What makes industries believe in formal methods

The introduction of formal methods in the design and development departments of an industrial company has far reaching and long lasting consequences. In fact it changes the whole environment of methods, tools and skills that determine the design culture of that company. A decision to replace current design practice by formal methods, therefore, appears a vital one and is not lightly taken. The past has shown that efforts to introduce formal methods in industry has faced a lot of controversy and opposition at various hierarchical levels in companies, resulting in a marginal spread of such methods. This paper revisits the requirements for formal description techniques and identifies some critical success and inhibiting factors associated with the introduction of formal methods in the industrial practice. One of the inhibiting factors is the often encountered lack of appropriateness of the formal model to express and manipulate the design concerns that determine the world of the engineer. This factor motivated our research in the area of architectural and implementation design concepts. The last two sections of this paper report on some results of this research

Corporate Political Strategies in Weak Institutional Environments: A Break from Conventions

There is a lack of research about the political strategies used by firms in emerging countries, mainly because the literature often assumes that Western-oriented corporate political activity (CPA) has universal application. Drawing on resource-dependency logics, we explore why and how firms orchestrate CPA in the institutionally challenging context of Nigeria. Our findings show that firms deploy four context-fitting but ethically suspect political strategies: affective, financial, pseudo-attribution and kinship strategies. We leverage this understanding to contribute to CPA in emerging countries by arguing that corporate political strategies are shaped by the reciprocity and duality of dependency relationships between firms and politicians, and also by advancing that these strategies reflect institutional weaknesses and unique industry-level opportunities. Importantly, we shed light on the muttered dark side of CPA. We develop a CPA framework and discuss the research, practical and policy implications of our findings

Fact Finding Report : Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations

This Fact Finding Report is submitted jointly to the Secretaries of Labor and Commerce. After release of this Report, the Commission plans a series of hearings and conferences with representatives of business organizations, labor organizations, other organizations that have presented testimony or statements, and the interested public to receive comments, reactions and suggestions as to the statement of facts and its implications for private and public policies and for the recommendations of the Commission.Within a period of six months of the presentation of this Report, the Commission plans to present a final report with recommendations to the two Secretaries

Antecedents and performance consequences of international outsourcing

The outsourcing of intermediate products to international suppliers is believed to improve firm performance. We investigate this claim and test key dimensions of the decision to outsource internationally using survey data on 200 manufacturing firms located in the Netherlands. We find that most international outsourcing is intra-regional in nature. Furthermore international outsourcing is a consequence of a firm‟s ability to search and evaluate foreign suppliers, which is co-determined by its size, multinationality, and frequency of cross-border communications. Finally, no performance effects were observed for international or global outsourcing. We conclude international outsourcing is a balancing act between lower production costs abroad and lower transaction costs locally

Understanding Entry-Level Health Care Employment in Chicago

Restructuring within the health care industry over the past ten years has sought to improve the quality and delivery of health care services while reducing employers' costs. However, coupled with the tight local and regional labor market, these organizational changes have introduced new challenges for employers trying to find workers who are adequately prepared to deliver quality health care services.Earlier this year, the Chicago Jobs Council received funding from the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation and BP Amoco to conduct research in the health care industry. This report summarizes the most recent industry and occupational data on Chicago's health care industry and provides a snapshot of the entry-level recruitment and retention needs of Chicago's health care employers, job training programs, and low-income job seekers. Based on our findings, the report also makes recommendations to employers, training providers, public agencies and workforce boards

Software reliability and dependability: a roadmap

Shifting the focus from software reliability to user-centred measures of dependability in complete software-based systems. Influencing design practice to facilitate dependability assessment. Propagating awareness of dependability issues and the use of existing, useful methods. Injecting some rigour in the use of process-related evidence for dependability assessment. Better understanding issues of diversity and variation as drivers of dependability. Bev Littlewood is founder-Director of the Centre for Software Reliability, and Professor of Software Engineering at City University, London. Prof Littlewood has worked for many years on problems associated with the modelling and evaluation of the dependability of software-based systems; he has published many papers in international journals and conference proceedings and has edited several books. Much of this work has been carried out in collaborative projects, including the successful EC-funded projects SHIP, PDCS, PDCS2, DeVa. He has been employed as a consultant t

