Enterprise portals: addressing the organisational and individual perspectives of information systems

Enterprise portals are being viewed as the next generation application platform of choice, offering benefits over both client/server and thin client arrangements. By providing a mediating layer between the information applications and resources of the organisation and the individuals using them, enterprise portals appear to provide a unique context to allow both the organisational and individual perspectives of information systems to be addressed. This study seeks to examine these often competing perspectives of information systems by using an exploratory empirical survey to investigate the actual deployment of enterprise portals within a range of different organisations. It is found that both the individual and organisational benefits that enterprise portals can offer appear to have been recognised, and coherent sets of services addressing each of these perspectives are being developed. Consistent with diffusion and acceptance of technology models, organisations appear to be commencing their portal developments with services that will ensure utilisation by individuals, and are subsequently seeking to realise organisational level benefits

Survey of Spectrum Sharing for Inter-Technology Coexistence

Increasing capacity demands in emerging wireless technologies are expected to be met by network densification and spectrum bands open to multiple technologies. These will, in turn, increase the level of interference and also result in more complex inter-technology interactions, which will need to be managed through spectrum sharing mechanisms. Consequently, novel spectrum sharing mechanisms should be designed to allow spectrum access for multiple technologies, while efficiently utilizing the spectrum resources overall. Importantly, it is not trivial to design such efficient mechanisms, not only due to technical aspects, but also due to regulatory and business model constraints. In this survey we address spectrum sharing mechanisms for wireless inter-technology coexistence by means of a technology circle that incorporates in a unified, system-level view the technical and non-technical aspects. We thus systematically explore the spectrum sharing design space consisting of parameters at different layers. Using this framework, we present a literature review on inter-technology coexistence with a focus on wireless technologies with equal spectrum access rights, i.e. (i) primary/primary, (ii) secondary/secondary, and (iii) technologies operating in a spectrum commons. Moreover, we reflect on our literature review to identify possible spectrum sharing design solutions and performance evaluation approaches useful for future coexistence cases. Finally, we discuss spectrum sharing design challenges and suggest future research directions

The Psychological Needs of U.S. Military Service Members and Their Families: A Preliminary Report

Since September 11, 2001, American military service personnel and their families have endured challenges and stressful conditions that are unprecedented in recent history, including unrelenting operational demands and recurring deployments in combat zones. In response to concerns raised by members of the military community, the American Psychological Association (APA) President, Dr. Gerald Koocher, established the Task Force on Military Deployment Services for Youth, Families and Service Members in July of 2006. This Task Force was charged with: identifying the psychological risks and mental health-related service needs of military members and their families during and after deployment(s); developing a strategic plan for working with the military and other organizations to meet those needs; and constructing a list of current APA resources available for military members and families, as well as additional resources that APA might develop or facilitate in order to meet the needs of this population. At present, 700,000 children in America have at least one parent deployed. Having a primary caretaker deployed to a war zone for an indeterminate period is among the more stressful events a child can experience. Adults in the midst of their own distress are often anxious and uncertain about how to respond to their children's emotional needs. The strain of separation can weigh heavily on both the deployed parent and the caretakers left behind. Further, reintegration of an absent parent back into the family often leads to complicated emotions for everyone involved. This Task Force was established to examine such potential risks to the psychological well-being of service members and their families, acknowledging the changing context and impact of the deployment cycle, and to make preliminary recommendations for change and further review at the provider, practice, program, and policy levels. To meet the Task Force charge, we will first provide an overview of what is currently known about the impact of military deployments on service members and their families (spouses, children and significant others). In addition, we will discuss a number of programs that have been developed to meet the mental health needs of service members and their families, and we will describe the significant barriers to receiving mental health care within the Department of Defense (DoD) and Veterans Affairs (VA) system. Finally, we will offer several general recommendations for improving the psychological care offered to service members and their Military Deployment Services TF Report 5 families, and we will outline some specific proposals for how existing APA programs and resources can be employed or modified to support military communities

Examining the Relationship between School Climate and Peer Victimization among Students in Military-Connected Public Schools

