The Impact of BI-Supported Performance Measurement System on a Public Police Force

Performance Measurement Systems (PMS) may assist implementing organizational strategy and act as an effective tool for control and surveillance. The PMS explored in this study was implemented by the public police forces, using advanced Business Intelligence (BI) technologies. Using that system, police commanders can analyze performance scores of their own units and get feedback on their success. The study examines the system\u27s impact, through analysis of the metric results over a 5-year time period. The results indeed show a positive impact, as with the vast majority of the metrics examined, the performance indeed improved. Further, the results confirmed the preliminary assumptions that the relative weight of each metric will moderate the improvement, and that metrics that reflect activity will behave differently than those that reflect outcomes. The study discusses the implications of these results, and proposed directions for future research

Meaningful and Effective Performance Evaluations in a Time of Community Policing

It is well recognized that the success of community-policing initiatives may be dependent on a variety of organizational changes, such as decentralization, increased officer autonomy and discretion, and permanent or stable geographic assignments. What is equally important, yet often overlooked, is the importance of a revised performance evaluation system that reflects the work to be performed in a community policing atmosphere. In a community policing context, performance evaluations do far more than simply evaluate police behavior; they serve as important vehicles for increasing awareness and understanding, conveying organizational expectations, and rewarding behavior concordant with a broadened police role (Oettmeier & Wycoff 1997). This manuscript suggests a step-by-step process for administrators interested in devising an evaluation system that will accomplish these goals

Assessing information value for harnessing knowledge needed for improving decision-making and effectiveness of a government organisation: A Case study of Abu Dhabi Police Force

Due to many adverse consequences of poor decision making in organisations there is a need to focus on the quality of information and knowledge. This research focuses on how to obtain and use, or “harness” knowledge from information in improving organisational decision-making in a civil protection/security organisation to become effective and enter an organisational wide learning spiral. This is necessary in order to gain a high degree of intuitiveness and intelligence and to be effective. The researcher explores how information-knowledge can be processed and converted into deeper level knowledge, while at the same time how to get decision makers to codify knowledge in order to help them to externalise it. In order to achieve this, the “information-space” model was used to show the information-to-knowledge dynamic journey. The research involved using quantitative and qualitative methods. The quantitative approach is used to obtain computable results from key decision-makers, such as senior workers, and test a model derived from the literature. Seventeen hypotheses were proposed based on theory to evaluate the proposed model. Primary data was collected during the empirical phase of the research from 135 respondents. A structural equation model was used and included exogenous and endogenous latent constructs. On the other hand, a use of qualitative research helped to obtain deeper insights into the use of information and knowledge in decision making. It was underpinned by several propositions and its aim was to expose the role of information-knowledge and the creation of a learning organisation. The results of the quantitative approach revealed that twelve hypotheses are positively significant. Two hypotheses have a significant negative impact on other constructs. Additionally, three hypotheses are non-statistically significant. The results reveal some very interesting insights, such as that demographic factors, such as age, level of education, gender, work experience and level of authority, have a significant impact on problem solving and decision making. In terms of type of information, the proprietary and common sense information types have more significance for solving problem and decision making. But, much to the researcher’s surprise, the public information and personal information played a very minor role. On the other hand, the results of the qualitative data collection show how key decision makers made decisions and gained a certain degree of intuition from it. Therefore, this research has met its objective in helping towards improvement in a civil protection/security organisation to become a learning organisation and help it to enter a learning spiral and make continual improvement. Hence, the researcher succeeds in making suitable recommendations to a number of different stakeholders, in particular the civil protection/security organisations to (i) to develop their management and specialist personnel, and, (ii) to have the necessary information management strategy in place that would harness information and help towards (iii) creating an effective and robust knowledge management strategy

