The Changing View of Information Systems In Chinese State-Owned Businesses

China is rapidly rolling out its reforms and has undergone many changes in recent years. One area of interest to many researchers and business people is the role that Information Systems/Information Technology (IS/IT) plays in aidingChinese businesses to make the transition from a planned to a free-market economy. The present reform leadership in China has identified the importance of Information Systems/Information Technology in achieving its goals of modernization and technology sophistication through scientific instead of ideologic means (Tate and Maier, 1987). In 1991, Franz, Wynne and Fu (1991) conducted a study of five state-owned businesses in Nanjing, China. They found that IS/IT primarily supported the business objective of reporting on how the company met monthly production and sales quotas passed down by the state planning centers. IS was not found to support strategic decision-making in the organizations. Emphasis was placed instead on accounting for material costs, rejects, production quantity, and efficiency. The IS/IT manager mainly focused on the technical issues of managing data resources for IS/IT applications. The present study revisits the IS/IT situation in Chinese businesses after four more years of economic reform. Four state-owned companies were selected for this study. All are in Beijing, the capital and political, industrial, technological, and cultural center of China. The goal was to study the changing role (situation in 1995 compared to 1991) of IS/IT in Chinese state-owned businesses, focusing on three aspects: the business objective of these companies and the evidence of IS/IT to support it, the role of the IS/IT manager, and the evidence of technological advances in these companies. It was hypothesized that with four more years into economic reform, this study would find advances in IS/IT\u27s presence especially in decision support areas, and that the IS manager role would grow beyond its technology manager base, and that more advanced technology would bein place, especially as this study considers larger companies in a larger city. The results of the study of the four companies yielded the following: two companies, although still state-owned, have begun to realize the importance of IS/IT in order to grow in an evolving market-based economy. Competition from private companies that have appeared in the past few years, most with strategic alliances with western multinational corporations, have forced the top management of these companies to address the importance of IS/IT to support critical decision making areas for strategy planning. The role of the IS/IT manager is not really changing. While at least one manager in this study sits on the company\u27s strategy planning committee, not one manager was found tomake any real impact at the top decision-making level. Generally, these companies have begun to implement much more advanced information systems and technology to achieve their business objectives. Networked systems, integrated database plans, and decision support systems are among the many technological advances that these companies are implementing today. This study\u27s contribution is the documented picture it draws of the little reported IS/IT area in an emerging market economy. In addition, because the cases studied are among the top organizations in their industry in all China, it provides extraordinary insight into this once hidden world

Teaching & Learning Management Using Expert System Modeling Tools

An essential key to success in managing effectively is to be able to develop one’s own solutions for one’s own task or situation, based on one’s experiences, the observed experiences of others, and guidelines provided by other experts in the field.  One application of this entrepreneurial process is its applications to developing professional decision guidelines which are part of an individual’s professional expertise developed over the years using this conceptual process.  This paper describes how this professional expertise development process can be applied by an individual to a small business planning situation

Learning How to Learn: Nurturing Professional Growth Through Cognitive Mapping

This article examines the professional development of entrepreneurs. It describes how cognitive mapping tools drawn from knowledge engineering can be employed to help entrepreneurs both to make decisions and to grow professionally

Researching teachers’ time use: Complexity, challenges and a possible way forward

In the context of global concerns about teacher workload and the relationship between workload and attrition, understanding the nature, quantity and intensity of teachers’ work is an essential first step in formulating robust solutions to this significant problem. Understanding teachers’ work, however, is a complex undertaking, and prior attempts have largely been focused on the quantity rather than the intensity or quality of work required and undertaken. This article reports on a pilot study of the Teacher Time Use app, a bespoke tool developed by the research team to ‘get inside’ teachers’ subjective experience of time through a focus on both workload and intensity. Our analysis shows that the app provides a simple, non-demanding way for teachers to record their work in a timely and efficient way. It also highlights the capacity of this approach to understand both the range and quantum of tasks that comprise teachers’ work and consequently the nature and subjective experience of work intensification. We argue the need for a more nuanced empirical understanding of the layering and multi-tasking of teachers’ work that characterises work intensity, and suggest that the Teachers’ Time Use app provides an effective means for recording and representing the complex dimensions of teachers’ work and time use

