When to rebuild or when to adjust scorecards

Data-based scorecards, such as those used in credit scoring, age with time and need to be rebuilt or readjusted. Unlike the huge literature on modelling the replacement and maintenance of equipment there have been hardly any models that deal with this problem for scorecards. This paper identifies an effective way of describing the predictive ability of the scorecard and from this describes a simple model for how its predictive ability will develop. Using a dynamic programming approach one is then able to find when it is optimal to rebuild and when to readjust a scorecard. Failing to readjust or rebuild a scorecard when they aged was one of the defects in credit scoring identified in the investigations into the sub-prime mortgage crisis

Realizing the Technical Advantages of Star Transformation

Data warehousing and business intelligence go hand in hand, each gives the other purpose for development, maintenance and improvement. Both have evolved over a few decades and build upon initial development. Management initiatives further drive the need and complexity of business intelligence, while in turn expanding the end user community so that business change, results and strategy are affected at the business unit level. The literature, including a recent business intelligence user survey, demonstrates that query performance is the most significant issue encountered. Oracle\u27s data warehouse 10g.2 is examined with improvements to query optimization via best practice through Star Transformation. Star Transformation is a star schema query rewrite and join back through a hash join, which provides extensive query performance improvement. Most data warehouses exist as normalized or in 3rd normal form (3NF), while star schemas in a denormalized warehouse are not the norm . Changes in the database environment must be implemented, along with agreement from business leadership and alignment of business objectives with a Star Transformation project. Often, so much change, shifting priorities and lack of understanding about query optimization benefits can stifle a project. Critical to the success of gaining support and financial backing is the official plan and demonstration of return on investment documentation. Query optimization is highly complex. Both the technological and business entities should prioritize goals and consider the benefits of improved query response time, realizing the technical advantages of Star Transformation

Coupling Performance Measurement and Collective Activity: The Semiotic Function of Management Systems. A Case Study

Theories about management instruments often enter dualistic debates between structure and agency: do instruments determine the forms of collective activity (CA), or do actors shape instruments to their requirements, or are instruments and concrete activity decoupled, as some trends of new institutionalist theory assume? Attempts to overcome the dualistic opposition between structure and activity stem from diverse sources: actors’ networks theory, structuration theory, pragmatism, theory of activity, semiotics. Performance measurement and management systems can be defined as structural instruments engaged in CA. As such they constrain the activity, but they do not determine it. Reciprocally, they are modified by the way CA uses them and makes sense of them. The central thesis of this paper will be that it is impossible to study the role of performance measurement as a common language in organizations independently from the design of the CA in which it is engaged. There is a not deterministic coupling between structure (i.e. management technical tools) and CA (i.e. business processes). The transformation of CA entails a transformation in the meaning of the “performance” concept, in the type of measurement required and in the performance management practices. The relationship between performance measurement and CA is studied here in the production division of a large electricity utility in France. The research extended over several years and took place when two new management systems were simultaneously implemented: a new management accounting system and an integrated management information system (ERP), both in the purchasing process. The new management accounting system was designed by the purchasing department; the new management information system was designed by the operational departments. Whereas the coherence between both projects could have been given by their common subordination to the rebuilding of CA (the purchasing process), their disconnection from concrete CA opened the possibility of serious dissonances between them. Both the new performance management system and the new ERP met difficulties to provide common languages, since the dimension of CA was taken for granted and consequently partly ignored in the engineering of both systems. When CA incurs radical transformations, actors’direct discursive exchanges about it, “collective activity about collective activity”, become necessary to ensure a flexible and not deterministic coupling between CA and new management systems. This reflexive and collective analysis of the process by actors themselves requires the establishment of “communities of process”, which can jointly redesign the CA and its performance measurement system. We conclude that performance measurement can be a common language as far as there is a clear and shared understanding of how CA should concretely take place and should be assigned to the different categories of actors.Business Process; Collective Activity; Community of Process; Management Instruments; Performance Measurement; Semiotics; Theory of Activity

Tackling change and uncertainty in credit scoring

Credit scoring methods summanse information on credit applicants. An assessment of creditworthiness is derived from this summary. This thesis is concerned with statistical methods of credit scoring. Much of the existing literature on credit scoring is concerned with comparing the predictive power of a wide variety of classification techniques. However, much of the published work concludes that classifier performance on credit data is relatively insensitive to the choice of statistical technique. Consequently, the techniques used in commercial credit scoring have remained broadly similar during recent years. This thesis investigates credit scoring from a more fundamental level, by considering the formulation of the credit problem. A review of the credit literature is given, focusing on areas that have been subjected to much recent research activity. Details of the data sets used throughout this thesis are provided and analysed using techniques common to the credit industry. Methods that capitalise on the uncertainty and flexibility in the definitions of the classes used to represent 'good' and 'bad' credit risks are proposed. Firstly, a class of models is described that permits the choice of class definition to be deferred until the time at which the classification is required. Secondly, a strategy for choosing a suitable definition which optimises some external criterion is introduced. In addition, an approach is presented that combats classifier deterioration resulting from the evolution of the underlying populations. This thesis is essentially concerned with the uncertainties and change inherent in credit scoring. We present novel ways in which these properties may be incorporated in the formulation of the credit problem

