Ownership or Performance: What Determines Board of Directors' Turnover in Italy?

This paper analyses the turnover of board of directors members on a sample of companies listed on the Milan Stock Exchange in the period 1988-1996. Our aim is to investigate if board members change more frequently when company performance is poor, as the literature suggests, if this relationship is similar for C.E.O.s and other board members, and if and how the ownership structure of Italian companies affects these relationships. We use three different measures of board of directors turnovers: turnover A is the turnover of all board members; turnover B is the turnover of the President, Vice-President, C.E.O. and General Manager; finally turnover C is the turnover of C.E.O.s only. We find that changes in ownership affect turnover and that the relationship between turnover and performance is stronger in companies that have experienced a change in the controlling shareholder.Board of Directors, Corporate governance, Financial agency

Business process models and entity life cycles

Tasks and business entities are the major constituents of business processes but they are not always considered equally important. The activity-centric approach and the artifact-oriented one have radically different visions. The former focuses on the control flow, i.e., on the representation of the precedence constraints between tasks, and considers the dataflow an add-on. The latter emphasizes the states of the business entities and defines the transitions between states in a declarative way that makes it difficult to figure out what the control flow is. This paper presents the ELBA notation whose purpose is to integrate those different visions by leveraging the dataflow. The dataflow defines the input and output entities of the tasks in process models. Entities flowing through tasks change their states and then a process model results from the combination of the life cycles of the entities managed by the process. Process models are complemented by information models that show the attributes and relationships of the entity types handled by the processes. Life cycles are intertwined in process models but they can be separated by means of an extraction technique that is illustrated in this paper with the help of two examples

Data flow and human tasks in business process models

In contrast with the traditional view that represents business processes as flow charts of tasks, the artifact-centric one stresses the importance of the data flow, as the main responsible for the activation of the tasks. This viewpoint leads to reconsider the interactions between the process and its tasks as well as the execution mode of the tasks. The greatest benefits concern human tasks; they should no longer be considered only as services implemented by people but they may enable their performers to make choices. Two kinds of human choices are considered in this paper: the choice of the inputs to be acted on, and the choice of the course of action to be taken. The execution mode of human tasks is also examined and three categories are illustrated: performer-driven tasks, process-driven tasks and macro tasks. These categories come with a number of patterns, which are exemplified in this paper

Tasks and Assignments in Case Management Models

The recent standard CMMN presents an approach to deal with situations, referred to as cases, that call for more flexibility than that offered by traditional control-flow based approaches. The information (documents and data) needed by a case is collected in a hierarchical structure called case file. The advancement of a case is based on the execution of the tasks shown in the case process model; the determination of the tasks to be carried out takes place through human decisions or events (e.g., those related to changes in the case file). However, the standard does not explain how the actual assignments of tasks to the participants in the case are generated. This paper tries to fill the gap by presenting a more detailed treatment of assignments, and by proposing an extension to the CMMN notation. This extension enables the features of assignments to be inferred from the case process model; moreover, it allows for the representation of the dataflow between tasks. There are two major benefits: one is to show the types of the inputs of the assignments, and the other is the possibility of determining the assignees of tasks as a function of the input entities. The notation is illustrated with the help of an example that concerns the handling of the papers submitted to a conference

business process modeling based on entity life cycles

Abstract This paper presents an approach to business process modeling that aims to benefit from research on the artifact-oriented perspective and on case management. It draws the notion of entity life cycle from the former and the notion of hierarchical stage from the latter. The main purpose of the approach, which is called ELBA (Entity-Lifecyle Based Approach), is to leverage the notion of dataflow to coordinate the life cycles of the entities involved in a business process. For this reason, the approach takes advantage of a number of patterns, structural and functional, which are illustrated with the help of two examples, one related to the handling of papers submitted to conferences and the other concerning the many-to-many mapping between requisition orders and procurement ones in build-to-order processes