MOSFiT: Modular open source fitter for transients

Much of the progress made in time-domain astronomy is accomplished by relating observational multi-wavelength time series data to models derived from our understanding of physical laws. This goal is typically accomplished by dividing the task in two: collecting data (observing), and constructing models to represent that data (theorizing). Owing to the natural tendency for specialization, a disconnect can develop between the best available theories and the best available data, potentially delaying advances in our understanding new classes of transients. We introduce MOSFiT: the Modular Open-Source Fitter for Transients, a Python-based package that downloads transient datasets from open online catalogs (e.g., the Open Supernova Catalog), generates Monte Carlo ensembles of semi-analytical light curve fits to those datasets and their associated Bayesian parameter posteriors, and optionally delivers the fitting results back to those same catalogs to make them available to the rest of the community. MOSFiT is designed to help bridge the gap between observations and theory in time-domain astronomy; in addition to making the application of existing models and creation of new models as simple as possible, MOSFiT yields statistically robust predictions for transient characteristics, with a standard output format that includes all the setup information necessary to reproduce a given result. As large-scale surveys such as LSST discover entirely new classes of transients, tools such as MOSFiT will be critical for enabling rapid comparison of models against data in statistically consistent, reproducible, and scientifically beneficial ways

Principals of audit: Testing, data and ‘implicated advocacy’

Historically, school leaders have occupied a somewhat ambiguous position within networks of power. On the one hand, they appear to be celebrated as what Ball (2003) has termed the ‘new hero of educational reform’; on the other, they are often ‘held to account’ through those same performative processes and technologies. These have become compelling in schools and principals are ‘doubly bound’ through this. Adopting a Foucauldian notion of discursive production, this paper addresses the ways that the discursive ‘field’ of ‘principal’ (within larger regimes of truth such as schools, leadership, quality and efficiency) is produced. It explores how individual principals understand their roles and ethics within those practices of audit emerging in school governance, and how their self-regulation is constituted through NAPLAN – the National Assessment Program, Literacy and Numeracy. A key effect of NAPLAN has been the rise of auditing practices that change how education is valued. Open-ended interviews with 13 primary and secondary school principals from Western Australia, South Australia and New South Wales asked how they perceived NAPLAN's impact on their work, their relationships within their school community and their ethical practice

The implications of service quality gaps for strategy implementation

This article addresses the problem of service quality strategy implementation and proposes three interrelated models: a static model of the organisation; a comprehensive dynamic model of the implementation process, both synthesised from the literature; and a mixed model, which integrates static and dynamic models. The mixed model is combined with the service quality gaps (SQGs) model, drawn at a previous congress paper, to propose a map of the pattern of SQGs occurring at each implementation stage; the organisational variables that can be manipulated to eliminate SQGs; and several implications to practising managers

Calibration of the Logarithmic-Periodic Dipole Antenna (LPDA) Radio Stations at the Pierre Auger Observatory using an Octocopter

An in-situ calibration of a logarithmic periodic dipole antenna with a frequency coverage of 30 MHz to 80 MHz is performed. Such antennas are part of a radio station system used for detection of cosmic ray induced air showers at the Engineering Radio Array of the Pierre Auger Observatory, the so-called Auger Engineering Radio Array (AERA). The directional and frequency characteristics of the broadband antenna are investigated using a remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) carrying a small transmitting antenna. The antenna sensitivity is described by the vector effective length relating the measured voltage with the electric-field components perpendicular to the incoming signal direction. The horizontal and meridional components are determined with an overall uncertainty of 7.4^{+0.9}_{-0.3} % and 10.3^{+2.8}_{-1.7} % respectively. The measurement is used to correct a simulated response of the frequency and directional response of the antenna. In addition, the influence of the ground conductivity and permittivity on the antenna response is simulated. Both have a negligible influence given the ground conditions measured at the detector site. The overall uncertainties of the vector effective length components result in an uncertainty of 8.8^{+2.1}_{-1.3} % in the square root of the energy fluence for incoming signal directions with zenith angles smaller than 60{\deg}.Comment: Published version. Updated online abstract only. Manuscript is unchanged with respect to v2. 39 pages, 15 figures, 2 table