Is There a New HRM? Contemporary Evidence and Future Directions

[Excerpt] Is there a new human resource management? Yo. That is, yes and no. A new perspective -- strategic human resource management -- emerged during the 80s to take its place alongside the more traditional operational and programmatic perspectives as a major influence on the field. This perspective has rapidly progressed in terms of theory and research (if not practice). But, it continues to take many shapes and forms, and even with its various permutations, is far from universally embraced by scholars or practitioners. What follows is a brief look at the strategic perspective of the field. It begins with a summary of some common themes. This is followed by an illustrative review of extant theory,which in particular distinguishes between the two dominant theoretical streams which have thus far emerged: (1) the multiple model theorists (MMTs) who are given to building typologies of human resource strategies and describing or prescribing the conditions under which the various types work or should work best and (2) the dominant model theorists (DMTs) who are rather less preoccupied with contingencies and rather more concerned with the details and promulgation of their preferred models or strategies within and across firms. Next comes a look at the extent to which these two views show up in actual practice.The evidence is sparse, but their diffusion appears to be rather limited thus far. This naturally gives rise to a discussion of the factors which seem to encourage and, especially, discourage diffusion. Particular attention is paid to the adoption of the so-called strategic business partner role by human resource executives, managers, and professionals, and to the adequacy of this role as a catalyst for the diffusion of the strategic perspective across the U. S. and Canadian economies. Finally, suggestions are made regarding future theoretical and empirical work which might help keep the strategic perspective moving ahead

An Examination of LEED Certification’s Utility as Evidence for Superior On-Property Environmental Sustainability in Hotels

This study explores the potential misalignment between LEED certification\u27s prescriptive scorecard and hotel real estate\u27s operationally complex nature. This study revealed that LEED hotels generally outperform their non-LEED counterparts on a per square foot basis for carbon footprint, energy use, and water use metrics, but perform worse on a per occupied room basis. However, the large amount of variance in the data sample that is inherent in hotel industry data renders definitive conclusions about the utility of LEED as evidence for superior on-property environmental sustainability in hotels difficult to make. Any variance between LEED and non-LEED data groupings was generally not found to be statistically significant. These results demonstrate that further analysis is needed before LEED certification can be tied to levels of environmental sustainability between hotels in a meaningful way. Also, the true impact of hotel LEED certification is extremely difficult to find with any method besides direct comparison of hotel metrics before and after LEED certification

Cloud migration strategy factors and migration processes

Organisaatiot ottavat pilvitekniikoita ja -palveluita käyttöönsä yhä laajemmin. Merkittävä osa pilvipalveluiden kasvusta johtuu nykyisten sovellusten siirtämisestä pilvipalveluun. Olemassa olevien vanhojen sovellusten siirtäminen pilvipalvelualustaan ei ole triviaali tehtävä. Migraatiomenetelmät tehostavat sovellusten siirtoa pilvialustoille ja vähentävät siirrosta aiheutuvia riskejä käyttäen vakioituja prosessimalleja. Keskeinen osa pilvimigraatioprosessia on valita sopivin strategia pilvimigraatiolle useiden vaihtoehtoisten tilanteesta riippuvien vaihtoehtojen joukosta. Migraatiostrategia määrittelee keskeiset migraatioprosessin vaiheet sekä käytettävän pilviarkkitehtuurin sekä palvelumallit. Nykyiset pilven migraatiomenetelmät eivät erityisesti huomioi tai määrittele migraatiostrategian valintaa määrääviä tekijöitä. Migraatiostrategian valinta on kriittinen osa pilvimigraation suunnittelua, johon tyypillisesti osallistuu useita eri organisaatioita ja asiantuntijoita. Tässä opinnäytetyössä esitetään ryhmittely sekä tekijät, jotka ohjaavat pilvimigraatiostrategian valintaa. Tekijät on johdettu nykyisistä pilvimigraatiomenetelmistä ja -prosesseista. Tekijät on validoitu deduktiivisella temaattisella analyysillä käyttäen kvalitatiivisia tapaustutkimuksia ja niistä saatuja haastattelutietoja. Pilvimigraatiostrategioihin vaikuttavien tekijöiden tunnistamisella ja käsittelyllä voidaan parantaa pilvimigraatioiden onnistumista ja tehostaa pilvimigraatioiden suunnittelua.Organizations are adopting cloud technologies at an increasing rate. Significant share of growth of cloud deployments is coming from application migrations to cloud computing. Migrating existing legacy applications to cloud computing platform is not a trivial task. A migration methodology will help migrating applications to cloud more effectively and with lower risk than doing it by trial and error. A part of the cloud migration process is the selection and execution of a migration strategy amongst the possible, situational and commonly used options. The migration strategy defines many of the migration process activities since they depend on cloud architecture and service and deployment models, which are implicitly set by the migration strategy. Many of the existing cloud migration methods don’t specify the factors that lead to migration strategy selection. The migration strategy selection is a critical part of migration planning involving multiple organisations and several individuals. This thesis presents categories of migration strategy factors derived from a cloud migration methodology and process framework review and validates the factors by doing a deductive thematic analysis against qualitative case study interview data. By having a clarity and a way to address the migration strategy factors, will increase the migration success rate and reduce planning time

