Management control systems in the traditional clannish societies: A case study of a telecommunication company in Somalia

Both traditional and contemporary perspectives of management control systems (MCS) failed to cope with the socio-cultural settings of the organizations operating in the traditional societies. The evolution of MCS in this socio-cultural context is an emerging research issue that has received less attention in the current MCS research. Therefore, this study attempts to understand, interpret and report the main MCS themes of organizations operating in the traditional societies of less developed countries. Based on the MCS literature, a conceptual framework was developed to better our understanding of the MCS forms that are practiced by the business organizations that are operating in the traditional clannish societies of Somalia. A qualitative case study was adopted to collect the field data from one of the telecommunication companies in Somalia. Similarly, the study uses semi-structured interviews with the executive directors, heads of divisions and some selected customers. To triangulate the data sources, observation and document analyses were employed. The findings of the study show the role of traditional clannish culture on the MCS development in Somalia. The prevalent MCS themes of the studied company include: clannish ownership, paternal leadership, collective responsibility, horizontal relationships, clannish customer recruitment/retention, clan-based selective employment of investors/staff, familial information sharing networks, friendship and personal trust, verbal communication, informal decision making process, centralized control practices, restricted information to specific groups and oral circulation of financial information. These control practices of the telecommunication company in the traditional clannish societies renders formal MCS to become less relevant. Therefore, the traditional clannish norms might play an important role in the emergence of specific MCS forms in the traditional clannish environments like Somalia. The outcome of the study calls for further researches to better our understanding of the MCS evolution, particularly that of the traditional societies in the developing nation

Procedura di information modeling per rappresentare un territorio colpito dal sisma

La procedura ARIM (Assessment Reconstruction Information Modeling) può essere vista come evoluzione e integrazione dei sistemi BIM finora utilizzati per monitorare e documentare le trasformazioni del territorio quali l’HBIM, il GeoBIM, il LIM e il SeismicBIM, rappresentandone al contempo una naturale evoluzione per la gestione della prevenzione e della ricostruzione collegata alle cala- mità naturali. Viene descritta l’applicazione della procedura al caso studio di un aggregato edilizio di Grisciano, frazione del Comune di Accumoli, descrivendo le fasi che costituiscono la parte del progetto/ricostruzione della procedura BIM: formazione del quadro conoscitivo, a sua volta distinto in “conoscenza diretta” e “conoscenza differita”; elaborazione dei dati rilevati; framework della procedura ARIM, che prevede una sotto-articolazione in acquisizione dei dati e loro sintesi; infine, costruzione del modello 3D sintetico e informato.ARIM (Assessment Reconstruction Information Modeling) procedure can be seen as the evolution and integration of the BIM systems used so far to monitor and document the transformations of the territory, such as HBIM, GeoBIM, LIM and SeismicBIM, representing at the same time their natural evolution for the management of prevention and reconstruction connected to natural disasters. The application of the procedure is described on the case study of a building aggregate of Grisciano, a borough of the Municipality of Accumoli, describing the steps that constitute the part of the design/reconstruction of the BIM procedure, consisting of: cognitive framework, distinguished in ‘direct knowledge’ and ‘deferred knowledge’; processing of the data collected; framework of the ARIM procedure, which provides a sub-articulation in data acquisition and their synthesis, finally the construction of the synthetic and informed 3D model