Multi-level Advocacy for Nutrition

Over the past decade, nutrition has received strong global attention as a development problem. Concerted efforts by international donors, philanthropical foundations, national and international non-government organisations and civil society have pushed nutrition further up global and national policy agendas. This has led to growing convergence on goals, strategies and interventions to tackle undernutrition, seeking to support country-owned, country-led strategies for addressing undernutrition. Policy advocacy has played a critical role in getting to this stage; it has raised awareness among key stakeholders of the underlying and immediate causes (direct and indirect) of malnutrition and its human, economic and other consequences. Advocacy is hence seen as essential for strengthening and supporting actions towards sustained political commitment, and effective multi-stakeholder and multi-level governance for nutrition. Domestic advocacy initiatives – including those related to international campaigns such as Scaling Up Nutrition (http://scalingupnutrition.org) and the 1,000 Days Partnership (www.thousanddays.org/) – have tended to focus on policymaking at international and national levels. This has also characterised many studies of nutrition and health advocacy. Pelletier et al. (2013) study national-level nutrition advocacy to present a useful set of ‘principles and practices of nutrition advocacy’. However, they do not set out to discuss advocacy or the potential catalytic role of civil society at the subnational level. Indeed, few studies have looked at nutrition advocacy beyond the international and national levels. This sharply contrasts with parallel nutrition debates, which underline that policy implementation dynamics mediate the outcomes of nutrition policy initiatives, and thus require greater analysis. This demands an analytical shift away from capital cities and the hubbub of central government administrations, donors, international and domestic pressure groups and national media to the realities, practices and political economies at subnational level.UK Department for International DevelopmentThe material has been funded by UK aid from the UK Government, however the views expressed do not necessarily reflect the UK Government’s official policies

Mission-Market Tensions and Nonprofit Pricing

Private not-for-profit organizations combine characteristics of a public sector agency with those of a private, proprietary firm. In particular, nonprofits are required to address designated social missions while breaking even financially. This structure underlies the difficulty that nonprofit organizations face in making decisions with important resource implications. Specifically, choices that would achieve maximal mission impact may differ from choices that reward the organization in purely financial terms. As a result, nonprofit managers face a variety of trade-offs between mission responsive and financially rewarding actions. This paper considers some of these tradeoffs in the context of pricing decisions by nonprofit organizations. In particular, the paper draws on alternative theories of nonprofit pricing from the literature. In one theory, nonprofits are viewed as revenue maximizers, pricing their services to garner as much net revenue as possible to support their organizations. In an alternative theory, nonprofits are conceived as mission maximizers, pricing their services to achieve maximum mission impact within the constraint of financial solvency. The efficacy of these theories is explored through five case studies of organizations offering a variety of services within the context of a local social services federation. Evidence from these cases suggests that the forgoing theories apply in some combination for any given nonprofit organization. Several different behavioral patterns are found, including nonprofits seeking to balance financial and mission impacts in the pricing policies for each of their service offerings and others pursuing a strategic mix of pricing policies for profitable and mission-impacting services. It is clear from all cases observed that nonprofit managers struggle with mission-market tensions as they relate to pricing and that they can benefit from metrics to help them sort through these decisions in ways that resolve these tensions. Working Paper 08-0

USAID Acquisition and Assistance: Actions Needed to Develop and Implement a Strategic Workforce Plan

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) over the years has shifted from conducting its own activities to managing acquisition and assistance (A&A) instruments--contracts, grants, and cooperative agreements--awarded to and implemented by mainly nongovernmental entities. For fiscal years 2002 through 2007, USAID's A&A obligations doubled from about $5 billion to$10 billion. A&A staff--contracting officers (CO) and A&A specialists--are primarily responsible for managing A&A instruments. GAO was asked to examine (1) USAID's capacity to develop and implement a strategic A&A workforce plan and (2) the extent to which USAID has implemented a mechanism to evaluate its A&A function. GAO analyzed USAID documents and data, interviewed officials, visited missions in seven countries, and administered a survey to A&A staff.