Policy into practice: Adoption of hazard mitigation measures by local government in Queensland:A collaborative research project between Queensland University of Technology and Emergency Management Queensland in association with Local Government of Queensland Disaster Management Alliance

The focus of the present research was to investigate how Local Governments in Queensland were progressing with the adoption of delineated DM policies and supporting guidelines. The study consulted Local Government representatives and hence, the results reflect their views on these issues. Is adoption occurring? To what degree? Are policies and guidelines being effectively implemented so that the objective of a safer, more resilient community is being achieved? If not, what are the current barriers to achieving this, and can recommendations be made to overcome these barriers? These questions defined the basis on which the present study was designed and the survey tools developed.\ud \ud While it was recognised that LGAQ and Emergency Management Queensland (EMQ) may have differing views on some reported issues, it was beyond the scope of the present study to canvass those views.\ud \ud The study resolved to document and analyse these questions under the broad themes of: \ud \ud • Building community capacity (notably via community awareness).\ud • Council operationalisation of DM. \ud • Regional partnerships (in mitigation/adaptation).\ud \ud Data was collected via a survey tool comprising two components: \ud \ud • An online questionnaire survey distributed via the LGAQ Disaster Management Alliance (hereafter referred to as the “Alliance”) to DM sections of all Queensland Local Government Councils; and\ud • a series of focus groups with selected Queensland Councils\u

A characteristics framework for Semantic Information Systems Standards

Semantic Information Systems (IS) Standards play a critical role in the development of the networked economy. While their importance is undoubted by all stakeholders—such as businesses, policy makers, researchers, developers—the current state of research leaves a number of questions unaddressed. Terminological confusion exists around the notions of “business semantics”, “business-to-business interoperability”, and “interoperability standards” amongst others. And, moreover, a comprehensive understanding about the characteristics of Semantic IS Standards is missing. The paper addresses this gap in literature by developing a characteristics framework for Semantic IS Standards. Two case studies are used to check the applicability of the framework in a “real-life” context. The framework lays the foundation for future research in an important field of the IS discipline and supports practitioners in their efforts to analyze, compare, and evaluate Semantic IS Standard

Work Organisation and Innovation in Ireland

[Excerpt] Innovations in work organisation have the potential to optimise production processes in companies and improve employees’ overall experience of work. This report explores the links between innovations in work organisation – under the broader label of high performance work practices (HPWPs) – and the potential benefits for both employees and organisations. It draws on empirical evidence from three case studies carried out in the Republic of Ireland, where workplace innovations have resulted in positive outcomes and where social partners played a significant role in their design and development

The Emerging Anglo-American Model: Convergence in Industrial Relations Institutions?

The Thatcher and Reagan administrations led a shift towards more market oriented regulation of economies in the Anglo-American countries, including efforts to reduce the power of organized labor. In this paper, we examine the development of employment and labor law in six Anglo-American countries (the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand) from the Thatcher/Reagan era to the present. At the outset of the Thatcher/Reagan era, the employment and labor law systems in these countries could be divided into three pairings: the Wagner Act model based industrial relations systems of the United States and Canada; the voluntarist system of collective bargaining and strong unions in the United Kingdom and Ireland; and the highly centralized, legalistic Award systems of Australia and New Zealand. Indeed, such a historical perspective contradicts the idea that there has been a longstanding Anglo-American model of liberal market economic ordering as has sometimes been suggested, e.g. in the varieties of capitalism literature. However, looking at the current state of the employment relations systems in these six countries, we argue that there has been growing convergence in two major areas. There has been a convergence in the area of labour rights toward private ordering of employment relations and away from the idea of work and employment being a matter subject to public ordering. By private ordering, we mean the idea that work and employment terms and conditions are primarily determined at the level of the individual organization, whether through collective bargaining between unions and employers at the organizational level, through individual negotiations, or through unilateral employer establishment of the terms and conditions of employment. The shift away from public ordering of work and employment is most dramatic in the cases of Australia and New Zealand, where the publicly established system of centralized Awards has given way to organizational level ordering of employment relations through workplace or individual level agreements. In the United Kingdom, the shift to greater private ordering is most evident in the breakdown of multi-employer collective bargaining, the weakening of industry wide standards enforced by strong unions, and the growth of nonunion representation at the enterprise level. By contrast, the much lesser degree of change in the labour rights area in North America reflects the historical situation that the Wagner Act model was from the outset a model built around the idea of private ordering. When we turn to the area of employment rights, we also see a convergence across the six Anglo-American countries toward a model in which the role of employment law is to establish a basket of minimum standards that are built into the employment relationship, which can then be improved upon by the parties. Within these general trends, we do see some variation in the degree of convergence on these models of labour and employment rights regulation across the Anglo-American countries. The strongest degree of similarity in adoption of the private ordering in labour rights and the minimum standards basket in employment rights is found in four of the countries: Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and, with recent legislative changes, Australia. Each of these countries has adopted labour laws that favour organizational level economic ordering, but with reasonably substantial protections of trade union organizing and bargaining rights, and a set of minimum employment standards that includes similar sets of minimum wage, basic leave entitlements and unfair dismissal protections. The first outlier in this study is Ireland. The Irish employment relations system stands out as the only one that has continued to have a significant degree of central coordination and public ordering of employment relations. Although there is substantial coordination at the central level, at the organizational level, the Irish system resembles the other Anglo-American countries much more closely, suggesting that it has the potential to evolve in a similar direction. The other outlier is the United States. Structurally its system is similar to the other Anglo-American countries in emphasizing private ordering in labour law and the role of employment law as being to establish a minimum basket of basic standards. However, where the United States diverges from the other countries is that its system has involved a general favouring of the interests of employers over those of employees and organized labour in the implementation of the model