Email record keeping in the government sector: a case study of Malaysia

Email has become the main means of correspondence, displacing the letter with its conventions and procedures developed over centuries. Every organisation needs to develop and implement policies to manage email as records of evidence of transactions and as a source of information. This study aimed to critically explore the management of email in the context of the management of information and record keeping in the transition to the digital. The objectives of the study were: To explore the legal and regulatory environment in relation to the Malaysian Government and the information it creates and holds; to explore the evolution of email recordkeeping by the Malaysian Government; to critically review existing policies, guidelines and systems for capturing and managing email by the Malaysian Government from a record keeping perspective; and to investigate the current practices in managing email in a selected part of the Malaysian Government against existing policies and guidelines, in part to determine if the latter were clear and unambiguous. It highlights the fact that no in-depth case study of email management has been published previously. In the public sector there are many examples of poor email management. For instance, Michael Gove, when UK Secretary of State for Education, conducted government business using his wife’s personal email account; and former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used a personal email account and server for both government and personal business. The context of this thesis is the introduction by the Malaysian government of a project that will provide a free email account for every citizen over eighteen to allow them to access e-Government services through a single sign-on user ID, as part of the move to e-government in Malaysia to deliver its Vision 2020. The research is based on a case study of the implementation of this initiative and the accompanying system for managing email at a selected government ministry in Malaysia; it is based on interviews with twelve participants with different roles across three departments and the two providers of policies and guidelines. The design of interview questions was based around the records continuum model and is four elements, the creation, capture, organisation and pluralisation of information. The findings suggest that email has been accepted by the government as records and evidence mandated by Malaysia’s National Archives Act 2003. Yet not all government servants accept emails as records, largely as a consequence of poor project planning and faulty design of the Digital Document Management System (DDMS) for email management. The DDMS has been developed to ensure that the government manages its email, and other electronic records, according to international standards embodied in ISO 16175:2 (2011), which has been adopted nationally as MS ISO 16175:2 (2012). The main factors influencing the implementation of the DDMS in the government sector are people, processes and technology. The DDMS project has been seen as an IT project, and not a records management project, and consequently has failed to meet the requirements for a digital records management system. This explains why some government servants are reluctant to accept email as a record. Project management, change management and quality management should have been central during the system implementation process, but were found to be either inadequately addressed or completely overlooked. The findings conclude that email management can be markedly improved by promoting information culture and awareness of the importance of managing email records. This case study contributes to the evolution of record keeping policy and practice in a former UK dependency during the transition to the digital environment and in the identification of good practice that could be applicable in other similar national government contexts

Ontology-based domain modelling for consistent content change management

Ontology-based modelling of multi-formatted software application content is a challenging area in content management. When the number of software content unit is huge and in continuous process of change, content change management is important. The management of content in this context requires targeted access and manipulation methods. We present a novel approach to deal with model-driven content-centric information systems and access to their content. At the core of our approach is an ontology-based semantic annotation technique for diversely formatted content that can improve the accuracy of access and systems evolution. Domain ontologies represent domain-specific concepts and conform to metamodels. Different ontologies - from application domain ontologies to software ontologies - capture and model the different properties and perspectives on a software content unit. Interdependencies between domain ontologies, the artifacts and the content are captured through a trace model. The annotation traces are formalised and a graph-based system is selected for the representation of the annotation traces

Teaching telecommunication standards: bridging the gap between theory and practice

©2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Telecommunication standards have become a reliable mechanism to strengthen collaboration between industry and research institutions to accelerate the evolution of communications systems. Standards are needed to enable cooperation while promoting competition. Within the framework of a standard, the companies involved in the standardization process contribute and agree on appropriate technical specifications to ensure diversity and compatibility, and facilitate worldwide commercial deployment and evolution. Those parts of the system that can create competitive advantages are intentionally left open in the specifications. Such specifications are extensive, complex, and minimalistic. This makes telecommunication standards education a difficult endeavor, but it is much demanded by industry and governments to spur economic growth. This article describes a methodology for teaching wireless communications standards. We define our methodology around six learning stages that assimilate the standardization process and identify key learning objectives for each. Enabled by software-defined radio technology, we describe a practical learning environment that facilitates developing many of the needed technical and soft skills without the inherent difficulty and cost associated with radio frequency components and regulation. Using only open source software and commercial of-the-shelf computers, this environment is portable and can easily be recreated at other educational institutions and adapted to their educational needs and constraints. We discuss our and our students' experiences when employing the proposed methodology to 4G LTE standard education at Barcelona Tech.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Software Engineers' Information Seeking Behavior in Change Impact Analysis - An Interview Study

