Sourcing Policy: Selected Developments and Issues

[Excerpt] Sourcing policy refers, generally, to determining which sector—public (government) or private—will perform an agency’s function(s). Both federal employees and contractor employees have valid roles to play in performing the work of the federal government. This combined workforce is known as a blended workforce. Determining which sector will perform which functions, including determining when federal employee performance is, or should be, required can be challenging, however. Efforts to address this issue, and related questions, have been the subject of the federal government’s sourcing policy since at least the 1950s. This report begins with a history of sourcing policy that focuses on the terms commercial and inherently governmental, and the policy of government reliance on the private sector. The following section examines the two strains of sourcing policy: competitive sourcing and multi-sector workforce management. The juxtaposition of the Bush Administration’s competitive sourcing initiative and the Obama Administration’s multi-sector workforce management effort aids in understanding different, yet potentially complementary, facets of sourcing policy. Policy issues that may be of interest to the 112th Congress are also discussed

The Responsibility of the RuleMaker: Comparative Approaches to Patent Administration Reform

Patent administrators across the globe currently face the most challenging operating environment they have ever known. Soaring application rates, lean fiscal policies and an increasingly ambitious range of patentable subject matter are among the difficulties faced by the world\u27s leading patent offices. These trends have resulted in persistent concerns over the quality of issued patents. Responding to recent writings questioning the value of maintaining high levels of patent quality, Professor Jay Thomas asserts both that patent quality matters, and that increasing the responsibilities of patent applicants provides a fair and efficient mechanism for improving patent office work product. This Article then assesses recent reform agendas pursued by the European Patent Office, Japanese Patent Office and U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that have elevated applicant obligations. After distilling broader policy trends from these distinct programs, Professor Thomas presents several proposals for patent administration reform

Improving Immigrant Access to Workforce Services: Partnerships, Practices & Policies

This report presents the challenges and shares actionable ideas on how the immigrant-serving and workforce development fields could partner to improve policies and practices connecting immigrants to skill-building and career-advancement opportunities. Immigrants and their families make up 13% of the overall population in the United States and 16% of the labor force. However, immigrants are much more likely than the native population to live in poverty and be underserved by our public workforce system.The research, conducted by the Aspen Institute's Workforce Strategies Initiative, helps us understand how workforce- and immigrant-focused organizations intersect and could work together. While forming robust partnerships is still in the preliminary stages, a few strong examples of such partnerships exist, and more are emerging with various modest investments. The report aims to contribute to the emerging national conversation about these issues

Legal Ontologies for the spanish e-Government

The Electronic Government is a new field of applications for the semantic web where ontologies are becoming an important research technology. The e-Government faces considerable challenges to achieve interoperability given the semantic differences of interpretation, complexity and width of scope. In this paper we present the results obtained in an ongoing project commissioned by the Spanish government that seeks strategies for the e-Government to reduce the problems encountered when delivering services to citizens. We also introduce an e-Government ontology model; within this model a set of legal ontologies are devoted to representing the Real-estate transaction domain used to illustrate this paper

Special Libraries, May-June 1977

Volume 68, Issue 5-6https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1977/1004/thumbnail.jp

Pharmaceutical M&A Activity: Effects on Prices, Innovation, and Competition

The rise of blockbuster pharmaceutical acquisitions has prompted fears that unprecedented market concentration will weaken competition. Two of the most prominent concerns focus on the upstream and downstream ends of the pharmaceutical industry: (1) the concern that these mergers will concentrate the market for discovery and will therefore lead to fewer discoveries; and (2) the concern that merging large marketing, sales, and distribution forces will strengthen the hands of select pharmaceutical manufacturers and weaken downstream competition. Having considered potential dynamic effects in the industry and conducted a series of preliminary interviews with knowledgeable observers, though, this Article argues that neither of these common fears is systematically warranted. There are, however, potential dangers in market concentration at an intermediate stage during the discovery-to-development path: the stage for regulatory approval. These preliminary findings are a product of dramatic changes that are currently reshaping the structure of the pharmaceutical industry. This Article discusses how these structural changes contribute to the current merger wave, how dynamic responses by industry players in response to the merger wave mitigate the potential harm from competition, and how the political arena might still offer threats to market concentration

Special Libraries, January 1958

Volume 49, Issue 1https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1958/1000/thumbnail.jp

The Assam Fever

'Wellcome History' is an easy and regular channel of communication between all Wellcome historians. It aims to be an informal, user-friendly centre of debate