In the Iraq and Afghanistan war context, studies have found that military-connected youth—youth with parents and/or siblings serving in the military—have higher rates of school victimization than their nonmilitary-connected peers. A positive school climate—where students perceive high levels of school connectedness, caring relationships and high expectations from adults, and meaningful participation—is associated with lower rates of victimization in secondary public schools. Based on a survey of 7th, 9th, and 11th grade students (n=14,493) enrolled in six military-connected school districts (districts that have a significant proportion of military-connected students), this study explores victimization rates and the role of school climate, deployment, and school transitions in the victimization of military-connected students and their civilian peers. The findings indicate that deployment and school transitions were significant predictors of physical violence and nonphysical victimization. In addition, multiple school climate factors were significantly associated with physical violence and non-physical victimization. The authors conclude with a discussion of future directions for research on school climate, victimization, and military-connected youth

Estimating household contact matrices structure from easily collectable metadata

Contact matrices are a commonly adopted data representation, used to develop compartmental models for epidemic spreading, accounting for the contact heterogeneities across age groups. Their estimation, however, is generally time and effort consuming and model-driven strategies to quantify the contacts are often needed. In this article we focus on household contact matrices, describing the contacts among the members of a family and develop a parametric model to describe them. This model combines demographic and easily quantifiable survey-based data and is tested on high resolution proximity data collected in two sites in South Africa. Given its simplicity and interpretability, we expect our method to be easily applied to other contexts as well and we identify relevant questions that need to be addressed during the data collection procedure

Bringing Salary Transparency to the World: Computing Robust Compensation Insights via LinkedIn Salary

The recently launched LinkedIn Salary product has been designed with the goal of providing compensation insights to the world's professionals and thereby helping them optimize their earning potential. We describe the overall design and architecture of the statistical modeling system underlying this product. We focus on the unique data mining challenges while designing and implementing the system, and describe the modeling components such as Bayesian hierarchical smoothing that help to compute and present robust compensation insights to users. We report on extensive evaluation with nearly one year of de-identified compensation data collected from over one million LinkedIn users, thereby demonstrating the efficacy of the statistical models. We also highlight the lessons learned through the deployment of our system at LinkedIn.Comment: Conference information: ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2017

Leadership for lean six sigma

Continuous improvement is an important business strategy for many organizations, and in the last few years Lean Six Sigma has become one of the most popular and proven business process improvement methodologies.Lean and Six Sigma developed as independent business improvement initiatives, before converging in the past decade. The success of Lean Six Sigma deployment depends on a series of process/quality improvement projects undertaken in organisations: although a vast amount of literature has explored the topic of Lean Six Sigma, most of it has centred around the technical aspects, specific case studies or problems, leaving a gap in knowledge about the impact of leadership on successful implementation.The aim of this research is to assess the impact of organizational leadership on the deployment of Lean Six Sigma in organisations and thereby develop a dependency model to facilitate its successful implementation. A mixed-methods approach, using survey and semi-structured interviews, was adopted.This research identifies leadership as a critical success factor for Lean Six Sigma deployment in organizations, details what leadership traits are needed for a successful deployment, differentiating by industry sector, and presents a leadership dependency model.Building on the existing literature, this research extends and helps refine our understanding of Lean Six Sigma and leadership, identifying the traits a leader needs to display to increase the chances of successful deployment.Continuous improvement is an important business strategy for many organizations, and in the last few years Lean Six Sigma has become one of the most popular and proven business process improvement methodologies.Lean and Six Sigma developed as independent business improvement initiatives, before converging in the past decade. The success of Lean Six Sigma deployment depends on a series of process/quality improvement projects undertaken in organisations: although a vast amount of literature has explored the topic of Lean Six Sigma, most of it has centred around the technical aspects, specific case studies or problems, leaving a gap in knowledge about the impact of leadership on successful implementation.The aim of this research is to assess the impact of organizational leadership on the deployment of Lean Six Sigma in organisations and thereby develop a dependency model to facilitate its successful implementation. A mixed-methods approach, using survey and semi-structured interviews, was adopted.This research identifies leadership as a critical success factor for Lean Six Sigma deployment in organizations, details what leadership traits are needed for a successful deployment, differentiating by industry sector, and presents a leadership dependency model.Building on the existing literature, this research extends and helps refine our understanding of Lean Six Sigma and leadership, identifying the traits a leader needs to display to increase the chances of successful deployment