Mapping a landscape of learning design: Identifying key trends in current practice at the Open University

The object of this paper is to present some early analysis of interview and focus group data about how existing teacher educators at The Open University (UK) approach, understand, and deploy learning design and the additional support and tools they would find helpful. This represents a component of a broader institutional project that seeks to develop a learning design tool for the support and promotion of learning design and to better define the current landscape of learning design across the university by charting existing experience and methodology. This study is interested in design as both an individual and collective process; thereby reflecting the need to move forward the definition of the learning design challenges faced by both individuals and organisations. Such work holds interest for all developers and users of learning design tools, whatever the design interface used. Twelve semi-structured interviews and four focus groups/workshops were conducted with University staff. The views expressed in the interviews reveal 'learning design' as a term with multiple, complex and sometimes competing roles and meanings. This paper will examine evidence for these conceptions and operations through a discussion of some issues emerging from the interviews

A Semantic-Agent Framework for PaaS Interoperability

Suchismita Hoare, Na Helian, and Nathan Baddoo, 'A Semantic-Agent Framework for PaaS Interoperability', in Proceedings of the The IEEE International Conference on Cloud and Big Data Computing, Toulouse, France, 18-21, July 2016. DOI: 10.1109/UIC-ATC-ScalCom-CBDCom-IoP-SmartWorld.2016.0126 © 2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) is poised for a wider adoption by its relevant stakeholders, especially Cloud application developers. Despite this, the service model is still plagued with several adoption inhibitors, one of which is lack of interoperability between proprietary application infrastructure services of public PaaS solutions. Although there is some progress in addressing the general PaaS interoperability issue through various devised solutions focused primarily on API compatibility and platform-agnostic application design models, interoperability specific to differentiated services provided by the existing public PaaS providers and the resultant disparity owing to the offered services’ semantics has not been addressed effectively, yet. The literature indicates that this dimension of PaaS interoperability is awaiting evolution in the state-of-the-art. This paper proposes the initial system design of a PaaS interoperability (IntPaaS) framework to be developed through the integration of semantic and agent technologies to enable transparent interoperability between incompatible PaaS services. This will involve uniform description through semantic annotation of PaaS provider services utilizing the OWL-S ontology, creating a knowledgebase that enables software agents to automatically search for suitable services to support Cloud-based Greenfield application development. The rest of the paper discusses the identified research problem along with the proposed solution to address the issue.Submitted Versio

SFDL: MVC Applied to Workflow Design

Process management based on workflow systems is a growing trend in collaborative environments. One of the most notorious areas of improvement is that of user interfaces, especially since business process definition languages do not address efficiently the point of contact between workflow engines and human interactions. With that in focus, we propose the MVC pattern design to workflow systems. To accomplish this, we have designed a new dynamic view definition language called SFDL, oriented towards the easy interoperability with the different workflow definition languages, while maintaining enough flexibility to be represented in different formats and being adaptable to several environments. To validate our approach, we have carried out an implementation in a real banking scenario, which has provided continuous feedback and enabled us to refine the proposal. The work is fully based on widely accepted and used web standards (XML, YAML, JSON, Atom and REST). Some guidelines are given to facilitate the adoption of our solution

Enhancing Brand Equity Through Sustainability: Waste Recycling

Unlike many existing research studies that explain reverse marketing from a purchasing perspective, this study recognizes it as an honest effort made by managers aiming to promote sustainability by purposefully managing waste and discusses the spillover effect of their initiatives on brand equity. It argues that efficient recycling of products through reverse marketing by a brand demonstrates its sincere intent to adopt sustainable business practices and enhances its equity in the marketplace. A business-to-business viewpoint has been used to combine knowledge about waste recycling and management through reverse marketing based on the unpretentious operations and management practices. The propositions reflect on the criticality of engaging business customer firms in a procedural mechanism of recycling for increase in brand equity as the success of reverse marketing. A comprehensive adoption of an initiative like waste management through reverse marketing by a brand highlights how sustainability initiatives can create value for the customers of the brand and ultimately drive brand equity