Coordination in Business Process Offshoring

We investigate coordination strategies in the remote delivery of business services (i.e. Business Process Offshoring). We analyze 126 surveys of offshored processes to understand both the sources of difficulty in the remote delivery of services as well as how organizations overcome these difficulties. We find that interdependence between offshored and onshore processes can lower offshore process performance. Investment in coordination mechanisms such as modularity, ongoing communication and generating common ground across locations ameliorate the performance impact of interdependence. In particular, we are able to show that building common ground – knowledge that is shared and known to be shared- across locations is a coordination mechanism that is distinct from building communication channels or modularising processes. Our results also suggest the firms may be investing less in common ground than they should.Coordination; offshoring; modularity; common ground; interdependence

Overcoming the cubic-scaling bottleneck: linear-scaling density functional theory

Electronic structure calculations based on Density Functional Theory (DFT) have been remarkably successful in describing material properties and behavior. In conventional formulations and implementations of DFT, the orthogonality constraint on the orbitals results in a cubic-scaling with respect to the number of atoms. The inherent nonlocality of such approaches also makes them unsuitable for high performance computing. Consequently, the length and time scales for which DFT is practical is severely restricted. In this discussion, earlier and current efforts of the speaker to overcome the aforementioned limitations will be discussed. In particular, the presentation will focus on the development of (i) linear-scaling DFT methods, including those based on purification, spectral quadrature and maximally localized Wannier functions; (ii) a better than linear-scaling technique to coarse-grain DFT, whereby crystal defects can be accurately and efficiently studied. The discussion will conclude with a discussion on possible future directions