Employer Training Needs in Hawaii

The Survey of Employer Training Needs in Hawaii was undertaken to gather information and data on the needs and preferences of employers in Hawaii regarding government assistance with training. The need for such information was created by passage of Act 68, Session Laws of Hawaii 1991, which created the Hawaii Employment and Training Fund "to assist employers and workers through innovative programs to include, but not be limited to, business-specific training, upgrade training, new occupational skills, management skills, and support services to improve the long-term employability of Hawaii's people." The survey was mailed to a stratified random sample of 5,886 establishments in the State of Hawaii. The response rate was excellent: Of the 5,886 who received the survey, 1,650 (or 28 percent) returned usable responses that are included in the analysis. A unique feature of the survey is that it obtained information on the training needs and deficiencies of seven separate occupational groups: Highly-skilled white-collar workers; sales and sales-related workers; administrative support (including clerical) workers; highly-skilled blue-collar workers; less-skilled blue-collar workers; service workers; and farming, forestry, and fishing workers. The results of the survey present a clear justification for policy along the lines of the Hawaii Employment and Training Fund: For only two occupational groups did more than one-third of employers say that their most recently hired employees were well-prepared for work. This basic finding suggests strongly that the underlying problem facing the labor market of Hawaii can be characterized as a skill shortage. Further, the results of the survey show that between 38 and 47 percent of employers (depending on occupational group) would like to see government provide some form of assistance with their formal training needs. In contrast, 15 to 23 percent of employers believe that government can do little to help with their formal training needs. In other words, about twice as many employers indicated that they would like to see government do something to assist with formal training as indicated that government could do little to help. Findings from the survey point to the importance of implementing policies that would assist two occupational groups and their employers: service workers and highly-skilled blue-collar workers. Seventy percent of employers who had job vacancies for service workers reported that they have difficulty filling those vacancies. Also, service workers stand out as having more acute skill deficiencies than any other group of workers. Finally, service workers' skill deficiencies appear to be of a kind that can be best remedied through formal training, and a relatively high percentage of employers 28 percent would like to see the training costs of their service workers subsidized. Regarding highly-skilled blue-collar workers, there is an acute labor shortage. The percentage of employers who indicate that they have difficulty filling vacancies for highly-skilled blue-collar workers is very high 68 percent and the percentage of these who report that lack of applicant training is a problem in filling skilled blue-collar vacancies 91 percent is far higher than for any other occupational group. For both service and highly-skilled blue-collar workers, the findings point to a problem of skill shortage that could be addressed through appropriate employment and training policy. There is also a somewhat weaker case for directly Employment and Training Fund resources toward two other occupational groups: sales and less-skilled blue-collar workers. The findings do not suggest a strong need to target certain counties or to vary policies from county to county. Neither do the findings suggest a strong case for targeting employers of a certain size, or for targeting employers in certain industries. Rather, the need is for targeting certain occupations in particular service and highly-skilled blue-collar occupations. The last section of the report suggests a two-pronged approach to implementing the Employment and Training Fund. The first approach would provide general training to service workers (and possibly others in need of improved general skills) by improving the linkage between workers who need to upgrade their skills and programs that could help them. The Employment Service as a strategically located information-gathering and counseling organization is the logical organization around which to integrate and link existing education and training programs, and to implement improvements in existing programs. The second approach would continue firm-specific training programs under the Aloha State Specialized Employment and Training Program (ASSET), and occupation-specific entry and upgrade training programs formerly funded by the High Demand Occupations Training program. The findings of the Survey of Employer Training Needs suggest gearing Hawaii's customized and occupation-specific training programs to the needs of service workers and highly-skilled blue-collar workers and their employers with the goal of alleviating skill shortages in these labor markets.employer, employee, job, training, Hawaii, Woodbury

History friendly simulations for modelling industrial dynamics

simulation, models, industrial dynamics