil, the core competencies were identified to be their research and development and performance management (PM) capabilities. We further provide a procedure to determine different kinds of physical, intellectual and cultural resources making a dominant impact on company's competence portfolio. In addition, we provide a comprehensive set of guidelines on how to develop core competence further by forging a partnership alliance choosing an appropriate network topology

Why do commercial companies contribute to open source software?

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link belowMany researchers have pointed out that the opensource movement is an interesting phenomenon that is difficult to explain with conventional economic theories. However, while there is no shortage on research on individuals’ motivation for contributing to opensource, few have investigated the commercial companies’ motivations for doing the same. A case study was conducted at three different companies from the IT service industry, to investigate three possible drivers: sale of complimentary services, innovation and open sourcing (outsourcing). We offer three conclusions. First, we identified three main drivers for contributing to opensource, which are (a) selling complimentary services, (b) building greater innovative capability and (c) cost reduction through open sourcing to an external community. Second, while previous research has documented that the most important driver is selling complimentary services, we found that this picture is too simple. Our evidence points to a broader set of motivations, in the sense that all our cases exhibit combinations of the three drivers. Finally, our findings suggest that there might be a shift in how commercial companies view opensource software. The companies interviewed have all expressed a moral obligation to contribute to open source

Libraries and the management of research data

A discussion of the role of university libraries in the management of digital research data outputs. Reviews some of the recent history of progress in this area from a UK perspective, with reference to international developments

A legacy handbook for enterprise

Legacy Handbook reviewing emda's experience of enterprise activity. Identifies key achievements and draws out lessons learned that may be relevant to successor bodies active in this area

Global-Scale Resource Survey and Performance Monitoring of Public OGC Web Map Services

One of the most widely-implemented service standards provided by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to the user community is the Web Map Service (WMS). WMS is widely employed globally, but there is limited knowledge of the global distribution, adoption status or the service quality of these online WMS resources. To fill this void, we investigated global WMSs resources and performed distributed performance monitoring of these services. This paper explicates a distributed monitoring framework that was used to monitor 46,296 WMSs continuously for over one year and a crawling method to discover these WMSs. We analyzed server locations, provider types, themes, the spatiotemporal coverage of map layers and the service versions for 41,703 valid WMSs. Furthermore, we appraised the stability and performance of basic operations for 1210 selected WMSs (i.e., GetCapabilities and GetMap). We discuss the major reasons for request errors and performance issues, as well as the relationship between service response times and the spatiotemporal distribution of client monitoring sites. This paper will help service providers, end users and developers of standards to grasp the status of global WMS resources, as well as to understand the adoption status of OGC standards. The conclusions drawn in this paper can benefit geospatial resource discovery, service performance evaluation and guide service performance improvements.Comment: 24 pages; 15 figure

Survey and Analysis of Production Distributed Computing Infrastructures

This report has two objectives. First, we describe a set of the production distributed infrastructures currently available, so that the reader has a basic understanding of them. This includes explaining why each infrastructure was created and made available and how it has succeeded and failed. The set is not complete, but we believe it is representative. Second, we describe the infrastructures in terms of their use, which is a combination of how they were designed to be used and how users have found ways to use them. Applications are often designed and created with specific infrastructures in mind, with both an appreciation of the existing capabilities provided by those infrastructures and an anticipation of their future capabilities. Here, the infrastructures we discuss were often designed and created with specific applications in mind, or at least specific types of applications. The reader should understand how the interplay between the infrastructure providers and the users leads to such usages, which we call usage modalities. These usage modalities are really abstractions that exist between the infrastructures and the applications; they influence the infrastructures by representing the applications, and they influence the ap- plications by representing the infrastructures