Towards developing a customer relationship management (CRM) strategy for supporting pre-implementation activities in business

Effectively preparing and planning for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategy is critical to CRM implementation success. A lack of a common and systematic way to implement CRM means that focus must be placed on the pre-implementation stage to ensure chance of success. Although existing CRM implementation approaches evidence the need to concentrate mostly on the pre-implementation stage, they fail to address some key issues, which raises the need for a generic framework that address CRM strategy analysis. This paper proposes a framework to support effective CRM pre-implementation strategy development

Adapted customer relationship management implementation framework:facilitating value creation in nursing homes

This paper proposes a framework to support Customer Relationship Management (CRM) implementation in nursing homes. The work extends research by Cheng et al. (2005) who conducted in-depth questionnaires to identify critical features (termed value-characteristics), which are areas identified as adding the most value if implemented. Although Cheng et al. did proposed an implementation framework, summary of, and inconsistent inclusion of value-characteristics, limits the practical use of this contribution during implementation. In this paper we adapt the original framework to correct perceived deficiencies. We link the value characteristics to operational, analytical, strategic and/or collaborative CRM solution types, to allow consideration in context of practical implementation solutions. The outcome of this paper shows that, practically, a 'one solution meets all characteristic' approach to CRM implementation within nursing homes is inappropriate. Our framework, however, supports implementers in identifying how value can be gained when implementing a specific CRM solution within nursing homes; which subsequently support project management and expectation management

An Execution Model for Fine-Grained Parallelism in Ada

20th International Conference on Reliable Software Technologies - Ada-Europe 2015 (Ada-Europe 2015), 25 to 29, Jun, 2015. Madrid, Spain. Best Paper Award.This paper extends the authors earlier proposal for providing Ada with support for fine-grained parallelism with an execution model based on the concept of abstract executors, detailing the progress guarantees that these executors must provide and how these can be assured even in the presence of potentially blocking operations. The paper also describes how this execution model can be applied to real-time systems

Macrophage and Galleria mellonella infection models reflect the virulence of naturally occurring isolates of B. pseudomallei, B. thailandensis and B. oklahomensis

addresses: Biosciences, College of Life and Environmental Sciences, Geoffrey Pope Building, University of Exeter, Stocker Road, Exeter, Devon, EX4 4QD, UK.notes: PMCID: PMC3025829types: Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't© 2011 Wand et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Burkholderia pseudomallei is the causative agent of melioidosis, a tropical disease of humans with a variable and often fatal outcome. In murine models of infection, different strains exhibit varying degrees of virulence. In contrast, two related species, B. thailandensis and B. oklahomensis, are highly attenuated in mice. Our aim was to determine whether virulence in mice is reflected in macrophage or wax moth larvae (Galleria mellonella) infection models

Constraints on the Use of Executors in Real-time Systems

18th International Real-Time Ada Workshop (IRTAW 2016). 11 to 13, Apr, 2016. Benicàssim, Spain.Previous work proposed work to include parallelism in Ada to improve the use of multicore processors. This work proposed a model of Tasklets to carry the expressions of parallelism, and introduced the notion of executors to map the execution of Tasklets on hardware. In developing the model, a number of choices arise that effect how well the model will accommodate real-time systems. These choices become constraints which are examined and reasonable choices proposed for adoption in Ada.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The type IV pilin, PilA, is required for full virulence of Francisella tularensis subspecies tularensis

Published onlineJournal ArticleThis is the final version of the article. Available from BioMed Central via the DOI in this record.BACKGROUND: All four Francisella tularensis subspecies possess gene clusters with potential to express type IV pili (Tfp). These clusters include putative pilin genes, as well as pilB, pilC and pilQ, required for secretion and assembly of Tfp. A hallmark of Tfp is the ability to retract the pilus upon surface contact, a property mediated by the ATPase PilT. Interestingly, out of the two major human pathogenic subspecies only the highly virulent type A strains have a functional pilT gene. RESULTS: In a previous study, we were able to show that one pilin gene, pilA, was essential for virulence of a type B strain in a mouse infection model. In this work we have examined the role of several Tfp genes in the virulence of the pathogenic type A strain SCHU S4. pilA, pilC, pilQ, and pilT were mutated by in-frame deletion mutagenesis. Interestingly, when mice were infected with a mixture of each mutant strain and the wild-type strain, the pilA, pilC and pilQ mutants were out-competed, while the pilT mutant was equally competitive as the wild-type. CONCLUSIONS: This suggests that expression and surface localisation of PilA contribute to virulence in the highly virulent type A strain, while PilT was dispensable for virulence in the mouse infection model

Integrating Object-Oriented Programming and Protected Objects in Ada 95

Integrating concurrent and object-oriented programming as been an active research topic since the late 1980s. There is now a plethora of methods for achieving this integration. The majority of approaches have taken a sequential object-oriented language and made it concurrent. A few approaches have taken a concurrent language and made it object-oriented. The most important of this latter case is the Ada 95 language which is an extension to the object-based concurrent programming language Ada 83. Arguably, Ada 95 does not fully integrate its models of concurrency and object-oriented programming. For example. neither tasks nor protected objects are extensible. This paper discusses ways in which protected objects can be made more extensible