Extending CMMN with entity life cycles

In the domain of business process modeling, a case denotes a situation that requires a customized treatment, and this may take place if the case workers are entitled to decide the tasks to perform as well as their ordering. In the recent CMMN (Case Management Model and Notation) standard, a case involves both an information structure and a process. The former is patterned on the file system structure and the latter is made up of stages, which are groupings of interrelated tasks. The standard leaves some open issues, such as the determination of the performers of the tasks, and the definition of the inputs and outputs of the tasks in terms of the information items affected. To address these issues, this paper proposes an extension to CMMN in which stages represent states of information items whose types along with their attributes and relationships are defined in an information model. The benefits of the extension are illustrated by means of an example that concerns the handling of papers submitted to conferences

Business process models and entity life cycles

Tasks and business entities are the major constituents of business processes but they are not always considered equally important. The activity-centric approach and the artifact-oriented one have radically different visions. The former focuses on the control flow, i.e., on the representation of the precedence constraints between tasks, and considers the dataflow an add-on. The latter emphasizes the states of the business entities and defines the transitions between states in a declarative way that makes it difficult to figure out what the control flow is. This paper presents the ELBA notation whose purpose is to integrate those different visions by leveraging the dataflow. The dataflow defines the input and output entities of the tasks in process models. Entities flowing through tasks change their states and then a process model results from the combination of the life cycles of the entities managed by the process. Process models are complemented by information models that show the attributes and relationships of the entity types handled by the processes. Life cycles are intertwined in process models but they can be separated by means of an extraction technique that is illustrated in this paper with the help of two examples

A data-flow language for business process models

On the basis of the artifact-centric approach to business process modeling, this paper proposes a notation named ACTA that provides two equivalent forms of representation: in one, all the life cycles of the artifacts involved in the business under consideration are shown in a single model, while in the other they are defined in separate models. The latter may be easier to understand when the model is large but requires synchronization points between life cycles: two kinds of mechanisms, i.e., driven transitions and driven tasks are analyzed in this paper. The major feature of ACTA is its nature of data flow language: the activation of tasks depends on the presence of suitable input entities rather than on the precedence relationships between tasks as it takes place in the conventional activity-centric approach. The advantage is the ease with which a number of situations that are difficult to handle with the activity-centric approach can be managed. Such situations encompass the selection of homogeneous entities to be processed in batches and the many-to-many mapping between entities of different types, such as requisition orders and procurement orders

Integrating Software Engineering Key Practices into an OOP Massive In-Classroom Course: an Experience Report

Programming and software engineering courses in computer science curricula typically focus on both providing theoretical knowledge of programming languages and best-practices, and developing practical development skills. In a massive course - several hundred students - the teachers are not able to adequately attend to the practical part, therefore process automation and incentives to students must be used to drive the students in the right direction. Our goals was to design an automated programming assignment infrastructure capable of supporting massive courses. The infrastructure should encourage students to apply the key software engineering (SE) practices - automated testing, con guration management, and Integrated Development Environment (IDE) - and acquire the basic skills for using the corresponding tools. We selected a few widely adopted development tools used to support the key software engineering practices and mapped them to the basic activities in our exam assignment management process. This experience report describes the results from the past academic year. The infrastructure we built has been used for a full academic year and supported four exam sessions for a total of over a thousand students. The satisfaction level reported by the students is generally high.Comment: Accepted for SEEM 2018 - Software Engineering Education for Millennials, colocated with ICSE 201

Integrating Software Engineering Key Practices into an OOP Massive In-Classroom Course: an Experience Report

Programming and software engineering courses in computer science curricula typically focus on both providing theoretical knowledge of programming languages and best-practices, and developing practical development skills. In a massive course --- several hundred students --- the teachers are not able to adequately attend to the practical part, therefore process automation and incentives to students must be used to drive the students in the right direction. Our goals was to design an automated programming assignment infrastructure capable of supporting massive courses. The infrastructure should encourage students to apply the key software engineering (SE) practices --- automated testing, configuration management, and Integrated Development Environment (IDE) --- and acquire the basic skills for using the corresponding tools. We selected a few widely adopted development tools used to support the key software engineering practices and mapped them to the basic activities in our exam assignment management process. This experience report describes the results from the past academic year. The infrastructure we built has been used for a full academic year and supported four exam sessions for a total of over a thousand students. The satisfaction level reported by the students is generally high