Enterprise Resource Planning Implementation Strategies in Small- and Medium-sized Manufacturing Enterprises

The difficulty SME leaders of manufacturing firms experience in the executing of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems threatens the longevity of innovative change within firms seeking to adopt ERP systems. Grounded in the diffusion of innovation theory, the purpose of this multiple case study was to examine critical success factors used to successfully implement ERP systems. The participants were four ERP business leaders of small to medium size manufacturing firms based on the east and west coasts of the United States. Data were collected using semistructured online interviews and a review of company documents. Through thematic analysis, five themes were identified: company culture and business process strategy; diffusion of innovation theory and digital transformation strategies in ERP; planning, managing, and leading strategies; change management strategies in ERP; and methods of implementation lessons learned. A key recommendation is for business leaders to identify causes of resistance to the organization-wide buy-in of new ERP systems. The implications for positive social change include the potential for successful change initiatives that impacts employment and economic health within their respective organizations and surrounding communities

Effective Mechanism for Social Recommendation of News

Recommendation systems represent an important tool for news distribution on the Internet. In this work we modify a recently proposed social recommendation model in order to deal with no explicit ratings of users on news. The model consists of a network of users which continually adapts in order to achieve an efficient news traffic. To optimize network's topology we propose different stochastic algorithms that are scalable with respect to the network's size. Agent-based simulations reveal the features and the performance of these algorithms. To overcome the resultant drawbacks of each method we introduce two improved algorithms and show that they can optimize network's topology almost as fast and effectively as other not-scalable methods that make use of much more information

Emergence of scale-free leadership structure in social recommender systems

The study of the organization of social networks is important for understanding of opinion formation, rumor spreading, and the emergence of trends and fashion. This paper reports empirical analysis of networks extracted from four leading sites with social functionality (Delicious, Flickr, Twitter and YouTube) and shows that they all display a scale-free leadership structure. To reproduce this feature, we propose an adaptive network model driven by social recommending. Artificial agent-based simulations of this model highlight a "good get richer" mechanism where users with broad interests and good judgments are likely to become popular leaders for the others. Simulations also indicate that the studied social recommendation mechanism can gradually improve the user experience by adapting to tastes of its users. Finally we outline implications for real online resource-sharing systems

Activating Latino Millennial Civic Power: A Report of the Aspen Institute Latinos and Society Convening - Unlocking Latino Millennial Civic Potential

The report highlights the ideas and conversations that came from a June 2016 convening of 26 bright minds who developed five inspirational and impactful projects designed to increase Latino Millennial civic engagement

Government Transparency: Six Strategies for More Open and Participatory Government

Offers strategies for realizing Knight's 2009 call for e-government and openness using Web 2.0 and 3.0 technologies, including public-private partnerships to develop applications, flexible procurement procedures, and better community broadband access

Investing in Boys and Young Men of Color: The Promise of Opportunity

This issue brief presents findings from a scan of issues facing boys and men of color in education, health, and pathways to employment. Drawing on discussions, surveys, and interviews with experts and practitioners, the paper identifies 8 pressing concerns and gives accompanying recommendations. Areas that emerge as having great potential for impact are: reforming harsh school discipline, early interventions for dropout prevention, trauma-based mental health interventions, and career training programs

Culture and disaster risk management - stakeholder attitudes during Stakeholder Assembly in Lisbon, Portugal

This report provides a summary of the topics discussed and the results of the third CARISMAND Stakeholder Assembly conducted in Lisbon, Portugal on 27-28 February 2018. In order to promote cross-sectional knowledge transfer and gather a variety of attitudes and perceptions, as in the first and second CARISMAND Stakeholder Assemblies held in Romania and Italy in the previous years, the audience consisted of a wide range of practitioners who are typically involved in disaster management, e.g., civil protection, the emergency services, paramedics, nurses, environmental protection, Red Cross, firefighters, military, and the police. Further, these practitioners were from several regions in Portugal, including the island of Madeira. The 40 participants were recruited via invitations sent to various Portuguese organisations and institutions, and via direct contacts of the Civil Protection Department in Lisbon which is one of the partners in the CARISMAND consortium. The event consisted of a mix of presentations and discussion groups to combine dissemination with information gathering (for the detailed schedule/programme see Appendix 1). Furthermore, this third Stakeholder Assembly was organised and specifically designed to discuss and collect feedback on a comprehensive set of recommendations for disaster practitioners, which will form one of the core elements of the CARISMAND Work Package 9 ‘Toolkit’. These recommendations, which have all been formulated on the basis of Work Packages 2-10 results, were structured in four, main “sets”: 1. Approaches to ethnicity in disaster management; 2. Culturally aware disaster-related training activities; 3. Cultural factors in disaster communication, with the sub-sets: a. Cultural values and emotions; (cross-)cultural symbols; “physical” aides and methods; b. Involvement of cultural leaders; involvement of specific groups; usage of social media and mobile phone apps; and 4. Improving trust, improving disaster management. In an initial general assembly, the event started with presentations of the CARISMAND project and its main goals and concepts, including the concept of culture adopted by CARISMAND, and the planned CARISMAND Toolkit architecture and functionalities. These were followed by a detailed presentation of the first of the above mentioned sets of recommendations for practitioners. Then, participants of the Stakeholder Assembly were split into small groups in separate breakout rooms, where they discussed and provided feedback to the presented recommendations. Over the course of the 2-day event, this procedure was followed for all four sets of recommendations. To follow the cyclical design of CARISMAND events, and wherever meaningful and possible, the respective Toolkit recommendations for practitioners provided also the basis for a respective “shadow” recommendation for citizens which will be discussed accordingly in the last round of CARISMAND Citizen Summits (Citizen Summit 5 in Lisbon, and Citizen Summit 6 in Utrecht) in 2018. The location of the Third Stakeholder Assembly was selected to make use of the extensive local professional network of the Civil Protection Department in Lisbon, but also due to Portugal being a traditional “melting pot” where, over more than a millennium, people from different cultural backgrounds and local/ethnical origins (in particular Africa, South America, and Europe) have lived both alongside and together. All documents related to the Working Groups, i.e. discussion guidelines and consent forms, were translated into Portuguese. Accordingly, all presentations, as well as the group discussions were held in Portuguese, aiming to avoid any language/education-related access restrictions, and allowing participating practitioners to respond intuitively and discuss freely in their native language. For this purpose, simultaneous interpreters and professional local moderators were contracted via a local market research agency (EquaçãoLógica), which also provided the basic data analysis of all Working Group discussions and an independent qualitative evaluation of all recommendations presented in the event. The results of this analysis and evaluation will demonstrate that most recommendations were seen by the participating practitioners to be relevant and useful. In particular, those recommendations related to the use of cultural symbols and the potential of mobile phone apps and/or social media were perceived as stimulating and thought-provoking. Some recommendations were felt to be less relevant in the specific Portuguese context, but accepted as useful in other locations; a very small number was perceived to be better addressed to policy makers rather than practitioners. These and all other suggestions for improvement of the presented CARISMAND Toolkit recommendations for practitioners have been taken up and will be outlined in the final chapter of this report.The project was co-funded by the European Commission within the Horizon2020 Programme (2014-2020).peer-reviewe