The adoption of IT governance for outsourcing and virtual team management in IT projects

Abstract : IT governance is an important factor in the success of Information Technology systems and implementation. The adoption of IT governance and its effectiveness is not clear or documented. The purpose of this study is to understand the adoption and effectiveness of IT governance in South African organisations as they conduct Information Technology projects both internally and externally. This study is explorative in nature as it seeks to understand the effectiveness of IT governance using the questionnaire as an instrument for collecting data. The research methodology of this study is quantitative. The target sample is IT (Information Technology) employees that work in various South African organisations both private and public. The sample size is 164 employees. The findings of this study show that South African organisations make extensive use of IT governance. There is data indicating that IT governance is applied locally on their dayto- day IT projects. The study found that there is management support and deliberate effort to monitor and measure the effectiveness of IT governance. The study further shows that there is strong adoption of IT governance in external IT projects such as outsourced IT projects. Finally, it shows a strong use of virtual teams in IT projects in South African organisations, and also a relatively high application of IT governance principles in virtual teamwork.M.Com. (Information Technology Management

How to Think About Resilient Infrastructure Systems

abstract: Resilience is emerging as the preferred way to improve the protection of infrastructure systems beyond established risk management practices. Massive damages experienced during tragedies like Hurricane Katrina showed that risk analysis is incapable to prevent unforeseen infrastructure failures and shifted expert focus towards resilience to absorb and recover from adverse events. Recent, exponential growth in research is now producing consensus on how to think about infrastructure resilience centered on definitions and models from influential organizations like the US National Academy of Sciences. Despite widespread efforts, massive infrastructure failures in 2017 demonstrate that resilience is still not working, raising the question: Are the ways people think about resilience producing resilient infrastructure systems? This dissertation argues that established thinking harbors misconceptions about infrastructure systems that diminish attempts to improve their resilience. Widespread efforts based on the current canon focus on improving data analytics, establishing resilience goals, reducing failure probabilities, and measuring cascading losses. Unfortunately, none of these pursuits change the resilience of an infrastructure system, because none of them result in knowledge about how data is used, goals are set, or failures occur. Through the examination of each misconception, this dissertation results in practical, new approaches for infrastructure systems to respond to unforeseen failures via sensing, adapting, and anticipating processes. Specifically, infrastructure resilience is improved by sensing when data analytics include the modeler-in-the-loop, adapting to stress contexts by switching between multiple resilience strategies, and anticipating crisis coordination activities prior to experiencing a failure. Overall, results demonstrate that current resilience thinking needs to change because it does not differentiate resilience from risk. The majority of research thinks resilience is a property that a system has, like a noun, when resilience is really an action a system does, like a verb. Treating resilience as a noun only strengthens commitment to risk-based practices that do not protect infrastructure from unknown events. Instead, switching to thinking about resilience as a verb overcomes prevalent misconceptions about data, goals, systems, and failures, and may bring a necessary, radical change to the way infrastructure is protected in the future.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering 201

Adopting DevOps Principles, Practices and Tools : Case: Identity & Access Management

Adopting DevOps has been of interest for many organizations and practitioners for a while now due to its various benefits for business. However, there is a lack of knowledge and understanding on what is meant by DevOps when it comes to the key concepts, practices, tools, and the benefits and challenges of DevOps adoption. Organizations and teams are missing guidance on how to adopt DevOps in their specific context. This design science research is conducted to understand how to adopt DevOps principles, practices and tools in the Identity and Access Management of a large multinational corporation. The result of this study are the proposed models for adopting DevOps, including the formation of the teams and the processes covering build, test and deployment of identity management system (SailPoint IIQ) and onboarding new applications to the system. Three design artifacts are built and evaluated against identified problem areas in DevOps adoption, providing insights to the research community and industry practitioners

Data-driven evaluation of on-field player performance in football using sensor and video technologies

Data has become increasingly relevant and used in football over the years. Technological development has made it possible to gather data from various aspects of the game. However, despite the growing popularity of sports analytics, relatively little research, especially qualitative, has been done on the topic. The purpose of this thesis is to create understanding and practices for taking advance of data for evaluation of on-field player performance in football using sensor and video technologies. This is done by identifying and combining technological possibilities with sports knowledge and suggesting an approach for data-driven evaluation of the on-field player performance. Review of previous literature and semi-structured theme interviews have been used as a method to achieve the purpose of the thesis. The findings of the thesis show that data can be used in the evaluation of on-field player performance in football by assessing players’ physical, technical, tactical, and mental attributes. These attributes have several different metrics, the value of which depends on several factors such as the team's objectives. Furthermore, an approach is presented in the thesis which suggests that the selection of team-specific attributes and metrics guides the user to consider which data is needed to be able to evaluate the desired metrics, which then can be linked to certain technologies and analytical solutions presented in the thesis