A Change Execution System for Enterprise Services with Compensation Support

Modern enterprises rely on a distributed IT infrastructure to execute their business processes, adopting Service Oriented Architectures in order to improve the flexibility and ease of adaptation of their functions. Nowadays this is a vital characteristic, as the increased competition forces companies to continuously evolve and adapt. SOA applications must be supported by management and deployment systems, which have to continuously apply modifications to the distributed infrastructure. This article presents a modelbased solution for automatically applying change plans to heterogeneous enterprise managed environments. The proposed solution uses models which describe in an abstract language the changes that need to be applied to the environment, and executes all the required operations to the specific managed elements. Also, to ensure that the environment ends in a stable state, compensation for previously executed operations is supported. The validation results from a case study taken from the banking domain are also presented here

A New Tool for Scaling Impact: How Social Impact Bonds Can Mobilize Private Capital to Advance Social Good

Provides an overview of how social impact bonds work; the key players, including nonprofits, investors, and government; potential risks with intervention models, execution, and government repayment; and how intermediaries can help mitigate those risks

Is the responsibilization of the cyber security risk reasonable and judicious?

Cyber criminals appear to be plying their trade without much hindrance. Home computer users are particularly vulnerable to attack by an increasingly sophisticated and globally dispersed hacker group. The smartphone era has exacerbated the situation, offering hackers even more attack surfaces to exploit. It might not be entirely coincidental that cyber crime has mushroomed in parallel with governments pursuing a neoliberalist agenda. This agenda has a strong drive towards individualizing risk i.e. advising citizens how to take care of themselves, and then leaving them to face the consequences if they choose not to follow the advice. In effect, citizens are “responsibilized .” Whereas responsibilization is effective for some risks, the responsibilization of cyber security is, we believe, contributing to the global success of cyber attacks. There is, consequently, a case to be made for governments taking a more active role than the mere provision of advice, which is the case in many countries. We conclude with a concrete proposal for a risk regulation regime that would more effectively mitigate and ameliorate cyber risk

AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF ENVIRONMENTAL COST DRIVERS

This paper draws on Environmental Management Accounting (EMA) literature and cost driver theory to study the nature and role of environmental cost drivers. More specifically, two types of operations related to environmental protection were empirically examined: the removal of asbestos from buildings and soil remediation. Findings from a series of case studies are presented and discussed. The paper contributes to existing literature in three ways: (1) by testing the adaptability of cost drivers typologies in a non-traditional, nonindustrial setting (2) by proposing a more dynamic vision of the cost of social and environmental responsibility of the firm, and (3) by shedding light on the complex interrelationships of environmental cost drivers.Environmental Management Accounting, Cost Driver, Social & Environmental Responsibility.

An empirical study of environmental cost drivers

This paper draws on Environmental Management Accounting (EMA) literature and cost driver theory to study the nature and role of environmental cost drivers. More specifically, two types of operations related to environmental protection were empirically examined: the removal of asbestos from buildings and soil remediation. Findings from a series of case studies are presented and discussed. The paper contributes to existing literature in three ways: (1) by testing the adaptability of cost drivers typologies in a non-traditional, non-industrial setting (2) by proposing a more dynamic vision of the cost of social and environmental responsibility of the firm, and (3) by shedding light on the complex interrelationships of environmental cost drivers.Environmental Management Accounting, Cost Driver, Social & Environmental Responsibility

The Brownfield Bargain: Negotiating Site Cleanup Policies in Wisconsin

In this paper, the first part of our three-part study on the development of brownfields policy in Wisconsin, we examine the regulatory history of the brownfields policy. We start with the 1978 Hazardous Substance Spill Law, the antecedent to the brownfields regulatory reform of the 1990s, and examine the interaction of policy entrepreneurs in both the public and the private sectors that has led to innovation. We follow this by exploring the response of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources to reform efforts, looking at both how it anticipated and led some of the efforts and how it addressed demands placed on it by the state legislature and executive. We then discuss the central role that the state’s Brownfields Study Group has played in moving brownfields cleanup and redevelopment objectives into legislation and the field. We base our work on interviews with nearly 70 individuals from public, private for-profit, private nonprofit, and tribal organizations.brownfields, policy innovation, regulatory history

A Self-healing Architecture based on RAINBOW for Industrial Usage

Over recent decades computer and software systems become more and more complex because of the applications’ and user’s requirements. The complexity makes the software systems more vulnerable to the error and bugs. Also, environmental situations affect software systems which do not react to the environmental activities. Self-healing architectures have been proposed in order to make systems defeat these problems and to make systems capable of reacting to the environmental activity. Hence, these architectures help system to become dynamic and more robust, but finding a proper architecture which can support and cover system’s requirements is an issue. This is particularly true in industrial environments, which consist of some known and some unknown parameters. This paper presents an architecture that can be used in some industrial environment to facilitate the process of adapting the system to unpredicted situations. This architecture has been developed over the base of RAINBOW infrastructure and it is compliant to the MAPE control loop (Autonomic Computing control loop). The paper reports also about the practical experience of implementing this architecture for a painter robot in an automotive factory, which deals with problems in painted part by itself. The proposed architecture uses rule-based reasoning and it actualizes the method of environmental modeling by using a rule-based system as the model extractor. The results of the implementation shows huge benefits in reusability and even in the quality of painting process

The 2010 and 2011 Canterbury earthquakes and organisational learning at the University of Canterbury: does practice make perfect?

In September 2010 and again in February 2011, the city of Christchurch was rocked by earthquakes of magnitude 7.1 and 6.3 respectively. The second earthquake was shallow and caused extensive damage and loss of life, destroying most of the Central Business District. This paper focuses on recovery management at the University of Canterbury, exploring the extent to which the senior management team learned lessons from the September event which informed the way that the recovery was managed after the February earthquake. It examines the counter-intuitive possibility that successfully dealing with a prior, lesser event, may not necessarily better equip managers to deal with a subsequent, more extreme event

Fair Labor Association 2006 Annual Public Report

Introduction concerns effects of globalization. Examines changes from 2005-2006 as companies are encouraged to move towards self compliance, with a concentration on corporate responsibility. Data is broken down by company