Impact of Unified Communications on Communication, Relationship Building and Performance

Unified Communications (UC) integrates multiple communication and multimedia services such as voice, email, fax, voice messaging, video conferencing and chat into a unified user experience. In this research, we study the use of UC in global virtual teams in a multinational corporation. Specifically, we conduct a case study to examine how the use of UC enhances individuals’ ability to communicate, helps them create and build relationship, and then how such relationship building in turn improves their performance. This research will contribute to the theoretical understanding of the use of UC in organizational settings. This research also has practical significance as it can help organizations to make better decisions in regards to their investments in and usage of communication technologies in a global environment

Equal Voice for America's Families

Outlines September 2010 discussions, including the need for refined strategies to advance the low-income working families' movement for community change, collaboration, innovation, accountability, and capacity building. Assesses progress by issue area

Advocacy, Politics, & Philanthropy

Over the course of our history, Atlantic has made some big bets designed to help solve major social issues. Needless to say, our 11-year, $70 million initiative to reform America's immigration system certainly ranks among the biggest of such bets. Among the factors leading to our decision to take on this challenging work was our deep concern that millions of immigrants to the United States have been without access to basic rights accorded by law or common practice to the majority of Americans. As a result of a broken immigration system, far too many individuals and families have been left vulnerable to a wide range of discrimination and abuse in the workplace, in housing and in healthcare settings, among others. Undocumented immigrants increasingly face growing social marginalization and hostility from those whose ancestors arrived on our shores in earlier times. At the time we started this work, as far back as 2004, we also firmly believed there was a willingness at the federal level and in the United States Congress to find a workable solution

A unified data repository for rich communication services

Rich Communication Services (RCS) is a framework that defines a set of IP-based services for the delivery of multimedia communications to mobile network subscribers. The framework unifies a set of pre-existing communication services under a single name, and permits network operators to re-use investments in existing network infrastructure, especially the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), which is a core part of a mobile network and also acts as a docking station for RCS services. RCS generates and utilises disparate subscriber data sets during execution, however, it lacks a harmonised repository for the management of such data sets, thus making it difficult to obtain a unified view of heterogeneous subscriber data. This thesis proposes the creation of a unified data repository for RCS which is based on the User Data Convergence (UDC) standard. The standard was proposed by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), a major telecommunications standardisation group. UDC provides an approach for consolidating subscriber data into a single logical repository without adversely affecting existing network infrastructure, such as the IMS. Thus, this thesis details the design and development of a prototypical implementation of a unified repository, named Converged Subscriber Data Repository (CSDR). It adopts a polyglot persistence model for the underlying data store and exposes heterogeneous data through the Open Data Protocol (OData), which is a candidate implementation of the Ud interface defined in the UDC architecture. With the introduction of polyglot persistence, multiple data stores can be used within the CSDR and disparate network data sources can access heterogeneous data sets using OData as a standard communications protocol. As the CSDR persistence model becomes more complex due to the inclusion of more storage technologies, polyglot persistence ensures a consistent conceptual view of these data sets through OData. Importantly, the CSDR prototype was integrated into a popular open-source implementation of the core part of an IMS network known as the Open IMS Core. The successful integration of the prototype demonstrates its ability to manage and expose a consolidated view of heterogeneous subscriber data, which are generated and used by different RCS services deployed within IMS

Chevron's Power of Human Energy: A Case for Corporate Social Responsibility as Identification Inducement

With corporate social responsibility (CSR) emerging as an inescapable business priority around the world, organizations are developing elaborate CSR campaigns to highlight their good deeds and influence important stakeholders. Despite its potentially powerful persuasive influence, however, we know surprisingly little about the actual messaging used in contemporary CSR campaigns. Accordingly, this study investigates a major multinational-and controversial-company's CSR campaign to examine CSR messages' propensity for inducing positive organizational identification. A case study applying Cheney's (1983b) organizational identification inducements reveals that Chevron's Power of Human Energy CSR campaign extensively and strategically uses CSR messaging to induce identification. This study thus suggests that organizations are using complex, versatile, and wide-ranging identification inducements in contemporary CSR campaigns-including eliciting identification via employee and outsider voices. Results are discussed in terms of practical and ethical implications for researchers, communication practitioners, and society