Los Angeles Labor Negotiations Study

[Excerpt] Sjoberg Evashenk Consulting and Cornell University have completed a study of the City of Los Angeles’ labor negotiation policies, processes and practices, under contract with the City Controller’s Office. The objectives of the study are to: • Review negotiations executed within the last three years for lessons learned, as well as review negotiations currently underway. • Evaluate and map the City’s current collective bargaining process. • Conduct a nationwide search for promising practices the City could incorporate into the collective bargaining process. • Evaluate the fiscal impacts of labor negotiations. • Evaluate the role of and incentives for each party in the process. • Evaluate the labor-management relationships outside of the bargaining process. • Identify opportunities for improving labor-management relations. Cornell University addressed the City’s current labor relations process and identified areas for improvement or consideration (Sections I and III), while Sjoberg Evashenk Consulting focused on the financial implications of the City’s collective bargaining practices (Section II). Cornell ILR faculty who contributed their time to this study include: Associate Dean Suzanne Bruyere, Marcia Calicchia (Project Lead), Lou Jean Fleron, Professor Emeritus and former Associate Dean Lois S. Gray, Dean Harry Katz, Sally Klingel, Peter Lazes, Tom Quimby, Jane Savage, Rocco Scanza, Scott Sears, and Associate Dean and Vice Provost for Land Grant Affairs Ronald Seeber. Pam Strausser in Cornell’s Office of Human Resources and Mildred Warner in Cornell’s Department of City and Regional Planning also provided invaluable assistance

Development and validation of scientific indicators of the relationship between criminality, social cohesion and economic performance

The study intends to contribute to a better understanding of the interactions between criminality, economic performance and social cohesion. We try to achieve this aim by evaluating the existing economic and criminological research and by carrying out own empirical investigation on the basis of international panel data sets from different levels of regional aggregation. Our empirical results with respect to the causes of crime clearly reveal the crime reducing potential of family cohesion and the link between crime and the labour market. Furthermore, we find that higher wealth is associated with higher rates of property crime and of drug-related offences. Drug offences themselves turn out to be robust factors of property crimes. Compared to studies assessing the causes of crime, investigations on its consequences are relatively rare. In our analysis, we investigate the impact of crime on economic performance. We find evidence that employment as well as GDP growth rates are negatively affected by the regional incidence of criminality. Crime ; socio-economic factors ; demographics ; European panel data --

Trade & Cap: A Customer-Managed, Market-Based System for Trading Bandwidth Allowances at a Shared Link

We propose Trade & Cap (T&C), an economics-inspired mechanism that incentivizes users to voluntarily coordinate their consumption of the bandwidth of a shared resource (e.g., a DSLAM link) so as to converge on what they perceive to be an equitable allocation, while ensuring efficient resource utilization. Under T&C, rather than acting as an arbiter, an Internet Service Provider (ISP) acts as an enforcer of what the community of rational users sharing the resource decides is a fair allocation of that resource. Our T&C mechanism proceeds in two phases. In the first, software agents acting on behalf of users engage in a strategic trading game in which each user agent selfishly chooses bandwidth slots to reserve in support of primary, interactive network usage activities. In the second phase, each user is allowed to acquire additional bandwidth slots in support of presumed open-ended need for fluid bandwidth, catering to secondary applications. The acquisition of this fluid bandwidth is subject to the remaining "buying power" of each user and by prevalent "market prices" – both of which are determined by the results of the trading phase and a desirable aggregate cap on link utilization. We present analytical results that establish the underpinnings of our T&C mechanism, including game-theoretic results pertaining to the trading phase, and pricing of fluid bandwidth allocation pertaining to the capping phase. Using real network traces, we present extensive experimental results that demonstrate the benefits of our scheme, which we also show to be practical by highlighting the salient features of an efficient implementation architecture.National Science Foundation (CCF-0820138, CSR-0720604, EFRI-0735974, CNS-0524477, and CNS-0520166); Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana and COLCIENCIAS–Instituto Colombiano para el Desarrollo de la Ciencia y la Tecnología “Francisco Jose ́ de Caldas”