Knowledge Management and Sustainable Agriculture:the Italian Case

The contemporary knowledge-based economy requires global usage of information in all aspects of modern society. Pertinent information is an important asset for successful business, therefore an application of knowledge management in organisational practice has become a crucial factor for the viability and sustainable development of enterprises. This is particularly relevant for the agricultural context, which needs modern practices for enhancement and development. However, information and knowledge, due to their intangible character, seem difficult to manage and organize. Therefore the paper targeted at developing sustainable organizational model of knowledge management for small and medium enterprises. Italian agriculture is considered as a context for this study, and knowledge management was offered as a tool for facilitating agricultural performance and increasing competitiveness of agricultural sector. A wide concept of knowledge management and specified agricultural context require a theory-based approach to research and a survey. Thus, the research methodology includes the next four parts. The first one contains literature review and examines definitions, strategies, approaches and models of sustainable knowledge management. The second part includes content analysis of 105 scientific publications. The third part of methodology is based on the results of the two previous parts and includes creating the model of knowledge management. Verification of this model is the last part of the research. Verification was executed through on-line questionnaire distributed to Italian agricultural enterprises throughout the country on their intentions and awareness towards knowledge management and developed model of knowledge management. The results of the survey have demonstrated farmer’s incentives to implement the developed knowledge management model with flexible approach in its organisation

CORI: Opening Doors of Opportunity: A Workforce and Public Safety Imperative

Recommends changes in the way the Criminal Offender Record Information (CORI) system is used, and alleviating unnecessary barriers to employment for men and women with criminal histories

Grand Challenges of Traceability: The Next Ten Years

In 2007, the software and systems traceability community met at the first Natural Bridge symposium on the Grand Challenges of Traceability to establish and address research goals for achieving effective, trustworthy, and ubiquitous traceability. Ten years later, in 2017, the community came together to evaluate a decade of progress towards achieving these goals. These proceedings document some of that progress. They include a series of short position papers, representing current work in the community organized across four process axes of traceability practice. The sessions covered topics from Trace Strategizing, Trace Link Creation and Evolution, Trace Link Usage, real-world applications of Traceability, and Traceability Datasets and benchmarks. Two breakout groups focused on the importance of creating and sharing traceability datasets within the research community, and discussed challenges related to the adoption of tracing techniques in industrial practice. Members of the research community are engaged in many active, ongoing, and impactful research projects. Our hope is that ten years from now we will be able to look back at a productive decade of research and claim that we have achieved the overarching Grand Challenge of Traceability, which seeks for traceability to be always present, built into the engineering process, and for it to have "effectively disappeared without a trace". We hope that others will see the potential that traceability has for empowering software and systems engineers to develop higher-quality products at increasing levels of complexity and scale, and that they will join the active community of Software and Systems traceability researchers as we move forward into the next decade of research

Grand Challenges of Traceability: The Next Ten Years

In 2007, the software and systems traceability community met at the first Natural Bridge symposium on the Grand Challenges of Traceability to establish and address research goals for achieving effective, trustworthy, and ubiquitous traceability. Ten years later, in 2017, the community came together to evaluate a decade of progress towards achieving these goals. These proceedings document some of that progress. They include a series of short position papers, representing current work in the community organized across four process axes of traceability practice. The sessions covered topics from Trace Strategizing, Trace Link Creation and Evolution, Trace Link Usage, real-world applications of Traceability, and Traceability Datasets and benchmarks. Two breakout groups focused on the importance of creating and sharing traceability datasets within the research community, and discussed challenges related to the adoption of tracing techniques in industrial practice. Members of the research community are engaged in many active, ongoing, and impactful research projects. Our hope is that ten years from now we will be able to look back at a productive decade of research and claim that we have achieved the overarching Grand Challenge of Traceability, which seeks for traceability to be always present, built into the engineering process, and for it to have "effectively disappeared without a trace". We hope that others will see the potential that traceability has for empowering software and systems engineers to develop higher-quality products at increasing levels of complexity and scale, and that they will join the active community of Software and Systems traceability researchers as we move forward into the next decade of research

