Emergent Customer Team Performance and Effectiveness: An Ex Post Facto Study on Cognition and Behavior in Enterprise Systems Implementation

Implementing enterprise systems usually involves a partnership between the customer organization’s internal team and an external team with professionals from the technology supplier and the business consultants. On both sides, team performance (a process) and team effectiveness (an outcome) emerge partly due to the unpredictable effects of the interaction between human factors at the individual level. Thus, a team’s dynamics and achievements may not fully correspond to its members’ individual characteristics—for instance, a modest team may be formed by outstanding individuals, and an outstanding team may be formed by modest individuals. With an ex post facto approach and a case study on a successful ERP customization project, we studied the interaction effects between human factors (here represented by cognition and behavior) that lead to team performance and effectiveness. Moreover, we focused on the customer side of teamwork due to gaps identified in the literature. Individual team members in our study did not score the highest in several cognitive and behavioral measures; thus, we conclude that a high-performance, effective team does not necessarily possess a theoretically ideal cognitive and behavioral archetype. This study further contributes to the ambiguous debate on performance and effectiveness, their emergent nature, and the role of team management

Consequences of altered eicosanoid patterns for nociceptive processing in mPGES-1-deficient mice

Cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2)-dependent prostaglandin (PG) E2 synthesis in the spinal cord plays a major role in the development of inflammatory hyperalgesia and allodynia. Microsomal PGE2 synthase-1 (mPGES-1) isomerizes COX-2-derived PGH2 to PGE2. Here, we evaluated the effect of mPGES-1-deficiency on the noci-ceptive behavior in various models of nociception that depend on PGE2 synthesis. Surprisingly, in the COX-2-dependent zymosan-evoked hyperalgesia model, the nociceptive behavior was not reduced in mPGES-1-deficient mice despite a marked decrease of the spinal PGE2 synthesis. Similarly, the nociceptive behavior was unaltered in mPGES-1-deficient mice in the formalin test. Importantly, spinal cords and primary spinal cord cells derived from mPGES-1-deficient mice showed a redirection of the PGE2 synthesis to PGD2, PGF2α and 6-keto-PGF1α (stable metabolite of PGI2). Since the latter prostaglandins serve also as mediators of noci-ception they may compensate the loss of PGE2 synthesis in mPGES-1-deficient mice

Do customers want to communicate with insurers on social media? : an investigation of the Swiss market

Social media usage has grown rapidly in recent years, and with it companies’ interest in interacting with their customers on these platforms. It is, however, not yet clear whether customers welcome more intense relationships on social media and what drives this acceptance in more detail. Our research aims at understanding how age, gender, geography, usage, type of platform, personality, and current insurance provider impact customers’ attitudes towards interacting with insurance companies in the Swiss market. We find that age and frequency of use, in particular, impact acceptance, with younger customers much more open to interactions and insurance presence more welcome on more frequently used tools. This is an encouraging result for insurers, as customers tend to welcome them where customers are already frequently present. In addition, insurers can look forward to increasing interaction as younger individuals, who are more open to social media, age into core customers. Social context, on the other hand, plays only a minor role in customer preferences. The current insurance provider plays no significant role, in spite of insurance companies in the sample following widely different approaches to digital offerings and communication. This may be due to the early stage of development of the industry

Real-time use of audio-biofeedback can improve postural sway in patients with degenerative ataxia

Abstract Objective Cerebellar ataxia essentially includes deficient postural control. It remains unclear whether augmented sensory information might help cerebellar patients, as the cerebellum underlies processing of various sensory modalities for postural control. Here, we hypothesized that patients with cerebellar degeneration can still exploit audio‐biofeedback (ABF) of trunk acceleration as a real‐time assistive signal to compensate for deficient postural control. Methods Effects on postural sway during stance were assessed in an ABF intervention group versus a no‐ABF disease control group (23 vs. 17 cerebellar patients) in a clinico‐experimental study. A single‐session ABF paradigm of standing plus short exergaming under ABF was applied. Postural sway with eyes open and eyes closed was quantified prior to ABF, under ABF, and post ABF. Results Postural sway in the eyes closed condition was significantly reduced under ABF. Both benefit of ABF and benefit of vision correlated with the extent of postural sway at baseline, and both types of sensory benefits correlated with each other. Patients with strongest postural sway exhibited reduced postural sway also with eyes open, thus benefitting from both vision and ABF. No changes were observed in the no‐ABF control group. Interpretation Our findings provide proof‐of‐principle evidence that subjects with cerebellar degeneration are still able to integrate additional sensory modalities to compensate for deficient postural control: They can use auditory cues functionally similar to vision in the absence of vision, and additive to vision in the presence of vision (in case of pronounced postural sway). These findings might inform future assistive strategies for cerebellar ataxia