Software engineers working in large projects must navigate complex information landscapes. Change Impact Analysis (CIA) is a task that relies on engineers' successful information seeking in databases storing, e.g., source code, requirements, design descriptions, and test case specifications. Several previous approaches to support information seeking are task-specific, thus understanding engineers' seeking behavior in specific tasks is fundamental. We present an industrial case study on how engineers seek information in CIA, with a particular focus on traceability and development artifacts that are not source code. We show that engineers have different information seeking behavior, and that some do not consider traceability particularly useful when conducting CIA. Furthermore, we observe a tendency for engineers to prefer less rigid types of support rather than formal approaches, i.e., engineers value support that allows flexibility in how to practically conduct CIA. Finally, due to diverse information seeking behavior, we argue that future CIA support should embrace individual preferences to identify change impact by empowering several seeking alternatives, including searching, browsing, and tracing.Comment: Accepted for publication in the proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Program Comprehensio

Impact Evaluation of Interoperability Decision Variables on P2P Collaboration Performances

This article deals with the impact evaluation of interoperability decision variables on performance indicators of business processes. The case of partner companies is studied to show the interest of an Interoperability Service Utility (ISU) on business processes in a peer to peer (P2P) collaboration. Information described in the format and the ontology of a broadcasting entity is transformed by ISU into information with the format and the ontology of the receiving entity depending on the available resources of interoperation. These resources can be human operators with defined skill level or software modules of transformation in predefined languages. A design methodology of a global simulation model for estimating the impact of interoperability decision variables on performance indicators of business processes is proposed. Its implementation in an industrial case of collaboration shows its efficiency and its interest to motivate an investment in the technologies of enterprise interoperability

Support for collaborative component-based software engineering

Collaborative system composition during design has been poorly supported by traditional CASE tools (which have usually concentrated on supporting individual projects) and almost exclusively focused on static composition. Little support for maintaining large distributed collections of heterogeneous software components across a number of projects has been developed. The CoDEEDS project addresses the collaborative determination, elaboration, and evolution of design spaces that describe both static and dynamic compositions of software components from sources such as component libraries, software service directories, and reuse repositories. The GENESIS project has focussed, in the development of OSCAR, on the creation and maintenance of large software artefact repositories. The most recent extensions are explicitly addressing the provision of cross-project global views of large software collections and historical views of individual artefacts within a collection. The long-term benefits of such support can only be realised if OSCAR and CoDEEDS are widely adopted and steps to facilitate this are described. This book continues to provide a forum, which a recent book, Software Evolution with UML and XML, started, where expert insights are presented on the subject. In that book, initial efforts were made to link together three current phenomena: software evolution, UML, and XML. In this book, focus will be on the practical side of linking them, that is, how UML and XML and their related methods/tools can assist software evolution in practice. Considering that nowadays software starts evolving before it is delivered, an apparent feature for software evolution is that it happens over all stages and over all aspects. Therefore, all possible techniques should be explored. This book explores techniques based on UML/XML and a combination of them with other techniques (i.e., over all techniques from theory to tools). Software evolution happens at all stages. Chapters in this book describe that software evolution issues present at stages of software architecturing, modeling/specifying, assessing, coding, validating, design recovering, program understanding, and reusing. Software evolution happens in all aspects. Chapters in this book illustrate that software evolution issues are involved in Web application, embedded system, software repository, component-based development, object model, development environment, software metrics, UML use case diagram, system model, Legacy system, safety critical system, user interface, software reuse, evolution management, and variability modeling. Software evolution needs to be facilitated with all possible techniques. Chapters in this book demonstrate techniques, such as formal methods, program transformation, empirical study, tool development, standardisation, visualisation, to control system changes to meet organisational and business objectives in a cost-effective way. On the journey of the grand challenge posed by software evolution, the journey that we have to make, the contributory authors of this book have already made further advances

Development of RMJ: A mirror of the development of the profession and discipline of record management

The purpose of this paper is to examine critically the history of Records Management Journal on its 20th anniversary; it aims to review and analyse its evolution and its contribution in the context of the development of the profession and the discipline of records management. The paper seeks to provide the context and justification for the selection of eight articles previously published in the journal to be reprinted in this issue