Light me up: power and expertise in risk communication and policy-making in the e-cigarette health debates

This paper presents a detailed account of policy-making in a contemporary risk communication arena, where strong power dynamics are at play that have hitherto lacked theoretical analysis and empirical validation. Specifically, it expands on the understanding of how public health policy decisions are made when there is a weak evidential base and where multiple interpretations, power dynamics and values are brought to bear on issues of risk and uncertainty. The aim of the paper is to understand the role that power and expertise play in shaping public health risk communication within policy-related debates. By drawing on insight from a range of literatures, the paper argues that there several interacting factors that shape how a particular narrative gains prominence within a wider set of perspectives and how the arguments and findings associated with that perspective become amplified within the context of policy choices. These findings are conceptualised into a new model – a policy evaluation risk communication (PERC) framework – and are then tested using the Electronic cigarette debate as a case study

Committed to Safety: Ten Case Studies on Reducing Harm to Patients

Presents case studies of healthcare organizations, clinical teams, and learning collaborations to illustrate successful innovations for improving patient safety nationwide. Includes actions taken, results achieved, lessons learned, and recommendations

Control Consistency as a Management Tool: The Identification of Systematic Security Control Weaknesses in Air Traffic Management

In 2008 EUROCONTROL published Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Security Guidance to Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs), to assist them in complying with regulatory security requirements. This included a visualisation tool which allowed the consistency of control sets to be reviewed and communicated: consistency being the degree to which more sophisticated controls were supported by core controls. The validation of that guidance included surveys which were conducted to contrast current practice in European ANSPs with a baseline control set based on ISO/IEC 27001:2005. The consistency test revealed significant gaps in the control strategies of these organisations: despite relatively sophisticated control regimes there were areas which lacked core controls. Key missing elements identified in the ANSPs surveyed include security management and senior management engagement, system accreditation, the validation and authentication of data used by ATM systems, incident management, and business continuity preparedness. Since anonymity requires that little can be said about the original surveys these results are necessarily indicative, so the paper contrasts these findings with contemporaneous literature, including audit reports on security in US ATM systems. The two sources prove to be in close agreement, confirming the value of the control consistency view in providing an overview of an organisation's security control regime

Standards and Agricultural Trade in Asia

The markets for agri-food products are changing at a pace that is unparalleled in modern history. Markets are increasingly open and increasingly homogenized toward international tastes and requirements for levels of quality, packaging, safety, and even process attributes such as socially or environmentally friendly methods. New distribution channels, dominated by larger firms including supermarket retailers, are imposing high performance demands on their value chains. In order to respond to these increasing demands, developing countries are facing an inexorable shift toward more industrialized models of farming systems. This shift presents new challenges for small and medium farmers’ access to markets and their ability to compete. The question for many countries—and not just developing countries—is what options are there for small farmers, which still comprise the great majority of the world's agricultural producers?value chain; supply chain; commodity; agriculture

Pledging, Populism, and the Paris Agreement: The Paradox of a Management-Based Approach to Global Governance

For many observers, the Paris Agreement signaled a historic breakthrough in addressing the problem of global warming. In its basic design, however, the Agreement is far from novel. Its dependence on each nation’s self-determined pledge to reduce greenhouse gases mirrors the domestic policy strategy called management-based regulation—a flexible regulatory approach that has been used to address problems as varied as food safety and toxic air pollution. In this article, I connect insights from research on management-based regulation to the international governance of climate change. Unfortunately, management-based regulation’s track-record at the domestic level gives little reason to expect that the Paris Agreement will lead to major long-term behavioral change needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Although a management-based regulatory strategy may have been the best option available for securing a widespread global climate agreement, this strategy seems to offer little assurance of forward momentum on climate policy due to an inherent paradox created by the Agreement’s management-based design: global progress will depend on domestic politics. Especially given the rise of nationalistic populism around the world, the Paris Agreement will succeed only if political efforts within individual countries push back the threat to global cooperation posed by populism and convince domestic leaders to support serious climate action