Quality of Service Driven Runtime Resource Allocation in Reconfigurable HPC Architectures

Heterogeneous System Architectures (HSA) are gaining importance in the High Performance Computing (HPC) domain due to increasing computational requirements coupled with energy consumption concerns, which conventional CPU architectures fail to effectively address. Systems based on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) recently emerged as an effective alternative to Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) for demanding HPC applications, although they lack the abstractions available in conventional CPU-based systems. This work tackles the problem of runtime resource management of a system using FPGA-based co-processors to accelerate multi-programmed HPC workloads. We propose a novel resource manager able to dynamically vary the number of FPGAs allocated to each of the jobs running in a multi-accelerator system, with the goal of meeting a given Quality of Service metric for the running jobs measured in terms of deadline or throughput. We implement the proposed resource manager in a commercial HPC system, evaluating its behavior with representative workloads

ARTE OU PRÁTICA EM TESTE DE SOFTWARE?

There is an increasing concern in the industry on improving product and service quality, and the software sector is aware of that. Governmental agencies and private organizations develop quality standards reflecting best practices (state of the practice) and scientific findings (state of the art) due to the increasing demand for systems aligned to project requirements and customer needs; software testing, the central topic of the present article, is one of the areas targeted for standardization (be it in the process itself or in managerial issues). Here we contrast the literature on software testing with actual practices – as perceived by experts – of a major cluster of software companies in Southern Brazil. In 2003, 14 out of the 20 companies constituting the cluster were investigated under a case study approach supported by in-depth interviews with some of the companies’ software testing professionals, and findings suggest that there is a correlation between a company’s time in the market and the adherence of its software testing procedures to the theoretical exhortations. Important topics are raised concerning the Brazilian software industry, as well as about the priority that should be given to the art or to the practice in the field.Há uma crescente preocupação na indústria em melhorar a qualidade de produtos e serviços, e o setor de informática não está alheio a isto. Entidades reguladoras governamentais e organizações privadas desenvolvem normas de qualidade refletindo melhores práticas da indústria (estado da prática) e descobertas científicas (estado da arte), dada a crescente demanda por sistemas alinhados a compromissos de projeto e necessidades do cliente; entre as proposições, encontram-se as de teste de software, objeto do presente artigo. Aqui, apresenta-se, comparativamente a recomendações da literatura, um panorama das práticas de teste de software em um dos principais pólos industriais brasileiros de produtos e serviços de informática, localizado na Região Sul do país. Em 2003, 14 das 20 empresas que integravam o referido pólo foram estudadas em estudo de caso auxiliado por entrevistas em profundidade junto a alguns de seus profissionais de teste de software, e os resultados dão conta de que há uma correlação entre o tempo em que as empresas atuam no mercado e a conformidade de seus procedimentos de teste de software às recomendações teóricas. Questionamentos importantes sobre a indústria brasileira de software são derivados, bem como sobre a primazia a ser dada à arte ou à prática neste campo

Towards an Environment Supporting Resilience, High-Availability, Reproducibility and Reliability for Clud Applications

Cloud Challenge at Utility and Cloud Computing 2015 (UCC 2015), Proceedings of the UCC 2015, Limassol, Cyprus

Down and out in Italian towns: measuring the impact of economic downturns on crime

The paper investigates the effect of local economic conditions on crime. The study focuses on Italy’s local labor markets and analyzes the response of crime to the severe slump of 2007-2011. It shows that the downturn led to a significant increase in economic-related offenses that do not require particular criminal skills or tools (namely, thefts)

Cosmology in 2D: the concentration-mass relation for galaxy clusters

The aim of this work is to perform a systematic study of the measures of the mass and concentration estimated by fitting the convergence profile of a large sample of mock galaxy cluster size lenses, created with the publicly available code MOKA. We found that the main contribution to the bias in mass and in concentration is due to the halo triaxiality and second to the presence of substructures within the host halo virial radius. We show that knowing the cluster elongation along the line of sight helps in correcting the mass bias, but still keeps a small negative bias for the concentration. If these mass and concentration biases will characterize the galaxy cluster sample of a wide field survey it will be difficult to well recover within one sigma the cosmological parameters that mainly influence the c - M relation, using as reference a 3D c - M relation measured in cosmological N-body simulation. In this work we propose how to correct the c - M relation for projection effects and for adiabatic contraction and suggest to use these as reference for real observed data. Correcting mass and concentration estimates, as we propose, gives a measurement of the cosmological parameter within 1 - {\sigma} confidence contours.Comment: 18 pages, 14 figures - replaced to match the accepted version for publication by MNRA