Multichannel in a complex world

The proliferation of devices and channels has brought new challenges to just about every organisation in delivering consistently good customer experiences and effectively joining up service provision with marketing activity, data and content. A good multichannel strategy and execution is increasingly becoming essential to marketers and customer experience professionals from every sector. This report seeks to identify the key issues, challenges and opportunities that surround multichannel and provide some best practice insight and principles on the elements that are key to multichannel success. As part of the research for this report, we spoke to six experienced customer experience and marketing practitioners from large organisations across different sectors. In Multichannel Marketing: Metrics and Methods for On and Offline Success, Akin Arikan (2008) said: ‘Because customers are multichannel beings and demand relevant, consistent experiences across all channels, businesses need to adopt a multichannel mind-set when listening to their customers.’ It was clear from the companies interviewed for this report that it remains challenging for many organisations to maintain consistency across so many customer touchpoints. Not only that, but the ability to balance consistency with the capability to fully exploit the unique attributes of each channel remains an aspiration for many. The proliferation of devices and digital channels has added complexity to customer journeys, making issues around the joining up of customer experience and the attribution of value of key importance to many. Whilst senior leaders within the organisations spoken to seem to be bought in to multichannel, this buy-in was not always replicated across the rest of the organisation and did not always translate into a cohesive multichannel strategy. A number of companies were undertaking work around customer journey mapping and customer segmentation, using a variety of passive and actively collected data in order to identify specific areas of poor customer experience and create action plans for improvement. Others were undertaking projects using sophisticated tracking and tagging technologies to develop an understanding of the value and role of specific channels and to provide better intelligence to the business on attribution that might be used to inform future investment decisions. A consistent barrier to improving customer experience is the ability to join up many different legacy systems and data in order to provide a single customer view and form the basis for delivery of a more consistent and cohesive multichannel approach. Whilst there remain significant challenges around multichannel, there are some useful technologies allowing businesses to develop better insight into customer motivation and activity. Nonetheless, delivery of seamless multichannel experience remains a work-inprogress for many

Communication-oriented Project Management Solution

Hajusa tarkvaraarenduse populaarsuse kiire kasv muudab tarkvaraloomeprotsessi kohanemisvõimelisemaks ja paindlikumaks inimressursside osas. Selleks, et hajusat loomeprotsessi toetada, tekib kliendi, meeskonna liikmete ja projektijuhi vahel lisakoorem kommunikatsiooni näol. Kaasaegse tarkvaraarenduse praktikas eksisteerib hulk nutikaid ja mugavaid tööriistu, mis aitavad muuta kommunikatsiooni mugavamaks ja ladusamaks. Kahjuks need riistad ei tegele mitme kommunikatsioonivahendi integratsiooniga ühtseks töötavaks süsteemiks. Töö eesmärgiks on pakkuda kirjeldatud probleemile lahendus. Töös kirjeldatakse loodud koostöötamise tarkvara, mis on mõeldud toetama hajusat tarkvaraarendust ning mille eesmärgid on erinevate kommunikatsioonivahendite andmete integratsioon ja tarkvaraarenduse projektiga seotud analüütilise informatsiooni pakkumine.Growth of popularity of distributed software development makes development process more adaptive and flexible in terms of human resources. But in order to sustain the process there is an additional burden put on the communication between customer, team members and project managers. In the contemporary software development practice there exists a number of smart and handy tools, which help making the communication more fluent and convenient. However none of those tools tackle a problem of integrating multiple communicational sources into a single tool. This paper intends to present a solution to this problem by introducing a collaboration tool for distributed software development. The collaboration tool will be oriented on integra- tion of multiple communication sources and provide analytical information on software development project